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IVH: Fixing Rubble, Building Us [1]
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Date: 2022-11-10
Discount (from Maximum RocknRoll #182, July 1998)
Tonight’s selections are from Discount’s Singles #2 compilation. Discount was started while the members were in junior high school. These songs were recorded while the member were 18 to 20 years old. It captures a period where the band was expanding the scope of their music while growing as songwriters and musicians. With singer Alison Mosshart in particular, it’s the sound of a young woman starting to find her voice (literally and figuratively).
Fixing Rubble, Building Us [1998]
It's the late-'90s inside a dingy club, hardcore music echoes throughout the room, and a female-fronted band takes the stage. A chubby-faced girl with scraggly short hair walks onto the stage and picks up the mic. She's dressed in baggy jeans with an inside-out, over-sized T-shirt and some heavily worn-in Chuck Taylors. The crowd watches her every move, waiting patiently for just a few words to be uttered from her lips. The first 30 seconds of "Torn Jeans" have heads bouncing and sweaty bodies moving against one another. The crowd mouths the lyrics "If you've got to say it, I won't mind / I can't justify your pain / By saying it's just a matter of time," along with the fidgety singer who is holding the microphone ever so tightly. The band onstage is Discount, a postpunk group from Vero Beach, Florida, that formed in 1995 [note: really 1993] with Alison Mosshart -- lately of the Kills and the Dead Weather -- on vocals. At the time, many of the members were still in junior high, including Alison, but this didn't hold them back from reaching considerable success within the DIY culture and music scene. Over the next five years, the band toured vigorously throughout the United States and around the world, unknowingly establishing itself as one of the most influential bands in the scene. Although many would say the band departed before reaching full potential, Discount still managed to churn out three LPs and countless EP/seven-inch releases. In August 2000, Discount performed its last show in Gainesville -- the same city where the Kills would play their first U.S. show two years later -- and the elusive Mosshart disappeared along with the memory of Discount. — Broward / Palm Beach New Times
Slant Invention [1999]
Dianca Potts: How did your love for music get started? Alison Mosshart: I got into music through skateboarding. I lived next door to these teenagers when I was really little, and they were always out on their half-pipe with this boom box, and I was fucking obsessed with it. I would sit next to the boom box and listen to everything that they were playing. I would copy those tapes and listen to them all night while I was asleep, wake up and listen to them, and then go back after school and listen to them some more. When I was around 13, the kids that I skated with thought, “Fuck it, let’s get instruments and start a band”, because that’s what you do when you’re a skateboarder. It was a really fun thing to do after school, and by the time I was 14, we were touring. It just didn’t stop. Somehow I got through junior high and high school and two years of college very much so stop-and-start way so that I could tour. That was all I cared about, and it was awesome. I got to see the world at a very young age. My parents tried to say no a few times, but I was very headstrong. I was just like, *This is what I need to do* . My first band, Discount, went on for six years, we toured everywhere, which is incredible for a punk band of our size because this was at a time where there was no internet, and the music scene was very much word-of-mouth and fan zines; you booked tours by sending letters. I’m so happy to have had that experience because that kind of life skill set is so major. The ability to communicate, to be patient, to read a map. You’re basically running a small business at the age of 15. I don’t think that there’s anything else in my life that I learned so much from. — "Too Wild a Dream" interview
Antiseptic [1998]
I was looking back at your first band Discount and I could not believe how many records you released. That feels like a band that needs a compilation, because everything is all over the place. ALISON MOSSHART: Yeah, it’s all over the place. We did a lot of recordings for sure. Back then, you would do a 7-inch every time you went on tour. So you’d always have 7-inches to sell on the road. And we did tons and tons and tons of 7-inches. I don’t even have all that stuff. It’s so long ago, and I’ve moved so many places. It’s wild. And it’s really a pre-internet era. I don’t know. [Laughs] Someone is welcome to put them all together and send them to me. Yeah, there are three songs on Apple Music when I looked on streaming. And then I went on Discogs, I was like, wow, there’s a lot more out there. But it’s all on different labels, tiny labels. And I think that’s what people forget too. Back then you did what you could, and it was really on a shoestring. MOSSHART: Sort of. You know, we kind of got in trouble towards the end, because there was a record deal that went wrong. And some guy — I can’t thankfully even remember his name, because I hate him so much my brain has decided not to remember his name — but he got all of the albums. He bought them through this company that we had been with, and we don’t have the rights to the songs. And not only that, for some reason we can’t seem to get them back. It was just one of those terrible stories that you hate when you read a biography of a band, that suddenly all of their work is in some guy’s house as like a power move. Those records are not even sellable, right? You can put them out, but the sales would be so low, it’s kind of not really a… I don’t know what he’s waiting for. I don’t know any of it anymore, but it was kind of bad. — Stereogum
Most Beautiful Criminal [1999]
It's harder to tell
With all this floor
Between the counter and the door
There's been a filling
Up
Holes in the ceiling
Static
The TV sounds like raining
It's just us
And the furniture Problematically you're smiling
But your teeth aren't directed at me
Did i walk in on a one on no one
You're one of those just like me
Harder to Tell [1998]
Crash Diagnostic is not a pop-punk record. It's decidedly more emo for its time period, although nowadays it could be placed more in the indie rock realm, recalling Sleater-Kinney and early Pretty Girls Make Graves. The guitars are a little more dissonant. The songs don't always make obvious pop moves. These tunes are angular, spastic. Crash Diagnostic veers violently from the lumbering, dreamy "Behind Curtain #" to the punk rocker "T.V. Kiss" simply because it can. While a handful of tunes share some genes with old Discount, like "Broken to Blue" or "Medical," the album is given to these deviations. One minute it's an ethereal drifter, the next it's cranked to full volume. — Punknews.org
Faithful Elevator [2002]
WHO’S TALKING TO WHO?
Jimmy Kimmel: Brian Tyree Henry, Lizzy Caplan, Young the Giant
Jimmy Fallon: Will Ferrell, Lindsay Lohan, the 1975
Stephen Colbert: Emily Blunt, George Saunders
Seth Meyers: Tracy Morgan, James Acaster, Benny Greb
James Corden: Kim Kardashian, Edward Enninful, Fontaines DC (R 9/14/22)
The Daily Show: Jordan Peele
SPOILER WARNING
A late night gathering for non serious palaver that does not speak of that night’s show. Posting a spoiler will get you brollywhacked. You don’t want that to happen to you. It's a fate worse than a fate worse than death.
One from VV and Hotel. The Kills were Mosshart’s *first* post-Discount band.
To watch Alison Mosshart perform is to watch a jungle cat go through the motions of a hunt—skulking, focused, serious. She is often, without self-parody, wearing a well-worn, beloved leopard print shirt. “A great show is one I don’t remember at all,” she once told Nylon. “I walk off and I know I went somewhere.” — Vice
The Kills :: Black Rooster [2002]
LAST WEEK’S POLL: WHICH DECADE HAD THE BEST MUSIC?
1950s 0%
1960s 36%
1970s 52%
1980s 0%
1990s 12%
2000s 0%
2010s 0%
[END]
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