"mEMOries" Part 21 feat. Lakes
8 years ago, back on the old site, we did start a series called mEMOries. It was all about asking new Emo-bands or other scene affiliates about their all time favourite (Midwest-)Emo-record. It was about nostalgia. And it was about connecting the new with the old. I had big plans for this series, wanted to collect 20 parts and then release some sort of a sampler with an XL-booklet attached, that features all of the text pieces...
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// The band // Lakes
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// The record // Counterfit - Super Amusement Machine for your Exciting Heart
Release: 2002 // Label: Accident Prone Records/Negative Progression Records
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Matt on "Super Amusement Machine for your Exciting Heart" by Counterfit
I could have picked a lot of albums. I could have picked that really obvious one that everyone expected me to pick. I decided to pick this though, the album I consider to be the ultimate hidden gem of the whole genre. A genre I have been well and truly obsessed with for twenty-two years now.It started in the year 2000 with a few key moments. Firstly a local Watford band called Ghymp stopped playing System Of A Down-inspired metal and shifted to this melodic and emotional punk rock style that blew my mind. Secondly I heard the song “Red Letter Day” by The Get Up Kids on the free CD that came with issue #805 of Kerrang magazine in June of that year. Finally I saw At The Drive-In at Reading Festival in the summer holidays and I was all in. Never to return. Emo was everything.
Over the next couple of years myself and my close gang of friends who had also fallen in love with the genre went full-on detective mode searching out absolutely every band we could find. Revelation Records was pretty early on with Garrison, Elliott and By A Thread, onto some Deep Elm bands like Red Animal War, Cross My Heart and The Appleseed Cast. Vagrant Records – Saves The Day, The Anniversary and Hot Rod Circuit.
Jimmy Eat World - Bleed American!
Further Seems Forever, New End Original, Rival Schools, Thursday. On and on and on. We were discovering new bands all the time in the bottomless pit that was Napster. Then my friend Rob (now guitarist in Lakes) sent me a dubiously-sourced mp3 of the song “Lying In Traffic” by the band Counterfit.
That opening riff!
It haunted us. It was just the best riff we’d ever heard. Still is. Those harmonics! The slide. The two guitars working together. My friend Neil set it as his voicemail so if he didn’t pick up his phone you just got treated to that riff.
I ordered my copy of the album on CD from Interpunk in the US and waited about a month for it to cross the Atlantic and reach me. I quickly wore it out by playing it constantly in my Ford Fiesta and it eventually just made that horrible CD skipping noise. Thankfully I later picked up a copy on vinyl (with the altered track-listing for all the nerds out there!). It’s hard to describe how much I love the album and just how special it is to me and my small group of fellow Counterfit-heads in Watford, UK. They felt like our special band that no-one else knew. It was simultaneously the angular guitar parts we were hearing at the time, but with these anthemic pop singalong choruses. In fact that formula has shaped my musical taste and the way I write music to this day. From that gang vocal on Managing The Details: "Always second guessing…" to the half-time emo breakdown at the end of This Dance (my email address is still "emodown" named after this riff) - it was so inspiring! I only have to catch a glimpse of the album cover now and I'm flooded with nostalgia.
For anyone not familiar with the band at all, the closest frames of reference I have would be No Knife and Mock Orange from a similar era, or a later collection of bands such as The Progress, Into It Over It and Del Paxton. Looking back it seems well ahead of it's time and I can't help thinking it would have been a huge record a decade later during the emo revival.
As is often the case with such important discoveries like this, the band were gone as quick as they arrived. By 2004 they had disbanded and it was all over. In fact the emo genre as we knew it was about to change beyond recognition too.
The legacy of Counterfit did live on though with the eventual return of the Allen brothers in Helen Earth Band - who I applied to play drums for and considered moving to the US for! More recently I've met fellow Counterfit fans through Instagram including Jason who now plays in the band Trades with Adam Allen. I've also loved hearing stories from my good friend Dylan (Lakes photographer) who grew up in California and used to see Counterfit play regularly.
If you don't know the album already I hope you check it out and find the joy in it that I have. If you do know the album then we're already good friends!
"The lights go out, and the TV's off, I’m sending happy endings".
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"mEMOries" Part 1 feat. Mosey Jones
"mEMOries" Part 2 feat. Daniel Becker (Time as a Color Records, Amid the Old Wounds)
"mEMOries" Part 3 feat. Former States
"mEMOries" Part 4 feat. Edie Quinn (Middle-Man Records, Coma Regalia)
"mEMOries" Part 5 feat. Human Hands
"mEMOries" Part 6 feat. Alex Miles (Is this Thing on?)
"mEMOries" Part 7 feat. Boys' Club
"mEMOries" Part 8 feat. Keith Latinen (Mt. Oriander, Parting)
"mEMOries" Part 9 feat. Villain of the War
"mEMOries" Part 10 feat. John Szuch (Deep Elm Records)
"mEMOries" Part 11 feat. Flight Mode
"mEMOries" Part 12 feat. Comic Sans
"mEMOries" Part 13 feat. Joe C (What Price Wonderland?, Plaids, Zochor)
"mEMOries" Part 14 feat. Mentah
"mEMOries" Part 15 feat. Walking Race
"mEMOries" Part 16 feat. Against Realism
"mEMOries" Part 17 feat. Klaus Axmann (Goddamn Records)
"mEMOries" Part 18 feat. Atlanta Arrival
"mEMOries" Part 19 feat. Mary's Letter
"mEMOries" Part 20 feat. Sinking
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