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In my “(Don’t) Gimmie Indie Rock” essay from a few months ago, I talked about how Bomb the Music Industry! helped lay the groundwork for much of what we think of as the current DIY (or “fifth-wave emo,” although I believe that this might now be considered a dead meme?) scene, in terms of sonics, aesthetics, and ethics. But I think a much more under-sung band, in terms of music but especially in terms of intra-scene dialogue and addressing serious issues in an articulate way, is Latterman, and it’s a goddamn crime that I rarely seem to see them talked about these days, at least in this context (although in fairness this VICE article from Paul Blest definitely seems to “get it”).

Like BTMI!, Latterman hailed from a heavily DIY-oriented punk and hardcore scene in New York, and were at least in part descended from ska (Brian Crozier, who played guitar on the final Latterman record and went on to Iron Chic, was an early member of High School Football Heroes). Like BTMI!, Latterman found much of the fair-weather politics and dismal personal conduct of many in the scene around them to be risible and repugnant, and emphasized both community support and extreme independence from the established music industry (this was back in the early 2000s, when those sorts of things were a little more clear-cut). And like BTMI!, they wrote songs with goofy self-aware song titles and emphasized anthemic, communal shout-alongs and organically ragged vocals, rapidly picking up popularity and esteem among the Punknews set.

But to say that Latterman was all that similar to Bomb the Music Industry! is only about as accurate as saying that every DIY punk band in the early-mid-aughts was similar to BTMI!; it’s more fair to say that the wave of bands that arose in a post-Today’s Empires, Tomorrow’s Ashes (which is, in my opinion, the best Propagandhi album) climate shared a lot in terms of sensibility but managed to carve out very unique niches in spite of that. And if Bomb the Music Industry! can be given credit for the Brave Little Abacus and a huge chunk of modern DIY’s musical and lyrical concerns, then Latterman should be regarded as responsible for a huge other part of the equation.

For one thing, I feel like Latterman’s sound lay somewhere between the nebulous spheres of punk/hardcore and indie rock in a way that we mostly take for granted now (see bands like PUP or even, like, Drug Church— these bands don’t necessarily sound much like Latterman themselves, but it’s a similar principle), but at the time felt somewhat anomalous. To most people at the time, the natural midpoint between indie rock and hardcore was emo a la Texas Is the Reason or Elliott, but Latterman’s sound was way more reckless and energetic than that. An easy point of comparison would be Lifetime, but in contrast to that band’s razor-sharp guitar sync, skate-punk-indebted rhythm section, and compressed song structures, Latterman’s songs felt expansive, billowy, and warm. Their dry, crisp guitar sound left plenty of room for bass highlights, and with the vocals mixed a little lower than usual the listener had to slightly strain to make out the words, resulting in a more dedicated listener experience. Perhaps that helps to explain the sheer devotion of Latterman’s audience; for a few years there you could hardly throw a rock without hitting someone ready to talk about how much they fuckin’ loved that band.

And they were right to do it, for the record. Although I’m admittedly a bit lukewarm on We Are Still Alive (it’s a perfectly good record! but compared to those first two…), Turn Up the Punk, We’ll Be Singing and No Matter Where We Go…! are resolute masterpieces of 2000s-era punk rock. It’s not just the bright, chiming guitar running counter to the joyfully overrunning cup of bass riffage, and it isn’t just the band’s lyrics, which have for the most part aged way better than I ever would have predicted; it isn’t even the fact that every single moment of every single song somehow feels anthemic. It’s the palpable sense of freedom within community that Latterman seemed to capture almost effortlessly. Few things could turn out more corny than trying to replicate the feeling of audience members grabbing the mic on record, but Turn Up the Punk’s grand finale, “For Someone So Easy Going You Sure Do Wear Pants A Lot” (give ‘em a break on that song title, it was 2002) manages to capture that exact feeling without ever tipping over into mawkish sentimentality. (It says a lot that when the Wonder Years repeated this trick eight years later on “All My Friends Are In Bar Bands,” it still seemed fresh and clever.)

