Lost Bands of the MySpace Era

"Remembering some dudes" MUSIC EDITION

(Editor’s [me lol] note): It took me four years but I have finally named this blog. Welcome to AWAY MESSAGE.

AWAY MESSAGE feels right because it was on AOL Instant Messenger that I put real thought into what I wrote for the first time. Between screen names, buddy profiles, icons and away messages, AIM presented me the first opportunity to express myself, through words publicly. I spent hours writing and re-writing my profile and away messages, trying to make the reader feel a certain way. The stakes felt so high. They still do, sort of.

Thank you for reading my AWAY MESSAGE.

In sixth grade, some girl I had a crush on but whose name I’ve long forgotten messaged me on AIM message about this new song The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows. I pulled up Kazaa and downloaded it, along with varieties of malware scientists still don’t understand, and immediately became obsessed.

A few years later I’d pull up a friend’s MySpace page and was greeted by Boa Vs. Python by Test Icicles. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

This is not rosy retrospection: discovering new music in the early social media era was just as fun as we remember it to be. Opening the Pure Volume page of a band you just found and seeing a few EPs to tear into was exhilarating, as was seeing a lyric-subtitled .gif of a music video on Tumblr and deducing who the artist was.

Because my preferred music software is iTunes, I still have the .mp3 files from that era. Just as Gen-Xers and boomers held onto the vinyl records and CDs of their youth, I refuse to let go of the satisfaction of having the actual audio file of the music I love. This might be the most old-man coded thing I currently do, but I will continue using iTunes for as long as it’s supported, that is a promise.

Looking back on the AIM and MySpace eras got me thinking about all the bands that are being lost in the streaming era. Bands that might not have a Spotify page. Bands that absolutely did not get invited to When We Were Young. Bands that have not existed since when Bring Me The Horizon was a metalcore band.

So grab your pyramid belt and jelly bracelets. It’s time to Remember Some Bands.

Men, Women & Children

It causes me actual heartache that dance punk was never bigger. This is a subsidiary opinion of my broader belief that the world needs nu-disco more than ever and I hope like hell a resurgence is on its way.

Le Tigre and The Faint introduced me to dance punk by showing up in skate videos, and the aforementioned God-Kings of dance-punk Test Icicles solidified my love of it. Everything about Dance In My Blood is wildly over-the-top and I love it for it.

Mason

A direct line could probably be drawn directly from Translating The Name’s release in 2003 to this album dropping two years later, but just because Mason might be a Saosin impersonation doesn’t mean they weren’t an awesome band.

Red Lipstick Letter

Red Lipstick Letter’s old last.fm bio tells the tale of how their first album was, “selling out in regional Hot Topic's and climbing the charts in CD sales on Smartpunk.com,” which is the most 2007 sentence I’ve ever read.

A Heartwell Ending

A Heartwell Ending is probably the least forgotten among all these bands: If you are one of the (!!!) over 100,000 people that listen to them every month on Spotify, please reach out. They started as a straight up MySpace emo band and later became neon pop-punk outfit Call The Cops. I saw A Heartwell Ending open for Chiodos in 2006 and still regret not getting a t-shirt.

Juniper

Juniper, I think, was a band from either the Hudson Valley or Rochester areas. An old friend showed me them, I think, in 2005, and the only song I had of theirs was called Thin Ice, off the EP One Road Onto Me.

There is a solid chance I am the first person to write about Juniper in 20 years. I don’t think any of their music is on the internet anymore; this is the only digital footprint I can find of their existence.

This Time It’s War

When I was 15, opening a metal song with Revelation 6:8 was the coolest thing imaginable. It was while seeing TTIW at Alley Katz that I first feared for my own safety at a show.

Neighborhood Friendly

Like TTIW, Neighborhood Friendly is another band that is likely only remembered in Richmond.

NF and Murphy’s Kids spearheaded a very fun little ska scene in Richmond back in the day and while Murphy’s Kids is only mostly dead and shows up every few years for the Skalidays, Neighborhood Friendly is but a memory. But I know there’s a few of us who always chuckle to themselves every July 5, thinking about this band.