At the Drive-In - In-ter A-li-a

There are a lot of interesting questions you can ask yourself when it comes to the new At the Drive-In record. Questions like: if you didn't know it was by ATDI but someone had said "if you like ATDI, you might enjoy this album", would I have still been interested? I'd definitely have marked them down for that artwork and font. I might have been into it after pressing play - the opener, No Wolf Like the Present, is one of the strongest on the album and might have drawn me in; it is very At the Drive-In-esque. Would I have spent £22 on it based on that alone? Almost certainly not.

Of course, all these questions are irrelevant, because it is an ATDI record, so I was going to buy it pretty much regardless. After seeing them on their first tour after reforming, I was amazed that they decided to stay together long enough to write another album - at points in the show Omar Rodriguez Lopez looked like he might not even make it to the end of the set. And like all reformations, you do wonder if it's truly necessary to write another album. There are some great moments here - Call Broken Arrow has a really, really good chorus. It's the sort of chorus that makes you think "yeah, this could have worked". Governed by Contagion is the other highlight - if they played it live you'd say "yeah, this isa good song" before really thinking which album it came from. The rest really struggle to stand out in any notable way. Ghost-Tape No. 9 sounds like a Mars Volta b-side.

All in all, not terrible but by no means essential.

Format: Gatefold 12", picture sleeve

Tracks: 11

Cost: £22 new

Bought: Truck Store

When: 10/05/17

Colour: Half black with pink splatter, half pink

Etching: Side A: "In defence of the hero the sermon on the mount will be" Side B: "Administered intravenously by a state appointed therapist" 

mp3s: download code

At the Drive-In - Acrobatic Tenement

Nearly three years passed between me hearing Relationship of Command and Acrobatic Tenement. I was a little late to the At the Drive-In party as it was, so finding any of their albums wasn't trivial. I bought them in an unusual order: Relationship of Command, In/Casino/Out, the best-of, Acrobatic Tenement and then finally Vaya a full three years after the first. As the albums got reissued on vinyl, this was the last one I picked up, for no other reason than I didn't see any copies of it around until I found this one in Rough Trade; I was pleased to finally have all their albums on vinyl.

I was familiar with Initiation from the best-of album (where it is strangely wedged at the end of the otherwise chronological album, between two covers) when I bought the album on cd (a £2 bargain from eBay); the rest was all new to me. The most defining feature of Acrobatic Tenement is its scrappiness - the albums that would follow had much higher production value and generally better musicianship too. But I love this album for its less-rounded edges - it adds a lot of charm. There's also a jazz influence that the later albums don't have (take the end of Paid Vacation Time for example). Given that some of the band members would dabble in a wide variety of influences later on in their careers, it's nice to hear those moments in their earlier days too.

The album is also a much more basic variation on post-hardcore than their later albums would be - the songs here sometime remind me more of Sparta than they do ATD-I. There are exciting moments throughout the album - Starslight, Initiation, Communication Drive-In and Porfirio Diaz all have huge choruses and the first two make use of multiple singers in ways they would never really do as well - the lyrics on Starslight are basically unintelligible and I love that about it.

Format: 12", picture sleeve
Tracks: 11
Cost: £14 new
Bought: Rough Trade East
When: 25/10/14
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no

At the Drive-In - In/Casino/Out

This record is my bargain of the year so far, and probably will be for the next nine months too. Banquet Records had a sale on in January featuring a whole bunch of albums for a fiver, and half of the money from the sale went to a local charity to support carers in the Kingston area, a noble cause indeed. Because Banquet is awesome, the sale wasn't the usual shit you see in the January sales and there were some decent albums in there, the most incredible of which was last year's reissue of In/Casino/Out on clear vinyl. Needless to say, I jumped at the chance to get this for a fiver; I'd nearly paid £17 for it a few months earlier but they'd run out of stock and waiting for some more to come in. I bought it using the "collect in shop" option and picked it up when I was in town a few days later. I almost felt bad; clearly this record cost them more than £5 given how much it was before the sale, and Banquet were then giving half of that to charity. It felt like I was taking advantage in a way - their desire for floor space and good deed was costing them loads whilst I was getting a classic album for not much more than a pint of beer (or a can of beer, if you're drinking in the wrong venues).

But guilt aside, this album is awesome. I first bought In/Casino/Out on cd in (the excellently-named and sadly-closed) Rounder Records in Brighton (along with Give Up by The Postal Service on double vinyl). I'd got Relationship of Command for Christmas and was keen to hear more At the Drive-In (much more on that here). I'd heard about the song Napoleon Solo so I figured In/Casino/Out was a good place to start. My first impressions were: it was a way crazier album than Relationship of Command; Napoleon Solo was one of the best ATD-I songs I'd heard; I didn't like it as much as Relationship (don't get me wrong, I like it, but I'm comparing to one of my all-time favourite albums). Eight years later, my feelings about it are much the same. There are some great songs here but, Napoleon Solo aside, none I like as much as the songs on Relationship. I'd still count this as my second favourite ADT-I album, but maybe that's only because Vaya is just an EP.

