Rites Of Spring - L’avanguardia post-hardcore

Rites Of Spring (Washington, 1984-1987) were the post-hardcore band of singer-guitarist Guy Picciotto (Washington, 1965) and drummer Brendan Canty, before the two went on to join the post-hardcore band Fugazi (Washington, 1987).

In Washington, in the mid-80s as now, the dominant figure was Ian Mackaye (Washington, 1962), who had not only effectively imported Californian hardcore into the city (first with Teen Idles, then with Minor Threat), but had also, precisely for that reason, founded the independent label Dischord, one of the earliest, most important and most prolific American indie labels in the hardcore field.

It was Mackaye who created the conditions for the formation and output of Rites Of Spring. Mackaye was undergoing the great shift from the hardcore of Minor Threat to post-hardcore (which, pending the name Fugazi, was then called, as far as Mackaye's own activity went, Embrace), and he pursued it both through his own bands and through his record label. Rites Of Spring, like many others, served Mackaye as a vehicle for promoting his own musical agenda. Then, when Mackaye realized that Rites Of Spring were, if not surpassing the master, at least becoming the realization of his musical dreams, he formed, with the two members of the band closest to him, the group that would synthesize - containing and surpassing - all of Washington's decade-long para-hardcore expressions. Fugazi (along with Pussy Galore, but that's another story...) would be the only band from Washington to achieve worldwide resonance.

Rites Of Spring were the missing link between the hardcore of Minor Threat and the post-hardcore of Fugazi. Guy Picciotto was Mackaye's surrealist alter ego; that imaginative streak without which Fugazi wouldn't be Fugazi.

But the art of Rites Of Spring managed to go beyond this mechanical historical role, elevating itself to a unicum in the whole history of music.

There's a post-hardcore style known as emo-core. The few who discuss it tend to place Rites Of Spring within it - indeed, to cast them as its founding fathers. But that's inaccurate, or at least reductive. If the music of Rites Of Spring is too elaborate, varied and eclectic to fit within hardcore, it's also too violent, nihilistic and angry to be called emo-core. Emo-core represents an overcoming of all hardcore's harshness in favor of a more reflective, formal and pictorial sound.

It remains true, however, that many of emo-core's devices derive from Rites Of Spring - starting with those of Fugazi.

The uniqueness of Rites Of Spring lies in the uniqueness of their post-hardcore. Post-hardcore is usually defined as such because it's either too extreme (Corrosion Of Conformity) or too mild (Flipper). Rites Of Spring were both at once, though in a very different sense from the pop-core of Husker Du.

Rites Of Spring stretched the hardcore song from 1-2 minutes to 3. They then paired thrash-metal fury and speed (thrash-metal which had in turn drawn on hardcore) with rock'n'roll riffs and structures, playing it all with that abused-child patina typical of Flipper. In short, they were playing thrash-metal for the nascent indie culture, and their means of communication was a rock'n'roll steeped in late new wave.

The work of Rites Of Spring was, and remains, immensely innovative, as well as accomplished and mature. We are, of course, firmly in the realm of avant-garde music rather than anything commercial or commercially viable.

The themes and concerns of Rites Of Spring are those of the average American kid from an average family, reflecting on his own existence in the mid-80s - a kid working through that reflection via music far removed from metal or pop proselytizing, music as extreme and radical as his own thoughts (still centered on existence rather than politics or society). While punk was the music of anarchy and hardcore that of nihilism, post-hardcore (and later indie) became, in the second half of the 80s, the music of contemplation - powerless but neither suicidal nor homicidal - of hardcore's nihilism. This demanded forms and content to match.

