The Player Piano

This blog has been less active lately, and while there are a few factors that contribute to that, the primary one is this: my ever-rising standards. If you go back and look at my earliest blog posts, you can see that I posted whatever I had on hand, whether that was a single EP or several albums. I might include more of the band's discography if I had it, but otherwise I was content to introduce readers to a band and leave it at that. Over time, as I assembled more and more full discographies, that became the new standard, resulting in an endless limbo of searching for former band members, scouring internet archives, and waiting for months in the (frequently vain) hope of an answer to many, many messages and emails. Thus, updates are few and far between.

So here's a new update on a very accessible band who are not particularly obscure (by the standards of this blog, anyway) and whose entire output is confined to a single CD. I imagine quite a few of the people who frequent this blog are already familiar with the band, but perhaps you will still enjoy some full art scans and FLAC files.

The Player Piano are the rare emo band with their own Wikipedia page, sparing me the effort of writing a brief biography. Active only briefly in the mid-2000s, they were a part of the largely unrecognized wave of bands combining post-rock with the midwest emo sounds of the 90s. The Player Piano also brought some influences from math rock to the table, though these are pretty subdued. The result is one of my favorite albums, something I especially like to vibe with on road trips. It's just one of those works that sonically resonates with the feeling of crossing the midwest.

The band's only LP was a self-titled in 2004, and it saw a very limited release. The band's legacy mostly comes from their posthumous compilation Satellite, put out in 2007 in Japan by Friend of Mine Records and subsequently imported by Sunset Alliance, who released the original LP. Including two additional tracks, it has apparently proven popular enough to warrant represses; my copy was made as recently as 2019. It includes an insert with a lengthy interview that I can't read, but along with the liner notes you can see what appear to be some of the band's influences, including Explosions in the Sky, Christie Front Drive, This Will Destroy You, Mineral, American Football, and Always the Runner. It's a fantastic list that illustrates what the band was aiming for, and they nailed it.

Satellite