Number One Gun "Celebrate Mistakes"

 Floodgate Records was a boon for Christian kids who were getting heavily into indie rock in the early and mid 2000s, their roster populated with groups who had found that sonic median between what was currently blowing up Pitchfork and college radio and the exhausted trappings of worship and CCM. Founded by Tim Taber, former member of underground Xian rock darlings The Prayer Chain, these bands helped bridge a divide for me while Tooth & Nail, Solidstate, and BEC served the youth group set with everything ‘harder’ that wasn’t available elsewhere in CCM. Few of these bands cut through quite like Number One Gun, however, and their debut is a testament to the discography lead singer (and eventual sole member) Jeff Schneeweis would go on to build. 

Everything about this album still works for me twenty years later: the guitars are huge and so tonally satisfying, the vocals are ideally mixed (a huge problem with CCM in general but especially in the early 2000s, as I have to imagine concerned parents needed to ensure that the singers in these bands were continuing to glorify God over the instrumental noise), and the drums are LOUD. Those intro flams on opener “Starting Line” propel you right into the mix, and a chorus with absolute sing-a-long phrases that would hook anyone accustomed to belting along in their car on their way to worship team practice (me). Listening back a week or so ago, I was immediately compelled to join in on the choral refrains “I’m sorry” (“I’m sarrr-raaaaaayyyy!”) and “I don’t care” (“and eyyyeee don’t caaaaarr-arrrrrr”), absolutely filled with joy. Track 2 is the title track, clocking in at a nearly absurd 5:05 (the longest song on the album by 25 seconds), and has the audacity to run out a long instrumental outro without overstaying its welcome. I can’t determine if it’s bravery or hubris, or just a band so in tune with their songwriting and structure that they’re unafraid to pull this off so early in the track listing. Little moments of production brilliance keep Number One Gun from sounding like a one trick pony as they masterfully cut through eleven power-pop punk tracks: “On and On” features the briefest earworm of feedback right before the chorus hits, sounding almost like a car speeding by in the distance – which repeats (albeit slightly muted) in the following track “The Last Time,” just in time for the final chorus. We get the obligatory ‘acoustic’ track two-thirds of the way through with “These Things,” a song that rivals “New American Classic” as an emo break from the electric guitar onslaught. The last two songs provide something of a archetype bait-and-switch: “This Is All We Know” fools us into thinking it’s the slow-burn anthem when it reveals itself as a fully realized Jimmy Eat World inspired rock song, and closer “Today is Transcribed” actually delivers the slow-burn goods. 

Number One Gun would go on to record their sophomore effort Promises For The Imperfect (2005) for Tooth & Nail as a full band before splitting up, two members going on to form the band Surrogate (who would release two albums under Tooth & Nail before going independent). Jeff Schneeweis would maintain the Number One Gun moniker for two solo albums in 2007 and 2010, utilizing more electronic production and expanding the sound palette of the project in overwhelmingly successful ways, while Surrogate would proffer in an indie-americana sound for several albums, slowly embracing more aggressive sonics in latter albums.

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I saw Surrogate perform at The Analog (RIP) in Portland, OR in 2017, and somehow ended up in conversation with one of the band members about previous projects they’d been involved in. It was then I realized that Chris Keene, who’d left Number One Gun to start Surrogate, had long before left another band to join Number One Gun – Sherwood. Sherwood was a big deal in the early 2000s for me, a band I’d seen several times right out of high school and whose americana-tinged power-pop had heavily influenced my very first band in college. It was an opportunity for me to get closure on one of the weirdest things I’d ever witnessed at a show. 

In 2006 my best friend from childhood got his band booked on a pretty sizeable one-day festival: Rockin’ Roots in Bakersfield, CA. The headliners included CKY, Bad Brains, hometown heroes The Warriors, and a little up-and-coming act called 30 Seconds to Mars. Sherwood was also slated to play the fest, and I was excited to see them again, as I’d just recently seen them in Fresno. I found myself in the center of the crowd for 30 Seconds to Mars’s set, Leto playing his guitar in a way I can only describe as “8 year old boy holding a tennis racket and pretending to slash through a solo.” At one point he jumped down and ran through the crowd, his sloppy makeup leaking down his face in the heat of the late summer Central California afternoon.

Here’s where my memory gets a little blurry, but I remember Leto addressing the crowd with some sort of general pablum along the lines of: “are we all here to have a good time tonight?” then scanning the crowd of screaming fans until he settled in on one person in particular. He pointed towards the back of the crowd and let out a barrage of furious, and confusing, insults: “Fuck you man! Fuck your stupid beard! We came here to have a good time and your ass isn’t gonna ruin it for us!” More cheers from the crowd, but less so, as we were turning around to try and figure out who had sparked this ire from the wispy actor/singer/alleged guitarist. Eventually it became clear that Leto’s victim was none other than Sherwood lead singer (and bearded gentleman) Dan Koch, slated to take the side-stage right after 30 Seconds was done performing. 

I ducked out of the 30 Seconds crowd crush early, and pivoted over to the stage where Sherwood was setting up. They launched into their set with little fanfare, until, about three songs in, Jared Leto came strolling over from near his merch table, a small gaggle of fans in tow. He decided, to finalize whatever brou-ha ha had occurred during his set, to stand – arms crossed, unimpressed, impassive – ten feet back from center stage, watching Sherwood perform like a stoic staring through an ancient painting. No words were exchanged or any acknowledgement passed between Leto and Sherwood on stage, and after about two songs, Jared seemed bored, and trundled back towards his merch table (most of the fans who’d wandered over with him remained to watch Sherwood resolve their set). 