The forms of Rites Of Spring were unique also because they featured an extreme vocal style, somewhere between the fiercest punk, thrash metal and even death metal. Picciotto is truly unrecognizable here: the Picciotto of Rites Of Spring relates to the Picciotto of Fugazi the way Buckley's "Buckley" relates to his "Lorca", or the way Van Morrison of Them relates to his solo career. In Fugazi, Picciotto's voice would become that of a surreal, metaphysical hell. Here it's bestial, hoarse, raging and breathless, like Yow's in Scratch Acid or Brannon's in Laughing Hyenas. It's a voice utterly at odds with future indie rock: all emotion and childlike rawness. Here Picciotto relies on belching and retching, not on falsetto, as he would in Fugazi. That voice - enough to make even the most extreme metal bands envious - is backed by instruments that sound like those of every post-hardcore band with similar vocals (again: Scratch Acid, Laughing Hyenas, but also Frightwig or Babes in Toyland): that is, instruments played with that kind of depowered, stuttering quality that was both the blessing and the curse of so many 70s punk bands - fast and obsessive, yet toothless and weak. The great difference between Scratch Acid and Laughing Hyenas on one side and Rites Of Spring on the other is that while the former are rooted in blues, the latter are rooted in a rock'n'roll (from which indie would spring) defined in opposition to the blues. It's the same difference that separates Fugazi from Jesus Lizard.

This contradiction between voice and music, deliberate and sought after (otherwise it would have been hardcore and not post), is in turn occasionally contradicted whenever voice and music decide to move in unison, burying the listener beneath a terrifying wall of sound of more than metal proportions.

The rhythm section, and the drums in particular, as we said, are here mostly kept low in the mix (however frantically and quickly they're pounding away); it's a deliberate effect, accentuated by deficient production and especially recording (it would take only a certain kind of remix to turn this music into death metal). That said, it must also be noted that Brendan Canty is, understandably given his age, far from the perfection he would later achieve in Fugazi. Where Picciotto is unrecognizable through excess, Canty is unrecognizable through deficiency. In keeping with the dictates of the Rites Of Spring sound, Canty played a kit that was more than minimal: a bass drum, three drums and six cymbals (yes, he hit the cymbals more than the skins). The result was a constipated sound that nonetheless found its own radicalism in that very limitation. Above all, Canty was fast (so fast you couldn't tell one hit from the next): the point is that what he squandered in power by hammering away at that single drum, he lost in speed as well; yet it is precisely this "losing" and "squandering" that gives off a gratifying sense of primitivism, or essentiality.

The guitars deserve special mention (also kept low in the mix compared to the voice): articulate, inventive, by turns apathetic and mournful; but never as sprawling as Sonic Youth's sometimes were (and yet also the polar opposite of hardcore, where the guitars serve a mainly rhythmic function). Essentially, there were two paths in underground rock for experimenting with the guitar: the noise route of Sonic Youth, and the minimalist one (built on counterpoint or chords) that runs from Slint all the way to Fugazi and Jesus Lizard. A third, intermediate path between the two was Albini's guitar work.

The Rites Of Spring's concerts were as extreme as their music (for a post-hardcore band!) was elegant, refined and deliberate, as were they themselves as people (photographs show them dressed in English new-wave style, Joy Division-like rather than Ramones-like: this heightens the band's singularity, given the era and place in which they were active; but it also lays bare their already "indie" sensibility).

With Rites Of Spring we enter one of the darkest, most fundamental and most precious periods in the history of quality rock: 1984-1987. One of those Dark Ages you enter one way and emerge from in another. The entrance was hardcore; the exit would be grunge.

The protagonists of this forgotten yet remarkably fertile transitional period, rich in ideas and intuitions, were, alongside Rites Of Spring, Big Black, Butthole Surfers, Scratch Acid, Naked Raygun, Squirrel Bait, Laughing Hyenas. Musically speaking, they were all closely connected to one another.

