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Sickle Moon Blues: Weekend Playlist By Infant Island

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Every Friday night, RVA Mag brings you an absolutely essential playlist curated by Virginia’s most influential artists, musicians, and institutions.

This time around, we’ve got one from Infant Island, the Fredericksburg-based screamo band who is working hard to carry the torch for Virginia screamo far beyond the Commonwealth. In fact, they just released a 4-way split EP with three bands from various points across North America — New Jersey’s Massa Nera, Illinois’s Frail Body, and Montreal’s dianacrawls. You can grab that EP in vinyl, cassette, or digital form at Infant Island’s Bandcamp.

The band will be headed out on tour in July, and will next play Richmond in August. But until they return to our fair city, they’ve brought us a jam-packed playlist that mixes the past, present, and future of screamo and metallic hardcore into a wide variety of sounds from outside their genre — ranging from quiet folk ballads to soaring post-rock anthems. It’s quite the journey, and is sure to spice up your weekend.

Let it rip, Virginia.

Open this playlist from mobile in your Spotify app HERE.

Music Sponsored By Graduate Richmond

For Infant Island, Screamo Is All About Friends

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The Fredericksburg screamo band has built quite a buzz recently, but for Infant Island, music is still mainly a way to connect with like-minded souls.

“Friends are fans. Fans are friends,” said Infant Island’s drummer, Austin O’Rourke.

“Fans are friends, not food,” chimed in the band’s guitarist, Alex Rudenshiold.

The Fredericksburg-based screamo band – whose name is an homage to the 1961 Japanese kaiju (monster) film Mothra – was on their way to a show in a Richmond basement, and I was tagging along. Despite Infant Island receiving recent coverage in publications like Vice and The Washington Post, the band remains charmingly humble and connected to their fan base.

“It’s weird to think that we have fans, honestly,” Rudenshiold said. “I know somewhere internally that we do. There are people who really like our music, which is wild.”

Rudenshiold and O’Rourke emphasized the community dynamic of the local music scene.

“If you like our music, that’s cool, but I’d prefer that you like us as people as well,” Rudenshiold said. “We try to talk to people as much as possible, and get to know them.”

“Fans and friends are kind of synonymous,” O’Rourke added. “For me at least, just being in a music project like this, that exists in a physical way, is such a good therapeutic thing for me as a human. This is my friend group. This is being social for me.”

One of Infant Island’s fan-friends is Emily Harrah, who has been following the band since this summer when they dropped their self-titled first album.

“Infant Island’s music to me is a catharsis; it helps me drown any negativity and gives me something to cling on to and empathize with,” she said. “Because of its loud, chaotic nature, it’s easy to put on their music, turn up the volume, and envelope myself in nothing but the soundscapes they create. It’s raw, unfiltered, passionate punk music that knows how to balance out brutality with beauty, and that’s exactly how I like it.”

Rudenshiold said that the close relationship with fans has made the band’s recent high-profile acclamation all the more heartwarming.

“People are so supportive in our community and our scene,” he said. “Not that they wouldn’t be if they didn’t know us, but it’s so nice to have people personally cheering  you on.”

Although Virginia has been lauded as a mecca for hardcore music, Infant Island is technically Fredericksburg’s only screamo band. O’Rourke said the term “screamo” is often misused.

“You have people who will call any derivative of metal or rock and roll screamo, when it’s its own genre,” he said. “Screamo also is a genre, just like grindcore, just like black metal, just like death metal and math core.”

Infant Island: Kyle Guerra, Daniel Kost, Austin O’Rourke, and Alexander Rudenshoild

The Fredericksburg music scene is incredibly tight-knit, according to O’Rourke and Rudenshiold.

“I’ve noticed all [of Fredericksburg’s] music tends to stem from the same place, of both comfort and discomfort in the world,” O’Rourke said. “When it comes to the shoegaze in the area, or the screamo in the area, or even the neoclassical in the area, to me it all has the same seed of thought, but it’s just different ways of expressing it.”

Fredericksburg, Rudenshiold agreed, has a distinct sound and musical lineage.

“I feel like we fit very comfortably into that, even though we’re the only band of our specific genre from around the area really,” he said. “Because there’s very few of each kind of band in Fredericksburg, we all have this kind of community. I think it’s a really good community of people who believe in Do It Yourself (DIY) music and that ethos.”

The group’s Richmond house show was on a Friday in February and featured Black Matter Device, a math core band also from Fredericksburg. Infant Island also played a benefit show in DC the next day with popular punk band Anti-Flag and post-hardcore quartet NØ MAN, featuring former members of well-known DC screamo band Majority Rule.

“The show [Friday] is awesome because it’s with our friends,” O’Rourke said. “It feels like a nice comfortable spot where you show your family your art, and they’re like ‘oh this is great.’ But [Saturday’s show], it’s with everyone’s childhood idols. It’s going to be pretty bizarre.”

Infant Island in DC. Photo by Danilandia

According to O’Rourke, the band’s next goals are to “finish [the second] album, go on tour [and] survive both of those things.”

“Honestly, Alex is like, superhuman, in that he’s always on to the next thing,” O’Rourke said. “So he’s already started writing the third album. Meanwhile, I’m still trying to finish writing this album. I’m glad – I think I represent somebody who could stay in one thing forever. I could easily work on this album for years.”

“I’m really excited to be playing new material in general,” Rudenshiold said. “All the songs we’re playing tonight are on a new record we just recorded. It’s not super-announced yet, but it’s coming.”

