Albums I Loved In High School: Before Today & 'A Celebration Of An Ending'
"We should be learning from our history" - Before Today, "The Process of Losing and Gaining"
Nazis unwelcome: here’s my post about moving this blog off of Substack soon. I might put this stinger on every post until then to try to irritate Nazi Sympathizer Hamish McKenzie. I might forget/get bored and stop. Not today though!
I genuinely forgot these last few weeks, only to remember whenever I wasn’t at my computer. It became a curse. We really are building the Lazy & Entitled website, it’s just been a busy few months for both Brendan and me.
Cotton Xenomorph’s “Cryptids and Climate Change” issue continues, with so much good stuff this month. Check out “Pacific Waste Receptacle” by Mirm Hurula, “TORSCHLUSSPANIK*” by Dee Allen, “The Water was with god” by Sara Cahill Marron, “Rotation, the rot: Poems” by Mateo Perez Lara, two poems by Jude Armstrong, and “Midday Heart and the Basurapaca” by Steve Gerson.
If you hate this series, there’s only two more left.
If you love this series, I’ll be doing more later this summer.
Today, we’re talking about another San Diego band, Before Today. You might know the Vic Fuentes-led post-hardcore band as Pierce The Veil, which is fine, that’s also a song on this record. I don’t dislike Pierce The Veil, but I’ve never quite been able to get into them, although I’m trying again.
Roundabouts 2005, going into my senior year of high school, the scene shifted. Pop punk was no longer the sound that had the crowd a-clamoring. Idk if it took 9/11 that long to catch up with us, or if we all just turned 17, but the scene became decidedly moodier and less fun, more post-punk, emo, screamo, hardcore, post-hardcore, metal. One band in my town began as a classic three piece who couldn’t play their instruments and then went through like six lineup changes in six months to become a five-piece emocore band who wrote two of my favorite songs ever before turning into a Southern metal band that 1) I genuinely can’t stand and 2) you’ve probably heard of, even if you’re not from Tennessee.
It was never easy for me to get into screaming music, although I don’t dislike it. Screaming music is like hiking—not something I do on purpose when other great options are available, but something I enjoy when things are going well. This 2005 shift eventually led to my atrocious attempt to be an acoustic singer-songwriter. It’s safe to say I went the opposite way of most people. But there were some bands—did you know Skrillex used to be the singer of a screamo band that put out one really good record? did you watch Umbrella Academy?—some bands really got into rotation in my Honda’s CD player.
Chief among them was Before Today, maybe the best or second-best punk band ever at playing their instruments. Lyrically? If Thundercat writes lyrics like a sixth-grade love letter, Before Today writes lyrics like they have 50 First Dates-style brain damage and the first thing they do in the morning is read Howard Zinn. That is to say, a lot of these lyrics are passionately cringe, but I do not care. We love the passion! Maybe if the world wanted Before Today to write better lyrics, the world could try doing better. Ever think that think? Obviously not. Let’s get into these tracks.
Sight To Frame
These ambient, clean-tone, weird sounds, and echo-y singing tracks that open albums? I can take or leave them. Maybe the only truly successful one is Brand New’s opener off their worst album, which at least leads seamlessly into the second song/lead single off the album, which is about being afraid of losing your virginity. “Sight To Frame” doesn’t remotely lead into the next song and is kind of a wasted track, except it rhymes nicely with the ending track, “Color Your World,” one of the most delightful songs in recorded music history. But that’s later, this is the present, and this song whiffs.
Roots Beneath Ideals
Yeah, play that punk beat! This is how you kick off a record. Blistering fast drums and guitar, melodic singing and screaming some lyrics that scream “I did the reading for AP History and are you kidding me? This is the world you’d like me to be a good citizen of when I leave high school?”
This song rules for doing the Pop Punk Breakdown, a bygone rhythmic trick every band used from 2001-2005 and then never again. You do it by really laying into 1 E & A 2 like they’re the most dramatic notes you’ve ever hit, then playing nothing for a measure and a half while the drummer goes crazy in half time. It happens around the 2:38 mark. Listen and tell me you don’t wanna jump off a roof into a swimming pool.
Pierce the Veil
Told you they ripped their own song for their new band name. Look, neither name is great, and probably I am the only person in the world who cares about this trivia. Before Today is a little bit my musical Orange County. This is probably their best song, this one or “The Process of Losing and Gaining,” which has a terrible title. Well, they both do. Titles are hard. This song rules.
Enlarge Your Hearts
You can be hardcore in a major key! It’s possible! They go hard like Ant Edwards in the paint on those trills in the chorus! Listen to that F major 9!
Also, the theme of Before Today having 17-year-old-ass lyrics continues. Personally, I love them for it. Hey Vic, I deeply, more than you know, relate to screaming “ENLARGE YOUR HEARTS” at people only to be met with “shut up nerd.”
