Recently Seattle lost a member of its music scene with the passing of Kevin Diers, who hosted the Loud & Local and Metal Shop radio shows on KISW, at the all-too-young age of 39. Record store Apollo Exos stepped up to help the family by selling off Kevin’s record collection, which as you can imagine given the shows he was on leaned heavily toward metal and local music. I swung over to their shop in Everett and picked out a random assortment of records – mostly stuff I’ve never heard of that looked interesting. One of those was Galleons Lap’s Themes And Variations – A Counter Industrial Revolution.
What I didn’t realize at the time was how successful some of the former Galleons Lap members became. Guitarist Greg Anderson currently shreds with Sun O))) and is one of the founders of Souther Lord Records, while bassist Nate Mendel was part of Sunny Day Real Estate and is one of the original (and current) members of Foo Fighters. Should I have heard of Galleons Lap, given all this???1 I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit humbled by learning all of this… and also feeling very fortunate that, for whatever reason, this record looked interesting enough to randomly pick up.
Galleons Lap is generally described as emo / hardcore, and that’s apt enough, though there’s a bit of a crossover thrash sound as well. And… holy shit it’s good. Really, really good. The riffs shred, but the real power is in the vocals – that blend of emo thoughtfulness and hardcore rage, kept up in the mix and not impossibly fast so you can hear both the words and the emotion.
Unfortunately Themes And Variations – A Counter Industrial Revolution is a tough one to track down – it’s not available for streaming and only came out on vinyl and cassette. It looks like people have been catching onto it as of late too – the last five sales on Discogs have been for $100+, which is crazy because for years and years it was consistently a $25-50 record2. A few folks have ripped their vinyl copies and posted on YouTube!, however, so if you want to give Galleons Lap a listen you should be able to find it.