These two albums are especially interesting insofar as they seem both of a piece and completely segregated from the dominant flavor of underground punk at the time, which was orgcore. If you look at contemporary reviews of Latterman, you’d find a couple people dismissing them as derivative of Against Me!/Dillinger Four/The Lawrence Arms/Hot Water Music, and while I can see some of the similarities (particularly between the churning sound of the first two Latterman records vis-a-vis Hot Water Music’s pre-Epitaph output), and I can totally see why so many orgcore dudes were into Latterman, ultimately the ethos and aesthetics seem too incompatible for me to fully slot them in there.

Orgcore was all about beer-soaked gutter poetry, frog-croak vocals, and a certain world-weary cynicism that could be charming and exhausting in equal measure. (There’s also the beards and the flannel, though in retrospect those factors seem more important in terms of audience than in terms of the bands themselves.) Latterman, though they were no strangers to taking the occasional sharp jab at their peers, were ultimately too idealistic, too wide-eyed and excitable to really fit into that mold, and on a particularly pedantic tip, I always thought their vocals tasted much more of youthful desperation than gruff, jaded slack. Am I splitting hairs here? Absolutely. Are Latterman basically still an orgcore band? Probably. But I think it’s an important distinction.

You don’t even have to look all that hard to demonstrate this split; my favorite Latterman song (and, deservedly, their most popular by far) is “Fear and Loathing on Long Island,” whose extremely memorable chorus includes the line “Break the habit, because self-destruction is oh-so-romantic.” You couldn’t ask for a more clear-cut defiance of the beer-punk/beard-punk mold, which was literally all about self-destruction. “Fear and Loathing on Long Island” actually makes a pretty convincing counterpoint to my favorite Lawrence Arms song, “Boatless Booze Cruise Pt 1,” which is all about friends embracing each other at their most reckless and self-annihilating.

Latterman were never as gratingly posi as some of their critics liked to say, but the underlying message of many of their best songs seemed to be that while accepting your friends for all their faults was fine and dandy, friendship and community could also be about pushing those around you to be better than they think they can be, and I think there’s beauty to that as well. I also think it’s something that’s especially pertinent in the DIY sphere today.

I first got into Latterman probably less than a year before Punknews announced their breakup in 2007; for all intents and purposes, they were one of my very first experiences with discovering and falling in love with a vital, excellent new band, only to see them break up before I ever got a chance to catch them live or even before they got a chance to become terrible. (Suffice to say, I’ve gotten very used to this phenomenon over the last fourteen-odd years. Jesus, I sound old.)

Their immediate influence post-2007 spoke for itself— not just in the illustrious family tree that they spawned, which includes such heavy hitters as RVIVR, Iron Chic, Bridge & Tunnel, and Tender Defender, but also in the bands that clearly took from their indie-punk sound, like Spraynard and Get Bent. But the VICE article I linked earlier cleverly makes the connection to If You Make It, and I think there’s a decent argument to be made that Latterman are a bit of an unsung parent to the late-00s twinkle revival; I never thought about it until just now, but you can definitely see their DNA in a band like Snowing, who married intricacy and raucousness in their musicianship and tinged it with desperate vocals that rode the line between harsh and anthemic.

If a band like, say, the Weakerthans or Ted Leo & the Pharmacists provided the blueprint for punks to make the transition to indie rock, Latterman were the foundation for the opposite— for punk bands to tool around in indie rock-indebted soundscapes while still maintaining a firm cultural and sonic foothold in punk. (That isn’t a shot at John K. Samson or Ted Leo, by the way, who are obviously some of the best songwriters of all time.)

If you’re familiar with my writing, you can probably see where I’m going with this. Latterman were a punk band that indie kids could get into; they had all the politics and the sharp edges, but couched in really smart songwriting that immediately jumped out as accessible and thoughtful. As an easy counterpoint, Dillinger Four are also fantastic songwriters who wrote deeply intricate, catchy, and thoughtful songs within the trappings of punk (in the great Lance Hahn/J Church tradition), but it took way longer for indie rock peeps to find them palatable than Latterman. And if it weren’t for Latterman, I do think that industry gatekeepers would have put up a much bigger fight before allowing equally-thoughtful but still rowdy and defiant punk bands like PUP into their year-end lists. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again— if PUP had formed just five or ten years earlier, I’m fully confident that the OG blog-rock cognoscenti would sooner pour beer on their heads than admit that they are great at what they do.

