Is Tonic's "Sugar" Still Sweet, 25 Years Later?

If you know of the 'liminal spaces' phenomenon, you are aware of the sensory deprivation that comes from emptiness, and how angst builds up when you lose track of the path back out into the white noise of life. When we look back at our favorite bands, sometimes the stories of how we came to find them feels like one of those liminal spaces. There is an eeriness as we wonder what it was about that one particular record that caught our attention, or how we found our way around the hollow spots without falling into the pit.

My cassette was well-worn, having seen me replace the songs I had recorded off the radio time and again, trying to keep an old format up to date with my taste. The very first song on that thin film when it was finally retired was Tonic's "If You Could Only See". The song was on the radio constantly, but I needed to hear it even more often, so it was given the leadoff spot, even though that was where the tape was most prone to failing. It was a simpler time, and even then I didn't have the energy to care to a startling degree.

I never ventured further than that song, as I seldom did in those days. Perhaps I knew in my mind that my interpretation of the lyric was going to wind up wrong, and I was protecting myself from having to explain why I so loved a band and song I didn't understand. That's giving myself too much credit, I fear. The simple truth is back then an album was an investment, and I did not want to get burned on one song leading me down the wrong path. Matchbox 20 has three singles I loved, so they seemed the safer bet.

I was also not terribly into the kind of movie comedy that led to "American Pie". I saw the movie, as seemingly everyone did, but it was not a landmark achievement that is etched in my memory. What caught my interest was actually a video that popped up on VH-1 that came from the soundtrack. It was a song with a driving guitar riff and a candied chorus. I loved it, and was surprised to see it came from... Tonic.

That song was "You Wanted More", and with a second piece of evidence, I was then eager to dive in further. As luck would have it, this was 1999, the very beginnings of the online music revolution. My brother was in college, as was able to procure me a copy of the brand new record, "Sugar", to cauterize the potential for a hemorrhage of disappointment. I put that CD in the player and listened intently, getting caught up in a textured blend of rock and pop that hit every side of my personality.

After this, I would go back and listen to "Lemon Parade", but it wasn't the same experience. "Sugar" was fresh and exciting, and I was caught up in it. I loved the heavy guitars, I loved the melodic solos, I also stupidly loved the random f-bomb Emerson threw in for some reason. The record went everywhere, and standing at the center, it looked like a universe shining in all directions.

Here's where the story turns. As the years wore on, how I saw and heard Tonic changed. "Lemon Parade" went from being the grungier disappointment to the album that was trying to reflect classic rock through the sound of the time. There was a depth to those songs and that recording which invited more repeated listenings. It was not a surface-level album, while "Sugar" was sort of its namesake sugar high burning off. When "Head On Straight" took the band in a heavier direction, eschewing much of "Sugar", it was clear which record was the outlier. To have come into the band, to have fallen in love with their music, through their oddest album was one of those existential questions I would wrestle with for eons.

That brings me back to the idea of liminal spaces. Since Tonic only has four records to their name, these twenty-five years have been a hall of mirrors reflecting those same few experiences back to me again and again. They have been heard so many times, and for so long now without any context to change them, that I can hardly remember the beginning anymore. They exist as if they always were, and always will be. The music stretches on in an endless loop, with no exit visible.

Much like how those spaces blur into a wash of indistinct colors that eventually become unsettling, so too does a band that is essentially over despite still existing. I will never say I don't love "Sugar", because it has meant so much to me over so many years, but there are times when I do curse at the record. I curse at it because being lured in by the black sheep is disconcerting. I curse at it because I now hear experiments throughout the album that don't work as they should. I curse at it for giving me a favorite band I would spend a decade waiting for, before I was finally able to give up on giving a shit anymore.

Twenty-five years on, when I think of "Sugar", I mostly think of how stupid I used to be. When you're caught in a liminal space, all you have is time to think...

Album Review - Neal Morse & The Resonance - No Hill To Climb

Musicians often like to play with new musicians, because there is something to collaboration you can't get when you write and make music on your own. Or at least that's how it is supposed to work. New combinations of musicians should produce new musical ideas, open avenues you would not go down if left to your own devices. Of course, that doesn't always happen, and sometimes it seems that new groups are put together only to fill the time and space left behind when the usual suspects aren't available.

That is what this record feels like. The Neal Morse Band was chugging along, but the recent reunion of Dream Theater put a halt to that. Without the full lineup being able to get together to keep things going, Neal has branched out on his own again. He put out a pair of religious concept albums (which are terrible), a singer/songwriter album (that I haven't heard, because of the odd release strategy), and now this new prog band.

The problem is that this prog band sounds indistinguishable from every other prog band he has been in. What is the difference between this and NMB? Or this and his prog solo albums? Pretty much just the names in the credits. Otherwise, it is pure Neal Morse doing the usual Neal Morse things.

That extends to the very structure of the album, which is entirely predictable. That's the opposite of prog, right? The opening "Eternity In Your Eyes" follows the blueprint; slow buildup, several individual songs stitched loosely together, big reprise to finish. We've heard this many times before, and it has become rather tiresome, in all honesty. Lots of bands follow patterns, but it is more objectionable when it comes from a 'prog' band. I should not be able to predict the beats this easily. It's disappointing.

The shorter songs between the epics lack Neal's best melodies, which I have found to be the case for several years at this point. They aren't bad songs, but I don't get the immediate hook from them I did when I discovered his music. Part of that might be the production, which also continues the trend of slapping an over-abundance of echo and reverb on every voice. It's a sound I do not understand, as it distorts the tone to an unnatural state, but someone must think it sounds good.

