If one was to look back over the alternative music landscape of the year 2000, they probably wouldn’t have a whole lot to smile about. Nu Metal was experiencing its second wind, thanks to the likes of Linkin Park, Papa Roach and Disturbed, ‘oooh wah ah ah ahh’s and all. Even Metallica had made an ill-advised attempt to jump on the bandwagon with their ‘I Disappear’ single. Trying to find exciting, thought-provoking and visceral music in the mainstream was not an easy task. Ironically, the salvation the music world needed would arrive courtesy of Ross Robinson, the man responsible for manning the boards of the vast majority of Nu Metal’s earliest (and ‘greatest’) albums. That salvation was ‘Relationship Of Command’, the third album by El Paso, Texas post-hardcore quintet At The Drive-In. An explosion of left-field abstract lyricism and jagged, progressive musicianship, the record took the band from relative obscurity to worldwide fame almost overnight, thanks in no small part to the heavy rotation on radio and MTV of the album’s lead single, ‘One Armed Scissor’.
The whirlwind success of ‘Relationship Of Command’ and the very public, very messy implosion At The Drive-In suffered just over a year after the album’s release put what, at the time at least, seemed like a very definite full stop on what was shaping up to be one of the defining bands of an era. 16 years have now passed and following a decade and a half of the band’s members engaging in various other musical endeavours – most notably The Mars Volta and Sparta – At The Drive-In are officially back (albeit minus founding guitarist Jim Ward), and are about to unleash their first new album since ‘Relationship Of Command’, ‘In•Ter•A•Li•A’, on May 5th 2017.
To celebrate one of the most unlikely and unexpected comeback records of all time, we’re going to take a journey through the career of what Frank Turner once described as “the best post-hardcore band there ever was”, through the filter of all of their major releases to date. Beware!
‘Acrobatic Tenement’ (1996)
At The Drive-In began officially in 1993, formed by Jim Ward and Cedric Bixler, though it took 3 years for them to record and release their first full length album. The band had self-released two EPs in the preceding years (‘Hell Paso’ in 1994 and ‘¡Alfaro Vive, Carajo!’ in 1995), however the story goes that after seeing the band play to just nine people in a now defunct Los Angeles dive bar, staff of LA indie label/fanzine Flipside offered the band an album deal on the spot after being completely blown away by their already impressive live show.
Recorded for just $600, ‘Acrobatic Tenement’ is rough and unpolished even by punk rock standards, betraying its budget production costs in sonic fidelity if not necessarily in terms of the music on display. Though undeniably primitive compared to what the band would concoct later in their (again, at the time) short-lived career, the album still bristles with a creative energy that set the band apart even at this nascent stage.
At The Drive-In were far from a run of the mill hardcore band from their very inception, and ‘Acrobatic Tenement’ captures the raw energy of a group of young men who were willing to pile themselves into a 1981 Ford Econoline and drive themselves around on a self-financed, 10,000 mile tour across the United States. The tragedy of this record is that the majority of people will only have heard it after discovering At The Drive-In through ‘Relationship…’, and compared to that album this does come off as relatively amateurish and simple, but those able to put the record into context will still find an engaging and thoughtful punk rock album worth spending time with.
‘In/Casino/Out’ (1998)
Following the release of ‘Acrobatic Tenement’, At The Drive-In experienced a major line-up shift, with original drummer Ryan Sawyer and guitar player Adam Amparan making way for Tony Hajjar and Paul Hinojos, who took over bass duties with Omar Rodriguez moving onto guitar. This had a profound effect on the band, whose sound almost immediately evolved into something more complex and progressive. The first hints of this expanded sonic palette could be heard on the 1997 EP ‘El Gran Orgo’, which was recorded without Jim Ward’s involvement, who was at the time burnt out by the band’s hectic touring schedules and ended up taking a full year off from the band. Following Ward’s return, the band set out to record their second full-length album, ‘In/Casino/Out’.
Produced by Alex Newport (of Fudge Tunnel/Nailbomb fame, and also acclaimed producer of everyone from Bloc Party to The Locust), the album was recorded ‘as live’ in the studio, the band wanting to capture on record the energy of their live performances. It certainly comes across that way, even if Cedric Bixler himself later stated that due to a rushed schedule they weren’t able to fully execute all of the ideas for the album as they’d have wished. ‘In/Casino/Out’ also posed a logistical challenge for At The Drive-In, as during the recording process they found themselves without a label to release it, Flipside having quit releasing records and Offtime, the label who put out ‘El Gran Orgo’, being essentially unable to fund any releases. Thankfully for the band and the world at large, Fearless Records were willing and able to issue the album, and it was eventually released in August 1998.