But while the crossover between indie rock and punk is the most obvious place that Latterman’s legacy endures (even if the exact chemical makeup of their songwriting has fallen a bit out of fashion in comparison to more adventurous and, dare I say, angular fare), the big missing piece here is Latterman’s lyrical content. While I’m sure that many could make the argument that their lyrics now seem almost brutally on-the-nose, Latterman’s distinct vocabulary and point of view put them on the cutting edge of dialogue within the punk scene. 90s hardcore bands like Spitboy and Los Crudos had introduced some of the jargon and some more progressive ideas when it came to concepts of race, gender, and sexuality, but Latterman took what they were doing and made it less insular and more accessible without sacrificing any of the insight or becoming patronizing.

I point once again to a moment that Paul Blest points out in his VICE article with the climax of No Matter Where We Go…!’s closer, “My Bedroom Is Like for Artists”:

Streets gentrified like it's no problem
Boys in bands still singing about killing their girlfriends
People leave communities while they’re still struggling
Come on everybody sing along we're to blame
Punks start dealing with their own white privilege
We tell all the boys to stop being so aggressive
Actually giving a shit about the place we live in
Come on everybody sing along let's fix this

Nowadays, it’s extremely common to see DIY bands taking stands against gentrification, reckoning with white privilege, and attempting to make the rowdy environment of shows safer for people of all genders (and one can always draw a line with the latter straight back to Fugazi, who continue to be one of the most influential bands of all time). But in 2005, this was a pretty radical sentiment on the face of it, especially when other, popular political punk bands like Strike Anywhere and Propagandhi concerned themselves more with global issues like imperialism and colonialism. Obviously those are things that are extremely important, but it’s also important to take a good hard look at what your community is doing on the ground floor, and Latterman were one of the few bands who displayed such a clear-eyed outlook and a full-throated conviction with regards to taking accountability and fostering a sense of responsibility within the scene around them.

Also, again, this is 2005, and some of the most powerful bands coming out of Latterman’s Northeast scene at the time were emo pop and metalcore bands that actually, literally were singing about killing their girlfriends. (I love both Senses Fail and Glassjaw, both of whom have profusely apologized for their lyrical content at this time, but that lyric is directly aimed at them.) Taking such a vocal stand against the lyrical content of bands whose platforms held a huge degree of importance, and who could easily boost or leave static the career of a band they took on tour with them, was an incredibly gutsy move.

But it wasn’t just being loud about progressive inclinations. Mattie Jo Canino, one of Latterman’s driving lyrical and vocal forces and the founder of RVIVR, would later become (along with Sarah Kirsch) one of the first and loudest of prominent trans musicians in the modern punk scene, and even before I started to be more open and honest with myself about my own gender identity, I found her attitude towards discussing her identity in interviews— forthright, confident as fuck, and unsparingly direct in her lack of willingness to suffer foolishness, but also unfailingly kind, thoughtful, and generous— to be comforting and inspiring in equal measure.

It would be foolish to undersell the macro importance of Laura Jane Grace coming out, but on a micro level, it was Mattie who made the most difference to me, personally, and helped put me on a path of self-education that arguably is a huge part of what led me to where I am now. Sometimes I take it for granted that there are so many non-cis musicians in the DIY scene, and I take it for granted that they should be afforded respect, but I really do feel as though she took a lot of unnecessary shit (see: that awful stupid Punknews “Latterperson” April Fools article) and put in a lot of legwork to help make the scene a safer and more inclusive space for trans people specifically.

Latterman, in some ways, was like a giant rubber raft thrown to me. I feel extremely lucky that I was able to get into DIY via their openly leftist politics and their rough-hewn yet sensitively-melodic energy; they fit in quite snugly with bands like Kid Dynamite and Gorilla Biscuits, now that I think about it, not just in their pop-hardcore sound but also in their lyrics which emphasized the importance of positivity without, importantly, downplaying the severity of life’s hardships or societal ills. I feel like when I bring up Latterman now, I’m met with a lot of apathy, but Latterman were a band that championed pushing up against apathy and for that I will forever be grateful.

Set back our setbacks for one more fucking day.

-xoxo, Ellie

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