By the time the title track closes things out with nearly half an hour of music that could have been condensed quite a bit, you know where you fall on the prog spectrum. If you've heard any Neal Morse album before and still love this one, you're a hardcore prog nerd. If you're more like me, you probably found yourself drifting off a few times during the instrumental sections that stretch on for minutes at a time, and not being drawn back in by the flat-ish melodies that try to anchor things. It's Neal Morse by formula, but it is far from his best work.

I haven't listened to enough prog this year to know if that is just the way the genre is going these days, but I've heard enough of Neal's music to know this is not one of his better works. As tedious as the trio of double albums NMB made are, they all have far higher highs than this record, which never gets out of first gear. This is about as 'meh' as it gets.

The Offspring's One Brief, Bright, "Smash" Of Success

Did you ever have a full circle moment when you realized that art and pop culture were influencing one another, slowly circling the drain until you felt just as empty? Perhaps it's just me, but there are specific instances where I become disappointed, as I realize the reason we use the 'lowest common denominator' is because it is also the largest one.

If you are of a certain age, you might remember the days of syndicated television airing on regional cable networks. You knew you were seeing something the rest of the country was, but no one was watching it at the same time, or experiencing it in the same way. It actually isn't that different from the streaming realities of now, but it was a completely different feeling back then.

Anyway, in the mid 90s there was a renegade wrestling promotion called ECW whose programming aired on one of those networks early on Saturday mornings. I can't fathom why they put the most violent and profane wrestling to ever grace television on when kids were up before their parents, but they did, because that's the kind of world we used to live in. I was one of those who was tuning in before the rest of the house was up, not entirely sure what it was I was so interested in.

One character caught my attention more than the others, because even at that age I felt myself either being or becoming bitter and sardonic. He would philosophize about the meaning of pain, rationalizing his actions as being part of a cruel world that didn't care much for our attempts at morality. Even watching wrestling, I couldn't escape my overthinking ways. His arrival every week was signaled by the guitar riff in The Offsping's "Come Out & Play". I knew nothing of punk, but hearing the song enough times, I would up with a copy of the album "Smash" at some point.

I didn't know what to make of the record at first. I was rather confused by the buzzing guitars, Dexter's oddly nasal vocals, and the lyrics that made no attempt at being what we would call conventionally 'good'. As he got to the end of "Bad Habit" and shouted, "you stupid dumb-shit goddamn motherfucker", I did not realize I was hearing the figurative line between adolescence and adulthood being obliterated. This was a band reveling in their refusal to grow up and have complicated thoughts, instead liking to think of themselves as living in a Tarantino movie, all the while not realizing he was merely re-writing foreign movies and taking all the credit for them.

"Smash" is a landmark album in that it broke open the gates for independent records to sell huge quantities, bypassing the traditional means of distribution. Did wrestling help with that development? I have no idea, but I do think there is a correlation between watching people hit themselves over the head repeatedly and thinking The Offspring were ever anything but jerks who happened upon a few good tunes.

That is the most interesting aspect of "Smash"; it stands with "Dookie" as the two poles upon which the hammock of pop-punk was hung. Two albums of snotty, self-loathing were able to marry the abrasiveness of punk with the subversive charm of power-pop. It's hard not to listen to the jaunty bounce of "What Happened To You?" and not find yourself bopping along, nor is it easy to escape the infectiousness of the "la la" choruses of "Self-Esteem". These were accidents that would later ruin the band, we would learn, but for a moment in time The Offspring were balancing on the knife's edge of being popular in the mainstream and heroes to the underground.

What went wrong? you ask.

I tend to believe the exact moment when The Offspring switched from being cool to lame came not from anything they did, but from Weezer. Yes, once again Weezer is ruining everything, because that's the kind of band they are.

In their song "El Scorcho", Rivers Cuomo wrote a lyric about watching ECW wrestling. For the most uncool person in rock to be writing a song mentioning something cool is to render that thing uncool in an instant. No one wanted to be associated with Rivers at that moment, as his record was rightfully bombing (before it unjustly became a classic), so I look at Weezer's embrace of that culture as the death knell for it. How could The Offspring still be cool if they were part of the soundtrack for something the nerd in the "Buddy Holly" video thought was awesome enough to write a song about?

It hasn't been easy to listen to "Smash" without thinking about how The Offspring became the kind of bullshit posers they were writing songs about thirty years ago. They thought they were being clever throwing in that nearly surf-rock riff as a take-down of the past, not realizing their future would become swallowed by those very gimmicks. When you hear Dexter shouting about how he doesn't "give a fuck 'cause it's good enough for" him, it rings so very hollow today, because he has spent so much time absolutely giving a fuck what everyone thinks of him and his band.

The thing about being anti-establishment is that it requires a degree of commitment. Listening to anything The Offspring did afterward is nearly as jarring as watching Ice-T as an actor playing a cop. Retroactively, they are pissing on their legacy, and telling us not to pay attention to anything they ever had to say.

I could talk about how "Smash" is very much the sound of punk absorbing Kurt Cobain's songwriting talents, setting the stage for pop-punk being the next step in the pop-ification of underground rock. I could, but what's the point?

"Smash" is one of those albums that has to be listened to nostalgically. I can put it on and feel like it's the mid 90s again, when rebellion felt clever because there really wasn't anything culturally to rebel against. They were pissing people off for the fun of it, whereas now they piss people off for not being able to write a good song anymore. "Smash" is a relic of time, and it feels out of place in this current age. It remains an important album, and one that can teach us about how we got here, but it no longer has anything to tell us.

ECW burned bright and burned out, and "Smash" did the same. There's no shame in that, other than trying to re-light the fuel that is obviously spent.