Pinback: I Knew (and Loved) More Than I Thought

Hey! Welcome back to what this blog should’ve been from day one! In this episode of Sam Rambles Like a Maniac: The Abridged Version, I thought I’d cover something fall-themed in my book before the holiday season arrives. Then again, I’ve already started playing the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack, but I’m ready to bring that out pretty much any time of year. Regardless, the first post in a series to be maybe possibly continued called Uncut Gems was about Pinback, an obscure indie band from San Diego that I’ve practically been listening to my whole life. While I continue to cherish their homey and nostalgic debut album as well as others like Blue Screen Life and Summer in Abaddon… well, I’ll admit with shame that I still haven’t explored the rest of albums like Some Voices and Offcell, but I feel the need to get this out there before the guilt of downplaying their outstanding library tears me to pieces.

I did get into the numbers I liked from Autumn of the Seraphs, but at the time of the last post on them, they only really consisted of “From Nothing to Nowhere”, “Good to Sea”, and “How We Breathe”, but goddamn, I do appear to have sidestepped some of the best selections all along! Truth is, others like “Devil You Know” (perhaps among the catchiest songs I’ve listened to in recent memory), “Torch”, and “Off by 50” have become some of my favorites since I finally rediscovered them. All three of these evoke borderline apocalyptic vibes, mainly thanks to the cryptic lyrics of the latter two that tell of a world ripping apart at the seams, yet they’re all still enjoyable to listen to nonetheless. More than that, however, I came across more from their humble beginnings and, as it would seem, the somber end of their output beyond public performances. In 2006, after Blue Screen Life but before Summer in Abaddon, they included a collection of unreleased tracks and demos on a compilation album titled Nautical Antiques: A Selection of Rarities from 1998-2001. Here, you can listen to the shockingly early yet complete demos for Blue Screen Life tracks like “Seville” and “Concrete Seconds”, but while I first heard and took interest in the original listing “Clemenceau”, the only one I currently own and listen to is “Anti-Hu” (short for “Anti-Human”) for the calming autumn atmosphere, melancholy lyrics, and grassroots vibes that come with the boiling tea kettle and cat noises in the background.

Then, another album embodies too brief a period in my upbringing to even register with me, that being the barely year-long period before I moved away from Pennsylvania. In 2012, they released Information Retrieved, which I seem to have a very mild obsession with lately. Although most listings capture their trademark gloomy gothic atmosphere to a tee, the first track “Proceed to Memory” is surprisingly uplifting, its sound differing greatly from what they’re best known for, and others leave plenty of room for personal interpretation. I figure the comedically titled “Denslow, You Idiot!” is probably just about a main or side character from a book Smith or Crow happened to be reading at the time. Moreover, “Sediment” may be among their saddest and prettiest numbers, which I must say is rather fitting, given this is the last official studio album either of these fantasy nerds have released to this day. Sure, they still go on tour from time to time—they’ve come to town near where I live multiple times in recent years—but I can’t shake this profound sadness that a modest group like them likely can’t succeed in this day and age, or at least not without a losing battle with bigger pop artists. They no doubt have a cult following, but as I’ve said before, it’s called a cult following for a reason. At the very least, if these guys started off earlier in the ’90s, I feel like they might’ve had a better opportunity to grow, given the types of bands that succeeded back then. Guess starting on my birth year was a curse all along…

As if it weren’t already evident, I figure they’re all too deserving of greater longevity. On many occasions, I’ve detailed my ongoing Choose Your Own Adventure-style rewrite of Shadow the Hedgehog in the form of the “Recollected Cut”, and at the moment, it seems to have been finished and perfected, with the illustrations to be showcased in my upcoming post about all my writing projects. However, I’ll also be sharing that rewrite’s two new expansion episodes in the works, with Episode Solaris being a reimagining of Sonic ’06 and Episode Storybook a reimagining of Sonic and the Secret Rings and Sonic and the Black Knight as part one and part two. While, for the most part, I’m partial to the Secret Rings soundtrack, I’ve complained in the past about the Black Knight soundtrack being too hardcore for Sonic, so to correlate with its very Pinback-ish fantasy atmosphere, I’ve reconstructed its soundtrack for the Recollected Cut using selections from their debut album, Blue Screen Life, Summer in Abaddon, Autumn of the Seraphs, and Information Retrieved. For instance, “Fortress” is the theme of Camelot Castle, “Proceed to Memory” is the theme of Great Megalith, “Torch” is the theme of the final boss fight with the Dark Queen, and “Good to Sea” is meant to replace “Live Life” during the ending and credits. This is because songs like “Proceed to Memory” and “Anti-Hu” go along with the Recollected Cut of Shadow the Hedgehog shockingly well—I actually wanted to make “Off by 50” the end credits theme for the final dark story, “Anti-Hu” for the final neutral story, and “Proceed to Memory” for the final hero story after “Never Turn Back” finishes, which I can still do since it’s not a game I have to mod—and “Good to Sea” captures the bittersweet feeling of leaving Episode Storybook as the end of my Sonic timeline. This is where the series ends for me, and the song fittingly expresses that “it’s good to see you go”, as all things have to. Lord knows this series, like SpongeBob, had a potential conclusion all too long ago that was only abandoned due to the profitability of the property. Ya gotta love capitalism!

On that note, I also mentioned in the previous Pinback post that songs like “June” and “How We Breathe” are exactly the songs I imagine showing up in the film adaptation of my future memoir. Well, since then, the latter song hasn’t made it into my pretend soundtrack, but the former already has… or at least into the soundtrack of my first memoir. See, because memoirs generally focus on a specific stage in the author’s life, I already have the premises for three separate graphic memoirs: Electricity tells of my teen and young adult years, The Initial Current tells of my childhood, and Positive Charge tells of my adult years and career history. “June” has made it into my made-up (for the time being) Electricity soundtrack, as I imagine it showing up after I return home from my old boarding school. I’ve also tweaked the album artwork for that adaptation and developed new artworks for the other two. The track lists for these and the full Recollected Cut album are available on my DeviantArt page here, but I may move them over to my Artstation account here, and the listings for the Recollected Cut expansion episodes will be added shortly.

Oh, and I also modded my new Pinback soundtrack into Black Knight to emulate on Dolphin, but I can’t share it due to copyright, so… have fun editing, looping, converting, and replacing the ADX audio files yourself, I guess.