Thursday, October 23, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Music: Blue kids on the block

Saves the Day checks its morbidity with Reverie

By Mike Prevatt

Rock 'n' roll is filled with songwriters who revel in their gallows humor, and few of the newer generation of bands personify this as much as New Jersey's Saves the Day. The quartet's biggest hit to date, 2001's "At Your Funeral," has lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist Christopher Conley singing to a living friend whose eventual death he wishes to immortalize through song. "This song will become the anthem of your underground," he nasally puns at the beginning, and from there what might have been an overwrought, pre-death requiem is emo-gone-Warren Zevon.

"To me, there's humor and optimism and a bit of the blues in all the songs," says Conley. "I just enjoy getting kind of crazy with the words, because it's a nice way to be able to vent twisted emotions. It's not boy-meets-girl music. It's life-sucks music."

For almost 10 years, the under-25 band has been channeling its gravitas and self-deprecation through uptempo punk-pop and lyrical one-liners, amassing a considerable underground following in the process. Its 2001 album, Stay What You Are, has sold in the hundreds of thousands and remains indie imprint Vagrant Records' second biggest-selling record. STD recently released its fourth album, and first on the Dreamworks Records imprint, called In Reverie, which isn't a terribly ironic album title, given its sunny tones and ear-grabbing melodicism, or the band's blazing successes of late. However, as in "At Your Funeral," Conley, the band's chief songwriter, checks each extreme emotion against its opposite. Be it sadness or joy, his devil's advocate approach to introspection is surely a lure for his fans, but he says it's a natural extension of his personality.

"A friend of mine made me aware that when I talk to people, I talk about bad things...whether it's the news or somebody died, or how much I hate myself," says Conley. "I realized, yeah, I really do focus on the negative things, but I think it's the way I cope. I really absorb them...because if I avoid negative feelings, and pretend they don't exist, it winds up causing me a lot more pain. I like to take the good with the bad, because that's the complete picture."

It's hard to pity a kid born in the upper-class 'burb of Princeton, and it's even harder to think such a young band has, as they say, paid its dues. But STD is renowned for insisting on its independence and creative control. Labels promised to make the band the next Blink-182, but it stayed with Vagrant until In Reverie, which was already recorded when Dreamworks offered a hand. Even as teenagers, Conley and company did not get handouts for touring.

"It's fucking hard," he says. "When you're on the road, there's no amount of, you know, mama's money that can help you. We were scraping by for four years touring before we made a single cent. We didn't have any money for gas. We couldn't run the A/C in the blazing hot desert. Whenever we checked into a hotel, if we were ever lucky enough to check into a hotel, we had to cram nine people into one hotel room, and we had to share the three sopping-wet towels. Most of the time we had to sleep on some strangers' floor in their basement, on cement with cockroaches everywhere, and you'd wake up and there would be cat vomit on the ground next to your head."

Now, it seems the only struggle is making new music that the fans don't instantly abhor because it's unlike the last album--and even that will keep STD out of complacency's way.

"Every time we release an album, even our most hardcore fans hate it immediately," says Conley. "And that sucks. It's hard to keep up the energy after something like that, so we're going to continue to pay our dues."