But, to get specific, Rites Of Spring were from Washington, and it was in Washington that they found their first and most significant inspiration. Hardcore in Washington, which became one of the genre's capitals after the Los Angeles diaspora, meant Mackaye; but not only him: S.O.A. and Red C were also among the first to carry the genre's banner. Moreover, Washington, from performers to audiences, had already arrived at post-hardcore before Rites Of Spring; and this too happened independently of Mackaye, though not of his Dischord label: essentially every Washington band was born and died with Dischord (just as Dischord lived and died for Washington's bands). Gray Matter, Government Issue, Marginal Man, Beefeater, Scream, Unrest are all brilliant and utterly obscure examples of post-hardcore in Washington, forming (in the first half of the '80s) the fertile ground without which Rites Of Spring would have been impossible, and unheard.

Contemporaries of Rites Of Spring, also from Washington and working within the same, if varied, post-hardcore terrain, were Fire Party, Shudder To Think, One Last Wish. Finally, between 1988 and 1991, the Washington bands Jawbox, Soul Side, Ignition, High-Back Chairs, Lungfish, Holy Rollers and Girls Against Boys carried the torch forward.

Like this whole roster of names that mean nothing to most people, Rites Of Spring too belong, on a general level, to that same obscurity. Rites Of Spring who, like Minor Threat, perhaps owe what little extra following they have solely to Fugazi.

They were twenty years old, and this was their first serious musical venture. Yet Rites Of Spring immediately showed the mettle that only true artists possess. Above all, they were theorists of the genre, and they wrote and played (as is somewhat typical of all post- bands) only after much deliberation over the how and the what, rather than by instinct or on a whim.

Between 1985 and 1987, under the wing of Mackaye, who produced them, and Dischord, which released their records, the four-piece (besides the two future Fugazi members, the essential lineup was rounded out by Michael Fellows on bass and Eddie Janney on guitar) put out one LP and one EP. Strangely, the LP came before the EP.

Rites Of Spring (1985): 12 brani, 33 minuti. Produttore: Ian Mackaye.

Why is it that in the other arts, the truly important artists and works are known and studied, while in rock they are not? Because rock, unlike the other arts, still hasn't been studied with any seriousness; or, more simply, it still hasn't been fully regarded as an art form. Had painting never been studied seriously, Botticelli's "Primavera" might well have vanished some time after it was made. In rock, which moves at the fast pace typical of modern times, if we keep failing to recognize the value of its works, they, like this one, are doomed to perpetual oblivion. And when future generations are left with nothing but some album by Artist K or Z, they'll be right to say that rock was worth nothing at all.

Rites Of Spring is among the tensest, most explosive and most extreme rock albums ever made. In 1985, a year that seemed neither one thing nor another, a record was conceived capable of outdoing, in sheer force, a good many of the thrash-metal, punk and noise albums that came both before and after it. And it managed all this without being metal, punk, or noise. The album even ends up, within hardcore's embrace, absorbing in its own way the acrobatics of the thing furthest removed from hardcore imaginable: the classic and power metal of Iron Maiden.

The album is conceived less as a collection of songs than as a series of rites of self-reflection, each more searing than the last. Live, these rites became collective, shifting from self-reflection to self-destruction. It's therefore petty to speak of masterpieces when, strictly speaking, there are no songs to begin with (in these assaults of noise there is neither beginning, nor middle, nor end). Moreover, as in much post-hardcore and, by extension, post-rock (from Jesus Lizard to Slint), the aesthetic of these tracks is properly an anti-aesthetic, an aesthetic or art of ugliness. Ugliness meant not as kitsch or trash, but as musical unpleasantness. What can and must be said, however, concerns the quality with which that state is rendered: a quality that never flags in tension, expression, or depth. Hence a masterpiece of an album made up of no masterpieces at all. An album by twenty-year-olds, produced by a twenty-three-year-old.

"Spring" (2:09) is a lightning bolt at a charging pace, over which rises Picciotto's voice in a form closer to what it would become in Fugazi, here vaguely recalling the inimitable, extreme falsetto of H.R. (Bad Brains). A humorous, light track both in content and in its frantic form.