Somehow I never managed to get into this album as well as Relationship either. I often find that's the way with albums where there is one song that stands out so much more than the others; when I think of In/Casino/Out, I mostly think of Napoleon Solo but that's because it's such an incredible song - heartfelt and brutal and everything I wanted "emo/post-hardcore" to be. "Our alphabet is missing letters" is a fantastic lyric. That said, it does have other songs, and they have their moments. Chanbara is certainly a song worth getting excited over and I love the whispers in Shaking Hand Incision.


Format: 12", insert
Tracks: 11
Cost: £5 new
Bought: Banquet Records
When: 04/01/13
Colour: Clear
Etching: none
mp3s: no

At the Drive-In - Relationship of Command

Relationship of Command is one of my all-time favourite records. I'm talking top-5 here, possibly even top-3 depending on how I'm feeling that day. From the second those pounding drums start at the beginning of Arcarsenal I know I'm going to spend the next 40 minutes smiling, foot-tapping and air-drumming away. I love it.

The first time the name At the Drive-In registered on my conscience was on a free cd on the cover of Kerrang! magazine - The Devil's Music Volume 2. The first volume in this series had been pretty influential for my friends and me (introducing us to Glassjaw, Pitchshifter, One Minute Silence and a whole load of other bands that we spent years listening to), and the second one had a couple of gems, albeit mostly songs by bands that we'd soon be embarrassed to say we liked. The two exceptions to this were Cosmonaut by At the Drive-In and Tension Head by Queens of the Stone Age (which remains to be my favourite QOTSA song). I got the cd just before a family holiday to France and spent many hours in the car with my sister's Walkman listening to those two in particular.

Somehow four whole years passed before I got a copy of Relationship of Command. I certainly heard the album more than once in that time, and even had tickets to see them on a tour that eventually never happened (they were due to play the Pyramids Center in Portsmouth on the evening of my last GCSE - IT, I think - but cancelled and broke up. Needless to say, I was pretty gutted but the show in London last summer pretty much made up for it). Anyway, Christmas 2004 my sister bought me the Fearless Records cd-reissue of Relationship (with the bonus track Extracurricular) and it quickly became a favourite of mine. I think I asked for a copy from her as a present having been reminded how much I liked them on the live Jools Holland dvd - my friend Matt had a copy and their performance of One Armed Scissor was incredible.

A year and a half later I moved to Australia for a year and my first task upon arriving in Canberra was to scope out the local record shops. Canberra had a couple - the national chain JB-Hifi and an independent (excellently) named Land Speed Records. In my first few weeks I bought a bunch of cds and one LP - this copy of Relationship of Command. The selection of vinyl in both shops was pretty impressive, but even still I was surprised to see a copy of Relationship given that the original cd had long gone out of print. At AU$18, it seemed a bit pricey, but it £'s it was a bargain (the exchange rate made things seem really expensive, which was good at stopping me from buying things unless I really wanted them). I didn't have a record player for the first few months, so it just looked pretty on my shelf while I listened to the mp3s.

So, what's to say about the album itself? It's incredible and I can't think of a post-hardcore album that comes anyway near close to it. All of the songs are great (One Armed Scissor, Invalid Letter Dept. and Cosmonaut being particular highlights) and the whole record is littered with these fantastic little moments, like the drums I mentioned on Arcarsenal, the handclaps on Enfilade or the raspy vocals on Quarantined. One of the things I always loved was that despite the huge songs along the way, I was always left with the closer Catacombs in my head and I'd be singing the huge chorus to myself for days. A lot of records don't end well, but this one saves a punch for last. The energy of the music is unstoppable and it still sounds to me as exciting as it did all those years ago, despite being nearly a teenager itself.

I got into At the Drive-in slowly over the years that followed that Christmas, picking up the other albums as and when I found them. The whole back-catalogue is being re-printed it seems, allowing me to get Vaya and In/Casino/Out on vinyl (a post on the latter in due course). Acrobatic Tenement and Relationship reissues are due out this spring apparently and I'll definitely be picking up a copy of the former. Musically, I enjoyed the other albums and they had some excellent songs but, for me at least, it's all about Relationship of Command.


Format: 12", picture sleeve
Tracks: 12
Cost: £7.61 new
Bought: JB-Hifi, Canberra
When: 16/07/05
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no

At the Drive-In - Vaya

This won't be a huge post about how much I love ATDI, I'll save that for when I write about Relationship of Command. Vaya was the last of the ATDI back-catalogue that I picked up, although I still don't have the early EPs. I got into them the way most people did, Relationship of Command first, then I worked backwards picking up albums as and when I found them. I eventually found the cd version of Vaya for £4 in a record shop somewhere in Paris one night.

I'd heard Metronome Arthritis and 198d on the This Station is Non-Operational cd and thought they were both great songs. In fact, the whole EP is really good, but given that it was sandwiched between their two best albums it's really no wonder. 300 MHz is also a great song, making side B solidly good tunes.

I'd love one day to have all of the (good) albums in my collection on vinyl instead of cd, so I was pleased this was re-released. I was even more pleased by the colour of it, the UK (or possibly non-US) version was limited to 1,500 copies and the half pink/half transparent yellow looks nice. For £13, it was certainly a luxury buy, but I like it.


Format: 10", insert
Tracks: 7
Cost: £13 new
Bought: Banquet Records
When: 09/08/12
Colour: Half pink, half transparent yellow
Etching: none
mp3s: no