The Process of Losing and Gaining
God, these song titles are tough. What’s not tough is that sick drum rimshot intro. Have I said this is like the best instrumental punk band ever yet? This is the band that filled the Rufio-shaped hole in my heart after 2005. Live video of Before Today is hard to find—that’s right, jagoffs, my high school era was right before everything was filmed all the time!—but here’s a video of them playing their first- or second-best song, somehow faster.
Failure is Relative
This is my least favorite track on the record. The only cool part is the solo after the first chorus. I can see in your eyes you don’t remember Rufio. Here they are.
Shallow Pockets
Ooooooh baby that clean guitar bridge, when he’s playing 16th notes on the hi hat and the guitar’s walking those chromatic chords down? Then the other guitar comes in tremolo one time then syncopated comping? So sick.
The Well of Tradition
Really great clean tone on that first verse (after that rad “Hard Day’s Night”-esque dissonant chord hit at the beginning, hey Brendan, we need to do more of this). I don’t wanna talk about the clean tone too much, because I do really like the heavy parts.
When they hit that guitar solo with the—what is that? Phaser? Flanger? I’m not the biggest effects guy—at the 2:41 mark? There isn’t a god in the cosmos who can stop me from losing all of my shit like a Key & Peele valet.
Staring at Backgrounds
Solid, solid track. Both guitars are just so good in this band, and the bass player, man, he wasn’t in Pierce The Veil, but he could play. This band broke up in 2006, when I graduated high school, before becoming Pierce The Veil and swallowing the post-hardcore scene. There was something in the back of my mind that was like, “should I move to Chicago for school, or should I go to San Diego and audition for this band?” There are worse places to end up alone and prospect-less than San Diego. San Diego rules. Did I talk about San Diego last week? I probably would’ve known about Chon way sooner if I’d gone to San Diego to not make the final cut for Pierce The Veil.
Color Your World
This song rules not because of how smooth it is, not because it’s my favorite “heavy band has an instrumental clean track at the end” song ever (narrowly beating out Between The Buried And Me’s “Laser Speed,” off Alaska), not because it’s a genuinely good fusion track played with real instruments (which it is)—this song rules because Vic Fuentes, Sr. is the one shredding. At least, he’s credited on the track, and I assume Vic didn’t bring his former jazz musician father into the studio to comp some chords. The Fuentes parents are a painter and jazz musician who Vic wrote the song “Million Dollar Houses (Painter)” for, thanking them for staying together and “never separat[ing] even in a time when the family had almost nothing,” per Wikipedia. Father-son shit like this always gets to me. One day I’ll write music I can play with my parents. It’s just very cool that Vic went to his dad was like “hey wanna come into the studio and rip one for us?” That’s how I picture it, anyway.
Shoutout to the Fuentes family, except for FORMER drummer Mike Fuentes, who is a groomer who solicits teenagers. He is also very out of the band. I believe Kendrick Lamar has a song for Mike Fuentes. K.Dot?
What Scratches This Itch For Me Today:
Nostalgia is embarrassing, because do you really like music or were you just happier when you were 16? One answer is depressing. The point of looking back at records I liked in high school is to see where I am today, too.
This is the easiest through line so far. As soon as I heard Polyphia, I was like, “oh cool, instrumental Before Today.” That’s not totally 1:1, but in my headcanon that’s the lineage. Hey, Polyphia is homies with Chon, another San Diego band. There are other bands more like and of the time of Before Today that I like—Fall Of Troy probably the one I listen to most. There are other bands more like Polyphia—Syncatto, Plini, Sithu Aye—but at a certain point, I’m just naming the heavy bands I actually listen to, which is a shorter list than the heavy bands I like. This alchemy of heaviness and melody is really hard to get exactly right, but when you do, it’s special.
Or maybe I just heard this band at exactly the right time. I discovered them on PureVolume, if you can believe it.
(PureVolume was like if the engineers started building Bandcamp, but got too distracted by Homestar Runner to finish)
Verdict: I still like it. A lot.
I didn’t think I would like it this much, honestly. I listened to this record like two months ago for the first time since early college in the exact right setting: by myself in my car. The amount of loud I cranked my speakers as soon as “Roots Beneath Ideals” hit—maaaaaaan, that was your pure volume, right there. This record slapped me like a wet octopus tentacle and hasn’t let go since. You might not like it—unlike Rancid, NOFX, and Blink 182, there’s no long-simmering nostalgia to appeal to. Let it be said, though, that the Before Today record is a certified banger and you should try it out.
Wanna move to San Diego?
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
Ok, what's the band referenced in paragraph 4?! I think I know, but I am not sure...