Music: Good day, sunshine

The Fire Theft renounces Sunny Day emo

By Newt Briggs

When Sunny Day Real Estate and its lachrymose frontman Jeremy Enigk emerged from the fog of northwest grunge in 1994, emo--or emotional hardcore--was reborn, and it was once again okay to cry. Or so goes the tale from influential rock pundits like Andy Greenwald, author of the emo opus Nothing Feels Good.

Of course, suggests Greenwald, no band ever conceded to being emo; the genre was too schmaltzy, too self-indulgent, too suburban to ever really be cool. And during a recent interview with the Mercury, Sunny Day drummer and co-songwriter William Goldsmith unconsciously upholds Greenwald's assertion, denying the band's emo-nicity like a practiced politician.

"We never considered ourselves part of the whole emo thing," Goldsmith says. "It just never made sense to us. In the punk rock scene, when you called someone emo that was sort of like poking fun at them. The term was reserved for people that were being overly dramatic and getting all emotional right in front of the band for everyone to see. So when people started saying that we somehow created emo, I was like, `Oh no! How did we do that?'"

But Sunny Day was emo--or at least what has come to be known as emo. Enigk, Goldsmith, guitarist Dan Hoerner and bassist Nate Mendel (later of the Foo Fighters) crafted music that was personal, melodic, visceral and cathartic. Like all music, it was emotional, but its emotional quality spoke specifically to the fragile, lonely and occasionally romantic sensibilities of suburban teens. Or, as Greenwald writes, "Hearing Sunny Day Real Estate had the same effect on 20-year-olds as seeing Star Wars for the first time had on 10-year-olds: It made them dream bigger."

But like that of the Star Wars franchise, Sunny Day's hold on the public consciousness was not to last. In fact, the quartet's subsequent albums (particularly 2000's The Rising Tide) began to sound a bit like George Lucas' second Star Wars trilogy looked--overblown, insincere and more than a little vain.

"The energy within Sunny Day was kind of stagnant, and there was this whole vibe in and around the band that felt like running up a hill through mud with a wet blanket on," Goldsmith says. "It was obvious that we had to wipe the slate clean and start again."

After what Goldsmith describes as "a lot of soul-searching and a lot of long talks," he and Enigk reunited with Mendel, and three-quarters of one of history's most important emo bands instantly became The Fire Theft. Contributing to this metamorphosis was the fact that Mendel's post-Sunny Day project, the Foo Fighters, is currently on "an extended break."

Unlike Sunny Day, The Fire Theft makes epic Promethean rock. Inspired more by The Who's Quadrophenia than emo godfathers Rites of Spring's End on End, The Fire Theft's self-titled debut shudders with anthemic guitar swells and classic-rock grandeur. Recorded in the basement of Goldsmith's house by legendary indie producer Brad Wood (also the producer of Sunny Day's definitive emo masterpiece Diary), The Fire Theft retains only one feature of its former incarnation: Enigk's glass-breaking falsetto.

But instead of the enigmatic lyrics that characterized his past songs, Enigk this time aims for clarity, howling lines like "I thought that I was a crazy/ All along it was just a girl" with power pop flair. To offset these orchestral pop flourishes--"Oceans Apart" sounds suspiciously like Yes' "I've Seen All Good People"--The Fire Theft experiments with atmospheric backgrounds and avant-garde production on "Backward Blues" and the 14-minute "Sinatra." In the end, it's near impossible to pigeonhole The Fire Theft as it shifts between pop gloss, emo introspection and prog-rock bombast.

"It's definitely multidimensional, which is what I really like about what we're doing," Goldsmith says. "There are really no rules with this band. We can do whatever we want, and in my mind we've barely even tapped into our collective potential. This is just like the first toe in the water."