the promise ring demo

ok, ok, you already have this from somewhere but it is so fucking good i am going to post it to. i wish i owned the actual tape. i bid a large amount of $ on ebay when i last saw it, but someone bid even more. crazy times.

anyways, this is 3 songs from whenever the promise ring started, from when they toured with snapcase (!). it opens with the otherwise unreleased jupiter, by far the most mid 90s emo song TPR ever recorded. it kicks in with some killer hardcore guitar and suddenly von bohlen is wailing over the top. it spirals around, like some kind of indian summer song but with singing instead of sobbing. utterly awesome. it's interesting that they got from cap'n jazz to this and then to the early promise ring material. the vocals totally fit with the stuff on 30 degrees everywhere, with vb wavering and out of tune, but the punishing guitars will come as a surprise to anyone who has never heard this. the bass is as stunning as anything you heard by this band, grooving the song along into it's more melodic final third. after that we have the super super super 12 sweaters red which is one of my favourite promise ring songs. you can find it also on the ground rule double comp on divot records, i am pretty certain it's a different version, the song on grd is a bit poppier and cuter (i haven't listened to it in ages), but listen to davey's broken vocals the opening guitars twinkle in ... "I CAN HEAR THE RADIO!" ... this song is so ridiculously good. the remake has better twinkles, but i think i prefer vb's drawl on this one and the twinkles are still to die for. half way through it explodes, vb gets over excited and tearful and the song energises. so good. we wind up with mineral point which you know already and it's pretty similar to the version as on horse latitudes, but not quite. pure early tpr, you can argue whether or not it has aged badly or not, but whilst many of tpr's peers made music that sounds immature these days, none of the stuff that this band recorded sounds remotely immature, which is an incredible testament to their song writing.

a brilliant artifact is here. davey, stop fucking around in maritime and write something with a bit of energy again please.