Embrace Fire

 Embrace Fire were a band from the Netherlands, active from 2004 to what appears to be somewhere around 2008, though they may have kept playing live past that point; they released two compilation tracks that year, and their website went offline at the end of it. The band included members from Raise Kain and springrain. Musically, Embrace Fire had more in common with bands like Life at These Speeds or Your Halo Is A Radar than their previous work, combining angular emo\post-hardcore with post-punk. The band's own press release describes the result as a combination of "Bloc Party, Explosions In the Sky and At the Drive-In," and… that's actually a pretty accurate self-assessment, especially for a piece of promotional fluff, though it does downplay the emo influences in the music, which are strong.

The band's first release was an EP in 2006, We Lost Our Organ Player in a great earthquake. It was self-released on a CDr in a cardboard sleeve (the first copy I bought was corrupted, forcing me to source a second). Later that same year, the band released a digital single through a website called Thrown, Unthrown. Sadly, no archives remain. One of the two songs, the title track, was put on a compilation, but the other track remains lost. Besides that, there was one other song on a compilation, "The Soft House," which showcases the band heading in a very different direction from the EP, moving towards post-rock. I would have liked to hear what they would have done with that sound, but nothing came of it.

Best as I can determine, that means I'm only missing one song from Embrace Fire, but their discography is small enough that a single song still represents a significant chunk of it.

Embrace Fire

Raise Kain

 Raise Kain were a band from Rotterdam, in The Netherlands. They were active from 1997 to 2002, after which they called it quits. The history I've pieced together from web archives is at odds with the one posted here on Skate Punk Memories, which claims the band changed all its members but one between their first album and last release. This does not appear to be true; all the same members are credited on both releases and the list of names on their final webpage farewell remains consistent, so I'm not sure where the other blog got that information from.

The band's first album, Last Action Heroes, is available at Skate Punk Memories, and that's a fitting archive. But while the album is unquestionably a work of pop punk that fits under the broad umbrella of skate punk—and features a few tracks that could have easily been blaring in the background of a Tony Hawk game—it also has a more dour quality than you might expect, with a lot of influence from emo pop. These influences would come to the fore on their subsequent EP, which leaves skate punk behind in favor of 90s-style emo pop\pop punk with some post-hardcore influence.

The band's first release was a 1998 demo tape called Coronation, which I haven't been able to find. In 1999 they released their only full-length, Last Action Heroes. Their last release was the Airborne EP, released either in 2001 or 2002, I have sources for both dates. What's interesting is that their website makes no mention of the EP in 2001, and then in 2002 the page changes to a goodbye message, so it's possible the EP was released posthumously.

Airborne