To this day ‘In/Casino/Out’ contains some of the band’s most heart-stopping songs, from the raucous opening ‘Alpha Centauri’ through the chilling creep of ‘Napoleon Solo’ and the euphoric closer ‘Transatlantic Foe’. As a whole the record does not have the sheer power of ‘Relationship Of Command’, however in many ways it feels a more measured and considered set of songs, and while they are undeniably less experimental in their construction, ‘In/Casino/Out’s arsenal is arguably almost as strong as its successor’s. This would be an ideal place for any newcomer to ATD-I to begin, as it hints at both the band’s more emo-leaning past whilst signalling their caustic, genre-bending future.
‘Vaya’ (1999)
Though not a full-length album, the band’s next release would signal another sonic shift that not only pointed towards the mountain-crumbling power the band would display on ‘Relationship…’, but also in many respects offer hints at the kind of eclectic experimentation that would typify the progressive loopiness of The Mars Volta. ‘Vaya’, released in July of 1999, saw the band adding electronics into their sound in a more meaningful way than had been explored on their earlier releases, and it’s clear listening back now that this was when Cedric and Omar truly began flexing their creative muscles outside of the band’s muscular but relatively straightforward post-hardcore. Interviews with the singer and ‘lead’ guitar player of that era show two men who are clearly beginning to feel constricted by the boundaries of their genre, and from the opening seconds of ‘Rascuache’ to the heartbreaking closing of ‘198d’ you can hear those walls being torn down.
It was around this time too that At The Drive-In began getting more attention on the live circuit, with the band sharing stages across America with bands like Jimmy Eat World, The Get Up Kids and even Rage Against The Machine. Audiences across the country were being blown away by the sight and sound of the 5 wiry Texans jolting and contorting around the stage as if plugged directly into the electrical current themselves. It was reportedly Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth who, after having shared a festival bill with the band and being suitably stunned by what he’d seen, passed on the good word of At The Drive-In to Gary Gersh, the man who signed Nirvana to Geffen and at the time a representative for Grand Royal, the non-more-hip record label owned by the Beastie Boys. Feeling an instant affinity for not only the band’s mind-expanding live show but also the sheer passion and intensity in their music, he sought the band out and bartered a deal for their next album…
‘Relationship Of Command’ (2000)
Some albums are significant and powerful enough that they change the trajectory of a band’s career. On September 12, 2000, ‘Relationship Of Command’ changed the trajectory of music itself. Recorded the previous January in Malibu, California with the aforementioned uber-producer Ross Robinson, the album was a perfect storm of adrenalin-pumping sonic acrobatics, brain-meltingly cryptic lyrics delivered through passionate, heart-rending vocal performances, all wrapped in its iconic ‘Trojan Horse’-inspired artwork. The band even managed to squeeze in a couple of cameos from punk rock icon Iggy Pop (on ‘Rolodex Propaganda’ and ‘Enfilade’), a man whose very appearance on the album was a clear signifier of the kind of respect and attention it warranted. It is a singular work of art that would always have made an asteroid-like impact on the underground, but ‘Relationship Of Command’ had a greater destiny, and the route to that widespread acclaim was paved by the album’s own Trojan Horse, the single ‘One Armed Scissor’.
Like an airborne virus, ‘One Armed Scissor’ and with it At The Drive-In’s burgeoning reputation, spread with haste and potency in the late summer of 2000. The song itself is like a firework going off in an enclosed space, ricocheting off the walls and causing both alarm and delight in equal measure as it tears through the air. It wasn’t the band’s music alone that caused such a stir with music fans both hardcore and casual, however. It was, strangely and stupidly enough, the pair of men elected the de-facto leaders of the band and their wild, untamed hair that caught the attention of the larger public.