"Deeper Than Inside" (2:17) is in a way a version of the previous track, but given over to pessimism rather than play. The guitar pulses with garage-rock energy, the drums never let up, the bass is symphonic: over it all rides Picciotto's despairing, screaming voice.

"For Want Of" (3:09), after the two opening chained blasts (which so recall the typical juxtaposition of tracks on Fugazi albums), takes on a more considered violence; it's a crescendo closer to Pere Ubu than to Germs. Picciotto immediately flaunts his gifts (speaking of David Thomas). Eddie Janney in particular stands out: a classically trained guitarist capable of taking on the most noise-driven, skeletal poses (a bit like Duane Denison in Jesus Lizard).

"Hain's Point" (2:08) confirms that music like this had never been heard before: it tastes neither of dark-wave atmospheres, nor punk metropolises, nor metal apocalypse: it is the (deflagrating) construction of that indie tunnel suspended in time, spanning the most sensitive and introspective of young consciences. "All There Is" (2:54) grinds out a violence equal to Little Richard, with restarts, implosions and explosions that are already pure Fugazi. As with Fugazi, it's a love song without having a love.

"Drink Deep" (4:55) is the most elaborate, most post-hardcore moment on the record. The bass dominates and the guitar makes noise in scales of gibberish. Picciotto now growls, now sways, wrapped in painful thirsts. There's a certain Rozz Williams-style fatalism here, though relived in secular terms. The ending is the centerpiece of the whole record: practically the Sex Pistols doing a kind of Iron Maiden cover, with Picciotto sighing and moaning like a hard rock singer who knows no pleasures, only tears. (The link reference to Sex Pistols retained.)

"Other Way Around" (3:59) is a power-core track (guitar and bass still playing Iron Maiden) in which Picciotto holds back the rhythm rather than driving it forward. The drums go straight and sobbing against everyone and everything. A couple of rhythmic detours before the end. "Theme" (2:19) is a naive, black-tinged rock'n'roll (think X) made up of all the powerless, disbelieving despair of youth; the very despair that would shape the sound of Fugazi, but more broadly, that makes all of indie-rock so compelling.

"By Design" (2:38) is yet another raid that is at once textbook and inimitable. The drums are primal; the guitars constantly shift without indulging in crude or hard rock riffs. The ending reaches, through distortion, into psychedelia. With "Reminder" (2:30), it's still astonishing how it manages to be so essential and stripped-down (rootsy, garage-born) and yet always burning, alive. It must be down to the universal truths it speaks for.

"Persistent Vision" (2:21) finds its own dimension even in occasional choruses or echoes. "Nudes" (2:48) channels all the violence of the late '60s (MC5, Stooges) through a new-wave (and intellectual) filter, arriving at the contemplation of the solitary teenage bedroom on a lonely afternoon. Because this is music made and conceived with that bedroom in mind, that private space, that anonymous self closed entirely in on itself.

Unreleased at the time but conceived during the same 1985 recording sessions, the most accomplished Rites Of Spring song: "End On End" (included from 1991 on the compilation of the same name). Over seven minutes of indie epic that, running from "So Cold" by Rockets From The Tombs, through "Budd" by Rapeman, to "If It Kills You" by Drive Like Jehu, stands as the lofty, extreme and sublime equivalent, for its own culture, of "Death Don't Have No Mercy" by Grateful Dead. A devastating track, between distortion, excesses of bass (which ends up carrying the melody), and rants that are almost Motorhead-like. A relentless track, without compromise and above all without a dull moment. A "Sentimental Journey" that has neither the desire nor the time for self-indulgence.

All Through A Life (1987). EP, 4 tracks, 11 minutes.

From "All Through A Life" (2:57) to "Hidden Wheel" (2:31) to the masterpiece "In Silence/Words Away" (3:00) to "Patience" (1:58), only the despair of two years earlier is preserved, now stripped of the violence. With these complex structures we are already in Fugazi territory (who would debut within a year); and with one foot firmly planted in Slint territory too.

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