Jejune - Junk

Three Berklee students walked out of music school and into the Massachusetts hardcore scene at the exact moment it started trading speed for melody. Junk is what came out: eight songs, roughly thirty minutes, cut across three Boston-area studios in 1995 and 1996 and issued on Big Wheel Recreation in 1997. Araby Harrison, who engineered it as well as playing bass and singing, is the one who named it Junk, which tells you how precious the band was about their own debut.

The trick was the two-voice arrangement. Joe Guevara's shouted, half-buried delivery runs against Harrison's clear one, and Chris Vanacore drums loud enough to keep the whole thing from tipping into anything delicate. "Meteorite" and "Greyscale" open at full tilt with all the push-pit energy of a band that had just gotten out of a practice room. By the time you reach "Ethan Allen" and the closer "Ford," the guitar interplay slows down and gets patient, and you can hear exactly where they were headed on the next record. Brian McTernan produced two of the tracks, early in a run that would make him one of the defining producers of the sound.

It sits at a geographic crossroads, part Gilman Street, part Midwest emo, part Massachusetts hardcore, which is precisely why it never got filed neatly anywhere and why it stayed out of print for so long. The band decamped for San Diego shortly after, and Junk became the document of the version of Jejune that only existed in Boston.

Reissued by Numero Group (NUM936), remastered by Jeff Lipton at Peerless, lacquer cut at Nashville Record Productions, pressed at Independent Record Pressing. Includes a double-sided photo and credits sheet. On vinyl again for the first time in a very long while.