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

The Next Autumn Soundtrack

 

Sometimes when I make a post on a band, it's not because I've successfully collected whatever amount of music from them I was after, but rather because I've exhausted every avenue of research. At a certain point, I've sent the unanswered emails, scoured the incomplete archives, and examined every lead I could find. Such is the case with this next band.

The Next Autumn Soundtrack were from Grimsby, UK, active for a couple years in the early 2000s; they were formed in February of 2002 and called it quits by 2004. Musically, they were a post-rock\midwest emo hybrid similar to The Bitter Life Typecast, The Cotton Weary, and especially their UK fellows Slingshot Around The Moon (Caesura deserves an honorable mention, though TNAS were not as influenced by post-punk. They also share a lot of DNA with little-known German band Kiss And Kill). Their best work comes from their one official release, and finds them working in a similar vein to Mare Vitalis and Low Level Owl-era The Appleseed Cast. I've always loved this offshoot of midwest emo and the first track from the split, "Nightnightbyebye," is a personal favorite.

They were not prolific, and pieces of their discography remain missing in defiance of my best efforts. Their only album release is a 2003 split with Swedish post-rockers Jeniferever on Big Scary Monsters. The only other release that could be considered official is their contribution to BSM's 50 Not Out compilation, which was posthumous, released in 2008. Prior to the split, there was a two-song demo in the same year. The band also put out a few demo tracks on their own site, which appear to have been from a self-titled five-track EP that was initially slated for its own release, but was instead used for the split, three of its tracks being rerecorded and another track eventually being repurposed for the compilation.

What this boils down to is I'm missing at least two of their songs, demo versions of tracks from the split. Even worse, two of the demo tracks I have are incomplete, cutting off before the song ends ("I said anything goes. Everything went." from the two-song demo and "splinters/GLASS/dust." from the unreleased S/T EP).

Partial Discography

Her Only Presence

Her Only Presence were a band from Barcelona (originally Mallorca), Spain, active from 2005 until 2012. The band began as a solo acoustic project for frontman Luis Cifre, who started out playing acoustic emo with some folk influences. After playing with several different lineups in live performances, Cifre would transition the project to a full band following 2009's A Brand New Start. While the majority of Her Only Presence's discography is therefore comprised of acoustic emo pop, the band's last two releases are midwest emo with a vein of post-rock (their 2011 LP was produced by The Appleseed Cast's Chris Crisci, a very apparent influence).

The timing of Her Only Presence's last album makes it tempting to label them an emo revival act, but I think they don't quite fit. Cifre's solo efforts predate the movement by a considerable margin, placing him in the company of other prescient acts like Up Up Down Down or oh my god elephant. The music itself also eschews the Kinsella influence usually seen in emo revival bands, though this is in and of itself not reason to disassociate from the movement as others did the same. In combination, however, I think that Her Only Presence qualifies as a forward-thinking outlier.

The project started with a 2005 demo CDr and two tracks submitted to a Dreamville Records Sampler, only one of which would end up on the first album, Ghost Of The Year, also released in 2005. Two years later, Cifre put out The Hurt Process, another full LP. In 2009 he released A Brand New Start, which featured a fuller sound than previous efforts with more varied instrumentation, a sign of where the project was headed. Then, 2011 saw the project become a band with the release of You're Never Back, the most well-known work of Her Only Presence, put out by legendary UK emo label Engineer Records; the same year, they also contributed a track to an Engineer compilation. The band's last release was in 2012, a split with L'hereu Escampa.

Her Only Presence Discography

Slingshot Around The Moon

Slingshot Around The Moon were a band from Kent, formed in 2001 and active until 2004. Their sound is really fantastic, a genuine bit of emo that combines midwest emo and emo pop with post-rock, the result being some truly great soundscapes and a sense of grandeur on their later recordings. It seems the band played their first gig at a Jimmy Eat World cover show, which makes a lot of sense if you listen to their first demo, Elixia. Their biography on Last.FM, which seems to have been posted by a band member, ends with a wish to record the last five songs they wrote. As it turns out, they did, and the result is the This Is Who We Were EP.

The Elixia demo was their first release in 2001. Recorded with a single microphone, the demo is a muddy attempt at a more emo pop-oriented sound than they would later pursue (none if its songs were rerecorded for subsequent releases, which is honestly a shame as there's at least two or three great songs on there). Following the five-track Elixia demo, the band put out a two-song demo, usually called Demo 2003, and then their best-known release, the Quod Sum Eris 7", which was originally titled What you remember more. The 7" marks the point in which the post-rock influences really begin to shine through. After that, the band recorded another two-song demo. Finally, in 2004, the band recorded This Is Who We Were, which was never released. It showcases a heavier, more energetic take on the band's sound.

While that list covers the band's 'official' releases, there is quite a bit more. I admit that 'official' in this case is a shaky definition, including anything that had a physical release as well as an EP that was intended to. Because various band members held on to behind the scenes material, I have a pretty comprehensive history of the band's unofficial recordings and demos, including a set from a 2001 house party and a collection of demo tracks spanning the life of the project. The Westgate Studio Live Demos even showcase the band rehearsing the same songs repeatedly. While I will leave some of this material out of the Youtube discography for the sake of brevity and repetition, they will still be included in the download, and I think they represent a great snapshot of Slingshot's creative process.

This artwork is made available courtesy of How Nothing Feels.

Slingshot Around The Moon Discography

Lorna Slavin

And now for something completely different. A few years back, I ordered a vinyl copy of Inside the Whale's superlative album Manifest, and the band member threw in a copy of Lorna Slavin's only release as a bonus. I expected something along the same lines, and that is not what I got. At least, not all the time.

To call this release eclectic would be an understatement. I threw pretty much every genre tag I could think of at this thing and, honestly, I could probably toss in a few more. Lorna Slavin often sound like a completely different band from song to song—sometimes they sound like a completely different band within the same song. This band was clearly a short-lived project, and maybe that's the way it had to be, because it feels like every band member brought in their influences and inclinations from previous bands and when it came time to decide what kind of band they were going to be, the answer was, 'all of them.' It's difficult to imagine a follow up album that wouldn't veer in one direction or the other. Maybe it's just me, but I feel like this kind of balancing act would be difficult to replicate.

The 2007 EP Call Them And They Will Rise is Lorna Slavin's only release, featuring six diverse songs.

Call Them And They Will Rise

Caesura

Caesura were a UK band from Winchester, formed in 2005. They exist as yet more evidence that a miniature wave of post-rock\midwest emo hybrid bands rose up in the aughts, combing post-rock's vast soundscapes with midwest emo's twinkling ennui. Caesura follow that formula well, but they also bring something a bit different to the table in the form of post-punk influences, which makes sense given the time period. This puts them in the rare company of bands that mixed emo with the garage rock revival, such as The Diggs—but given Caesura's home turf, a more fitting comparison would be their fellow countrymen One Toy Soldier, who also sometimes sound a bit like Bloc Party.

Caesura put out their first release in the form of the Dear Light Outside EP in 2006. They also contributed a track to a compilation; during the same sessions, they recorded second track that went unreleased. I'm able to include it here thanks to one of the band members. In 2008, the band would change their name to On Histories of Rosenberg and release a final EP. 

Caesura Discography