the promise ring nothing feels good
An album that makes me think of spring….
There are many songs that have that “spring” feeling, coming in from all over the place, but not full albums. Most of my album listening leans towards the Winter and Fall feeling, and there’s actually a lot of summer too. Buts this one, for me, feels like full on Springtime: The Promise Ring, Nothing Feels Good.
This came out in the fall of 1997. I was doing my own personal High Fidelity thing at Orpheum Records in Seattle, and one of my friends and co-workers was really into the whole “emo” scene at that time. And by “emo” I mean bands like Braid, Sunny Day Real Estate, Knapsack, Rainer Maria, Get Up Kids, and The Promise Ring (and so much more).
Brian M. was a rock star in my eyes, playing bands I’d never heard of (I was big into bands like the Tindersticks, Primal Scream, Spiritualized, The Dandy Warhols, among others, in that year of 1997) and bringing me out of the store and into his other Seattle world of poetry and literature, and even more music.
I could probably dive into a whole essay based on the music I listened to in 1997, but I won’t. I will dive into the first time I heard the song “Is This Thing On?”. It’s not my favorite song on the album, but it is the first song. The one that made me stop ignoring the customers for no reason, and start ignoring them because I had to know what was playing on the speakers above my head.
This band, this album, will forever be connected to that springtime feeling of everything starting again. New life, new love, a first kiss, a shared joke, a quiet crush, a romantic poem, a sip of cherry coke.
Marcel Feldmar 