Look! A punk band with afros! Though it seems ridiculous now, at the time the chosen hairstyles of both Cedric Bixler and Omar Rodriguez appeared to be the most talked-about aspect of At The Drive-In, and though their appearance was indeed striking, it was then and remains by far the least interesting thing about them as individuals and as members of the band. Thankfully, this inane detail caused a great deal of people to start paying attention, and once these gawkers saw past those inflated hair bubbles, they discovered one of the richest musical experiences in all of alternative music at the time.
‘Relationship Of Command’’s complex themes, both lyrical and musical, were never a shoe-in for real quantifiable success, and yet on the back of ‘One Armed Scissor’ and the continued buzz surrounding the band’s now legendary live shows, it became their first and only album (thus far) to reach the Billboard Top 200. It also pulled the band into the realm of mainstream TV, with them making live appearances on popular US talk shows ‘Late Night with Conan O’Brien’ and ‘The Late Show with David Letterman’, and even saw them take the stage for iconic performances of ‘One Armed Scissor’ and ‘Rolodex Propaganda’ on ‘Later… with Jools Holland’. This kind of exposure in the UK scored the band high-profile slots at the Reading and Leeds Festivals, performances that would be talked about in hushed tones by anyone lucky enough to have been there for years to come.
Sadly, and inevitably, this is the part of the story where things started to go very wrong, very quickly. During a performance at Big Day Out in Australia in January 2001, At The Drive-In cut their set short in protest of the unruly levels of violence in the crowd, a matter on which the band had always been very outspoken about. The following month, the band cancelled the final 5 dates of their in-progress European Tour, citing “complete mental and physical exhaustion” as their justification. Only a month later, on the cusp of an extensive US tour, the band announced that they would be going on an ‘indefinite hiatus’. Though initially the band claimed this was a measure taken to allow them to rest and re-evaluate themselves as both musicians and people, it very swiftly evolved into a definitive breakup, Bixler and Rodriguez taking the brunt of the blame as they made it quite clear in the press that, as previously hinted at, they felt too bound and constricted by the boundaries of punk and hardcore.
The members would of course splinter into two distinct factions, with Rodriguez and Bixler forming the wildly proggy and brain-collapsingly complex The Mars Volta, and Ward, Hinojos and Hajjar reuniting in Sparta. Looking back, it’s almost astonishing how cleanly At The Drive-In’s sound was split between the two acts, with Sparta taking the solid post-hardcore backbone and The Mars Volta specialising in the off-kilter, experimental progression that coloured much of ‘Relationship Of Command’, only pushed much further and deeper.
It took a little over a decade for the members to bury the hatchet deep enough that they were able to venture onto a stage again together, with At The Drive-In playing their first show in 11 years on April 9th 2012 at a small club in Texas. This was considered a warm-up for the real meat of their reunion, which took the form of a highly anticipated set at the Coachella Festival in California the following week. Reactions to the band’s return were mixed, with many onlookers noting that, though the majority of the band appeared to be enjoying the experience, Omar Rodriguez was not firing on all cylinders, some even suggesting that he didn’t look like he wanted to be there at all.
Though it was later revealed that at the time of the shows he was suffering the grief of having recently lost his mother, Rodriguez also noted in the press that though he was glad to have gone through the reunion process, he discovered that he no longer felt connected to the At The Drive-In material, being unable to relate to the person he was when writing those songs. Following a few more festival appearances and one-off shows, it appeared that the band had finally closed the book on At The Drive-In once and for all.
Of course, we now know that this was not the end. In January 2016 the band announced a full reunion, though sadly without the involvement of Jim Ward, who elected not to return and was replaced with his former Sparta bandmate, Keeley Davis. This announcement was accompanied by the promise of a world tour and the release of the band’s first new music since 2000. Though the music world is alight with anticipation for the release of ‘In•Ter•A•Li•A’, At The Drive-In had already cemented their place in the history books with ‘Relationship Of Command’.
Like ‘Nevermind’ or ‘The Shape Of Punk To Come’ before it, this was an album, and a band, that managed to stand singularly in a crowded scene and reshape what punk rock, or even the very notion of rock music, could be. The musical landscape of 2017 is in many respects a very different place than it was 17 years ago, but if there was ever a band equipped to continue to colour outside of the lines and defy all that surrounds them, that band is At The Drive-In.
JAMES LEE
‘In•Ter•A•Li•A’ is released on May 5 via Rise Records. and At The Drive-In will perform at the Reading and Leeds festival’s in August.