A few months after this I was at the Uprising Festival, where Sherwood was once again slated to play. I saw Dan in the crowd and went up to him, introducing myself and explaining that I’d been at the Rockin’ Roots show, and so um what the hell actually happened there? Did you flip off Jared Leto or something? “Oh, no,” he replied, “I more made a joking gesture like this–” miming waving his hand across his throat, a passive-aggressive “no, thank you” to Leto’s Invitation to Rock. “His team came up to me afterwards and apologized – he’s an actor, so apparently this is something he does at all of his shows, picks someone to make an ‘enemy’ so he can rally the crowd around him,” Dan laughed it off. 

And so, in 2017, I asked Chris Keene and the Surrogate guys if they knew or remembered this odd brush with Mr. Leto a decade previous. “We ran into him again, actually, some years after that!” “What, did he remember y’all?” I asked. “We were in New York, in a restaurant, and we heard a slam on the glass – and there was Jared on the sidewalk, wide-eyed, waving at us.”

Relient K "Two Lefts Don't Make a Right... But Three Do"

 I never got into Relient K’s self-titled debut album (2000), but I was well aware of all the buzz around it. My older friends from church told me it was basically a Christian version of New Found Glory, then let me borrow NFG’s debut (2000) CD (you know, the one with the condoms and Playboy magazines on the cover), which banged around in my discman for weeks, and had sound buried deep in the mix on the first track that always made me tear my headphones off, convinced the phone in the kitchen was ringing while I was rocking out in my bedroom. Regardless, something about Relient K didn’t click with my burgeoning music tastes, and the “Marilyn Manson ate my girlfriend” gag wasn’t as amusing to me as it was to others. 

Their sophomore follow-up The Anatomy of the Tongue in Cheek (2001), however, did work; every youth group was bumping “Sadie Hawkins Dance” on a regular basis during their teen turn-up nights and lock-ins, and the riffy punk of “Pressing On” and chuggy basslines of “The Rest Is Up To You” were absolute ear-candy for my 15-year old sensibilities. Theirs was the first concert I can recall attending, with my church youth group, carpooling to Bakersfield, CA to see them play at a Vans skatepark (fitting). Holland (memory-holed) and Bleach (underrated) opened; I remember Davy from Bleach climbing up on top of a tower of amps as they performed songs from their latest album Again, For the First Time (2002), an acrobatic feat I’d not witness again at such magnitude until I would watch Adam Lazarra scramble up the scaffolding on the main stage at Warped Tour a couple years later. Swinging his mic, the dipshit tangled in the 120ft cord; “mics are for singing, not swinging,” I’d think to myself. Of course, less than an hour later I’d witness Geoff Rickley helicoptering his microphone above the widening pit, but honestly – he made it look cool. The only moment of Relient K’s set I genuinely remember was at the end, when fans I couldn’t see inside the skate bowl from my vantage point across the room tossed packages of Skittles and Combos on stage as Relient K encored, ah, the rumors are true. 

Revisiting Relient K’s third album for the first time in probably about a decade, I’m struck by how rough around the edges Matt Thiessen’s vocals really are, occasionally gruff and growly, sounding now oddly juxtaposed against his bright, piano-driven melodies. Opener “Chap Stick, Chapped Lips, and Things Like Chemistry” has a fantastic chorus line that would make zero sense to a teenage listener today – “And I regret that I'm completely out of daytime minutes / And so I guess I'll have to wait a lot ‘til 8 o'clock comes around” – and evokes a lesson from the Lord before we’re even out of the bridge. That segues into the ‘playfully misogynistic’ punk anthem “Mood Rings,” a song with unreasonably thin guitars for being ‘clean’ Blink-182 fare in context and construction. They pull off the Blink trope in much stronger fashion later on with “Trademark” and “College Kids,” but one has to slog through the weakest section of side A with “In Love With the 80’s (Pink Tux to the Prom),” which conjures a stronger image of Harry and Lloyd in Dumb and Dumber than anything from The Breakfast Club. 

The album wavers its way through the rest of its slightly exhaustive tracklisting, tracks like “Kids On the Street” and “Gibberish” littering side B and undermining the strength of songs like “I Am Understood?” and “From End to End.” The album should of ended with “Getting Into You,” but Matt’s well-reported megalomania* gets the best of him with his first ‘long-song’ experiment “Jefferson Aero Plane'' doing more to softly ground the album rather than send it out soaring (he’ll get it right a few albums later, however, when 2007’s Five Score… closes out with the fantastic “Deathbed.”) The hidden track is laughably awful, but at the album’s conclusion you can see them squaring all their positions in preparation for their 2004 breakout MMHMM. 

Two Lefts…, incidentally, was also the first album I can recall having variants, 4 different CD covers each illustrated with a different crashed car in stark monochromatics. I couldn’t, for the life of me, understand what would compel someone to purchase four copies of an album when each had the exact same songs on it…and this was all before the vinyl variant boom.

I ran merch for Relient K at Uprising Festival in September 2006, a volunteer position that paid with free tickets to the event, agreeing to work a late shift during their set so I could watch Starflyer 59 perform earlier in the day while the sun was stuck burning in the middle of the Southern California sky. I met Matt Hoopes (the other Matt in Relient K) that day, who was very kind and grateful we were slinging their ridiculously designed t-shirts – but I also met Jason Martin that day, so I guess I owe Relient K at least that much. 

* I can distinctly remember a HM Magazine cover story on Relient K, likely from around the time Five Score… was released, when a newly added guitarist to the band described his role as “Matt’s bitch.”