Courtesy of ANTI-.

The end of the semester approaches. With each paper, each article, each self-assigned responsibility I step another inch away from some of my best memories. At times WVAU gave me the best of that best. Since starting on the web staff as the sophomore, generous editors all too kindly lent me a space to write some really overwrought thoughts. The free range helped refine my wandering words into some decently developed points. I do not want to end my time in such a sweet space completely normally. As I step forward, I want to look back into the beginnings of my musical taste as it is today.

Three artists really wooed me deeply, becoming first loves launching me deeper into obsession with sound. Rush, The Mars Volta and Man Man pushed me into writing this column and working with WVAU. I‰’ll try to make it clear the things worth loving about these three bands that make up my beginnings.

I started listening to music way late and picked up a mix of metal, classic rock and some weird outliers from friends. My friends’ favorites sounded great, but I stumbled on my very own first love while in the upstairs of the library rummaging through the public CD selection.

Rush are nothing short of rock legends. The strange Canadian trio of Neil Peart, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson started in the ’70s and still play today. Over so much time and despite a constant cast of musicians, Rush never stopped changing their sound. Their first album, before Peart arrived, sounds as straightforward as classic rock can get. A year later Rush picked up Peart and the band released Caress of Steel, an album with two songs over ten minutes long.

In an instant Rush showed what would be a longstanding love of deep, overly intellectual epics. “The Necromancer” takes twelve and a half minutes to tell the story of a fantasy land ran by a destructive sorcerer. “Fountain of Lamneth” takes nearly twenty minutes to paint a musical bildungsroman. Starting hopefully and lightly, the song turns, torn and angry, into adolescence, which soon transforms into sometimes lonely and directionless early adulthood and eventually into the excitement and ultimate calm of the end.

No song quite captures Rush‰’s wild and fluid soul quite like “2112.” Another twenty minute-long epic, “2112” tells the story of a dreadful society where a technocratic apparatus runs the Earth and licenses all art. The protagonist stumbles upon a relic from the past unseen through centuries, an acoustic guitar. The protagonist tries to convince the state to make music out of it, but they flatly deny him. Not even the words of an oracle are boon enough to keep the protagonist going, and the musician dies as an ominous invasion takes place for good or ill.

Rush has a marvelous way of doing a bit of everything. They manage short songs just fine, but shine in their marvelous epic yarns. Sometimes they confront modern issues like LGBT rights in “Nobody‰’s Hero‰” or delve into fantasy like in “The Trees.” Albums like Vapor Trails border on metal while Roll The Bones embraces all the goofiness of the early nineties. Above all else, Rush has an unbelievable character. The three band members stay together through decades and phases, they hardly hiatus for long and each new project never feels phoned in. Rush has the character that I wish every band could have, that I wish I could have.

What Rush started The Mars Volta continued. I remember vividly the first time I ever listened to them. On the way back from a concert in Cleveland my friend popped their CD in. He played Frances The Mute and at first the quiet strumming guitar of “Cygnus…Vismund Cygnus‰” gently echoed in my ears. The song suddenly shot off like rocket thrusters into the atmosphere off of its own wild energy. My mind reeled. Music can do this? The time signatures, the erratic rhythms, the endless technical display so neatly refined and perfectly mixed, where had this been all my life?

Describing it to others sometimes feels impossible. By all objective measure every song is cluttered up with random and unnecessary noise. All the fury can sound spontaneous, but the lead guitarist, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, worked tirelessly to fit everything to perfect form, sometimes making band members play to metronomes to get it all right. The lyrics of entire albums come together to paint fascinating, otherworldly tales. The songs come crashing in with the instrumentation to back the emotive near-gibberish lyrics up at every step. TMV seems too impossibly wild to be directed, but they are and that direction separates them from anything else.

The Mars Volta had so much energy that they burnt up and collapsed a year ago. Man Man had to fill the void TMV left in me, but Man Man is too much its own band to be just a replacement. Their songs spill over with strange chimes and tings from xylophones and other strange percussion and wind to supplement the regular rock set of instruments. Amidst all of it Honus Honus‰’s deep voice screeches, wails and yells out sick stories of deeply ill people.

As an urbanite, I was obsessed. I felt in Honus Honus‰’s lyrics and the band‰’s frantic and ever-exploding mix of strange sounds the subtle and sad madness of the weird shit around me. Man Man felt to me the only band that explained the middle aged guy that sprinted up and down the block in front of a state government building in a pink Sunday dress, or much more grimly, the cocaine-addled criminal that killed a family of seven a block away from the childhood home that held my first eighteen years and many little stories in between.

Sad stories, like the one told across “Poor Jackie‰” and “Whale Bones,‰” had a character all their own. Half mystic but half real, Jackie‰’s lover ends up obsessed, searching for a woman on the lam. Ultimately destroyed and disheveled, the story drains out of him and pours back and forth between himself and Jackie during “Whale Bones.‰” The burden shifts sharply and now Jackie carries the person who sought her until they both buckle, exhausted, and she ultimately slips away like she was never there.

Man Man introduced me not only to world of harsher, wilder indie music, but the way reality could have stories as gripping and mystical as fantasy. Man Man songs did not work like prog epics. They did not gear up to satisfying ends. They wound and wound up until the line snapped and made me ask, “what if something does not end in any meaningful way? What happens if somethings end up internally inconsistent and unreconciled?‰” Man Man would have seemed to edgy to hold, but they interwove so much fun rhythm and bits of wordplay to keep it light. The dancy bounce of their twisted 50‰’s dance hall brought me smiling back year after year.

That‰’s it, cut the amplifier and end the feedback. Thank you, WVAU! Family, friends, acquaintances or strangers, if you have read this long then hopefully we can meet underneath another sunny day to talk about your first loves.