It’s September 8, 1998. I’m less than two weeks into my freshman year of college, and already I’m bored and alienated, the world around me awash in the sounds of Korn and Dave Matthews, the smell of dormitory BO and cheap hair gel, and the sight of 30-packs of watery light swill portioned out into plastic cups for beer pong.
But today is a great day. I’m sitting alone in my car in the mall parking lot in Trumbull, Connecticut, where I’ve just purchased the brand new Sunny Day Real Estate album, How It Feels To Be Something On. I pop the CD into my Discman and listen through. How It Feels is different than the two previous records. It’s softer and more melodic, with a change in the high end of Jeremy Enigk’s vocals from an airy, pained scream to a peculiar falsetto. I enjoy it immensely nonetheless. Shortly thereafter I buy a ticket to see the band on November 3, 1998 at Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel in Providence, Rhode Island.
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I discovered Sunny Day Real Estate in the summer of 1997, two years after their initial break-up, and their reunion made me feel as though I was getting a second chance to witness something incredible. That night in Providence, Sunny Day played a rousing set, comprised equally of new material and older cuts delivered in the new vocal style. Such was the case as the band continued to tour through 1999 and into 2000 in support of The Rising Tide. Did the altered vocal delivery of those vintage Sunny Day tracks work? Sunny Day Real Estate Live and an endless supply of YouTube clips of shows from that era exist for you to judge for yourself.
I saw Sunny Day play twice more during that second incarnation, and have long since stated that they were among the best bands I ever had the pleasure to watch perform. Yet there was no denying that a part of me still wished I could’ve seen the band in the early days.
Attending Sunny Day’s performance on September 28, 2009 at the House of Blues in Boston was the next-best thing to travelling back in time. With bassist Nate Mendel back in the mix for the first time in 14 years, fans were treated to a tight, inspired showing by the original lineup. With the recent re-releases of both Diary and LP2 (i.e., “The Pink Album”) on Sub Pop, the setlist was vintage Sunny Day. So, too, was the vocal delivery.
The band opened with “Friday,” the slow-paced yet brief opening track of LP2, and then quickly launched into “Seven,” track one on Diary. It was during the chorus — the line, “You’ll taste it,” specifically — where I realized the voice reverberating through the PA system was that of classic early ‘90s Jeremy Enigk. To paraphrase my friend Neal, standing next to me and seeing the band for the first time, “They sound just like their records.” The discussion later that night often returned to the other-worldly vocals, the fact that what you hear on the first two albums are indeed 100 percent real, and not the product of any recording studio wizardry.
The band unrolled one old favorite after another: “Song About an Angel,” “Iscarabaid,” “Shadows,” “47,” and the sole track performed from How It Feels, “Guitar and Video Games.” The evening’s major surprise came in the form of the one track they’d never played live on any previous tour, “Grendel.” A song written and performed solely in the studio during the recording of Diary, Sunny Day had forever refused to perform it, for fear of the inability to replicate the epic nature of the song as it was recorded. Now, with the original lineup back intact, their performance of this mysterious song with the single distinguishable lyric (“I wanted to be them/but instead destroyed myself”) was the high point of the show.
After playing the catchy, familiar “Theo B,” the Boston crowd was treated to another surprise: a new song, as-of-yet untitled but dubbed by the fans as “10.” Though a radical departure from the early material, this new track alone stands in place of the entire The Rising Tide album as the logical next step in the evolution of Sunny Day Real Estate: it is lush, melodic, and mature (all adjectives used liberally by critics in 2000 to praise The Rising Tide), but it lacks the overly-refined, hyper-retro prog rock sound of The Rising Tide that allowed it to become the sole casualty of Sunny Day’s canon, falling sadly into the dustbin of forgettable records that failed to maintain their relevance over time.
As the band wrapped up the new three-and-a-half-minute long song, they delved right back into Diary material for the remainder of the show: “47,” and “Sometimes,” bisected by one more LP2 track (“J’nuh”), and emerging for a curtain call to play “In Circles” and “48.”
When treated to one of the best shows you’ve ever seen performed by one of your all-time favorite bands — who, in turn, have performed songs from your favorite albums as closely as possible to their original delivery — it’s like getting a big old pony for your fifth birthday. You’re spoiled as hell, and you know it, and it’s hard not to stomp your feet and demand more. And so it goes, at the end of the show: “They only played one hour? They didn’t play ‘8’ or ‘9’ or ‘Rodeo Jones?’ Only a two-song encore, and not the usual three?” And then, at that moment, a big invisible maternal figure gave me an invisible spanking and I snapped out of it. “That was,” we agreed while leaving the House of Blues, “one of the best shows of all time.” When you walk out of a venue immediately ready to see the band play again, you know you saw something special.
And we got more out of it than just a show. A band such as this, who’ve meant so much to their listeners in the past 16 years, exists as a sonic point of reference in our lives. While our moms and dads are still able to go out and get $50 tickets to see the likes of Neil Young, Carlos Santana, and Robert Plant perform, those of us around the age of 30 who grew up in the ‘90s don’t have an abundance of chances to see the essential bands of our formative teen years. Kurt Cobain, Eazy-E, Shannon Hoon, Bradley Nowell, Tupac Shakur, and Layne Staley (not to mention Joey Ramone and Joe Strummer) checked out too early, left us standing around scratching our heads. The punk rock and indie bands of the ‘90s were born doomed to die in obscurity or be crushed by an indie band-eating label like Atlantic. So that pretty much leaves us with what, Green Day and Sonic Youth? An occasional (soulless banter-free uninspired overpriced) Pixies reunion?
You can’t overstate the importance of those few bands that mean the world to you, who are there with you to help bridge the gap between childhood and adulthood. So I spent an evening in Boston with a bunch of aging hipsters who pulled their Chuck Taylors and old one-size-too-small band tees out of the closet; collectively, we let the music carry us back in time, and remind us of our youths, for better or for worse. And, like the band onstage, whose obvious enthusiasm for performance always belies their melancholic musical reputation, we had the time of our lives.