Group Sounds was Rocket From The Crypt’s glorious restatement of purpose
In the early ’90s, when major labels raided the independent punk and hardcore scenes looking for the next big thing, few of the bands swept up in the signing frenzy produced their best work. One that did was San Diego’s Rocket From The Crypt, whose 1995 album, Scream, Dracula, Scream!, would become a high-water mark, a fantastically catchy-yet-aggressive collection of garage punk laced with saxophone and trumpet.
The band shifted direction a bit on 1998’s RFTC, opting for a less aggressive, more “classic rock ’n’ roll” sound, but the success of Scream, Dracula, Scream! didn’t repeat itself. The band’s label, Interscope, lost interest, and RFTC hung in limbo for more than a year while waiting for Interscope to finally drop it. Longtime drummer Adam “Atom” Willard quit, and Rocket From The Crypt found itself homeless and wondering about its next move.
When the band re-emerged with Group Sounds in March of 2001, it had found an unlikely home on Vagrant Records, which was blowing up at the time thanks to a slew of young emo bands like The Get Up Kids, Saves The Day, Alkaline Trio, and especially Dashboard Confessional—whose broken-hearted, acoustic sing-alongs couldn’t sound more different from Rocket From The Crypt. When I interviewed frontman John “Speedo” Reis for Punk Planet in the spring of 2001, he admitted to knowing nothing about the other bands on Vagrant. By that point, Reis was in his early 30s and had been in Rocket for more than a decade, and he couldn’t really care less what the kids were listening to.
Group Sounds explodes with that “We’re still here” defiance and the frustration that had built up over the long, infuriating wait during the band’s time in major-label limbo. It’s also a truer sonic successor to Scream, Dracula, Scream! than RFTC, ramping up the aggression with a slew of riffs that hit RFTC’s sweet spot of garage punk and post-hardcore. (Plenty of people associate Reis more with Drive Like Jehu, the seminal post-hardcore band he played guitar in at the beginning of the ’90s.)