The band’s first album was two and a half years in the making. Their second record is a marked change from that.

“These songs songs are so fun to play,” Rudenshiold said. “They’re a little more complicated, a little more technical than our old material, which is more fun for me to play.”

“The new songs they’ve been playing live recently have been quite a bit more aggressive than the songs from their self-titled album, which has me very, very excited,” Harrah said. “I love seeing bands improving on their formula in a way that helps keep a signature sound but never makes things boring or repetitive.”

Infant Island’s tour diet.

At Friday’s show, the mosh pit was more intense than anyone in Infant Island had seen during their set.

“It’s really fun because the energy we put into it, you can see it literally get digested by the audience and they throw it back at us,” O’Rourke said. “It’s really cool. I probably could have worded that much much more normally.”

“I know for a fact that Infand Island are, without a doubt, not only some of the nicest, supportive, and loving people in the local punk scene, but absolutely one of the best punk acts in Virginia,” Harrah said. “I’m so proud of Daniel, Alex, Kyle, and Austin, and I can’t thank them enough for doing what they do, and being in my life.”

Top Photo by Danilandia

Music Sponsored By Graduate Richmond

The Triumphant Return of Action Patrol and Sleepytime Trio

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The mid-1990s was an adventurous time for underground music, especially for punk, hardcore, and [scr]e[a]mo bands. Building off the vast musical foundations laid by the pioneers of the genre in the late 70s and throughout the 80s, the 90s emerged as a time of experimentation, aggression, and a fierce commitment to local scenes.

Virginia was at the heart of this national musical movement, with now-legendary bands emerging from Hampton Roads, Washington DC, and of course right here in Richmond. For young people who came up in this scene, bands like Jesuit, MayDay, Words a Game, and Channel from Hampton Roads, along with Fugazi, Nation of Ulysses, Jawbox, and Hoover from Washington DC, changed everything by articulating a kind of camaraderie, spirit, and individual power that was lacking during the lethargy of the 90s. Through these things, lifelong friendships were born and the course of so many lives determined.

Channel, 1995. Photo from Video by thebishbk

Yet nowhere was this reality more potent than right here in the River City. Richmond in the 90s was a mecca, a sanctuary for the underground that rivaled the greatest scenes in the US – the legacy of which the city is still benefiting from today. In this sonic vortex, bands like Avail, James River Scratch, Hose.Got.Cable, Inquisition, Men’s Recovery Project, The Rah Bras, Young Pioneers, Four Walls Falling, and countless others brought a certain kind of sound and style to the national scene that is still being tirelessly imitated.

On the forward edge of this scene were Richmond dissidents Action Patrol and Sleepytime Trio. You would be hard-pressed to find a single scene kid from the 90s in Virginia who was unfamiliar with either of these bands; and rightfully so, they represented a unique passage from the stoic hardcore punk of the 80s to the more progressive emo and screamo of the 90s. The inevitable transition from the musical war waged against Reagan’s evangelical America to the more tolerant and liberal era of the Clinton’s represents an under-appreciated golden age in underground music. The creative tension between these two generations generated some of the scene’s best music, as older musicians linked up with younger musicians to create new genres and sub-genres in the process.

Four Walls Falling, 1992. Photo from Video by Michael Medina

In the 90s scene, almost anything was possible; the old heads know this history, and the history of these bands, intimately. Therefore, it was little surprise that Action Patrol and Sleepytime Trio’s upcoming April show at Strange Matter sold out last night only a few hours after ticket sales began. In fact, Strange Matter announced that it was one of the fastest selling shows in the venue’s history. This should come as no great shock, given that they’ve also been a scene staple (in multiple forms) since the 90s – hence, the “triumphant return” of these bands, as this article title suggests. But it is more than just scene nostalgia that sold this show out in record time. While each of these bands has done reunion shows before, there is something about this day and age which makes their re-emergence so needed, especially for those who came of age in the 90s.

Perhaps it is knowing that we now live in a time where political and social complexity could be greatly articulated by bands who knew how to irreverently take the proverbial “piss” like Action Patrol. On their song “Tube,” they proclaim snidely, “I don’t think I’ll hold you close, I’ll just hold you responsible for another loud mouth advertisement,” before going fucking nuts in matching orange coveralls. Does that lyric need to be put into a contemporary context, or should we just accept that this sums up most of our entire experience in 2017? How about the frantic agitation and feverishness behind Sleepytime Trio’s “Rock Candy,” where singer Drew Ringo crows, “Forced reaction, Danton. To your intrusion, Robespierre. It needs no answer,” a weirdly subversive nod to the terror of the French Revolution; another perfectly timed and prescient lyric for what people have felt and experienced in 2017.

Sleepytime Trio. Photo from All Music

There is no doubt that music today is thriving, just in different formats, which are spread out across multiple scenes and genres. And ultimately, all music conforms to the context and circumstances of the politics, art, and cultural life that surrounds it; much like it did for those who came of age in the hardcore, punk, and screamo scene of the 90s. Do all people look back and fondly claim that their scene was the best scene? Of course they do. Nonetheless, there was something about the 90s and how one scene transitioned to another that revolutionized underground music in the US. Virginia led in that process, making the scene here unique amongst the best scenes nationally.

For those who missed the brief window to see Action Patrol and Sleepytime Trio on their home stage at Strange Matter, it sucks to be you.