Photo courtesy of Jade Tree Records The members of Lifetime enjoy the time of their lives as they look for an emo record they didn’t influence

The soft side of hardcore

By Sarah Conway
cwoullar@mscd.edu

    
    When they started out 16 years ago, New Jersey hardcore band Lifetime was considered a joke. In those days of practicing in garages, handing out demos and lyric sheets that lacked contact info, their legacy wasn’t a consideration. They were often made fun of for being a “melodic” hardcore band.
  “ Everybody just thought (of us as) this ‘faggy’ little band, and we kind of lived off that,” original guitarist Scott St. Hilaire said in a 2005 interview with Alternative Press.
    Despite the lack of respect, today Lifetime is cited as one of the most influential hardcore bands of the decade.
    They changed the standards of the genre by being the band willing to draw flowers on T-shirts and write songs about catching raindrops on their tongues. They made it OK for a hardcore band to write love songs. They weren’t wrapped-up in the machismo attitude and the escalating violence within the scene.
    Lifetime created music that was relevant in a new decade by rebelling against the standards set by the previous generation. They reacted to the demise of the straight-edge style, DC hardcore subculture known as “youth-crew” by putting forth a greater sense of experimentation, slower, less aggressive songs, and a new direction for emotional/melodic hardcore altogether.
    Their raw guitars, rapid-fire drums, sandpaper vocals and authentic, sincere, personal lyrics helped kick-start an East Coast hardcore scene that recognized a dose of pop melodies didn’t necessarily mean the motive or meaning behind the music was any different. The melodic hardcore sound they pioneered gave birth to a whole new subgenre known as emo.
    Formed in 1990 by singer Ari Katz and guitarist Dan Yemin, the band survived personal conflicts among itself, numerous lineup changes and jam-packed, windowless tour vans in the hottest of summer months before it even recorded its first album.
    That debut album, Background, came out in 1993, but it was Hello, Bastards, released in 1995, that put Lifetime on the map. Their final, most groundbreaking release, Jersey’s Best Dancers is easily the band’s best and most influential work. It’s the album that summed up their purpose and mission as a hardcore band through honest, straightforward lyrics and their DIY ethic.
    Several bands, including New Found Glory, Thursday, Taking Back Sunday and Saves the Day, list Lifetime as a direct influence on their music. Saves The Day was even given the nickname, “Jersey’s Second Best Dancers” for the obvious impact Lifetime had on their music. In 1997, just after Jersey’s Best Dancers was released, Lifetime called it quits.
    Last week, Jade Tree Records released Somewhere in the Swamps of Jersey (the title taken from a Bruce Springsteen lyric) as the label’s 100th release. The album features three different versions (one re-mastered, one remixed, one live) of their crucial, out-of-print debut album, along with a handful of tracks from early seven-inch singles and compilation albums, including “Theme Song for a New Brunswick Basement Show,” one of their best-known songs. The album also comes with a 52-page, perfect-bound book of liner notes, lyrics, interviews and more than 40 rare photographs. Newcomers to Lifetime’s music would be better served by buying Jersey’s Best Dancers, or Hello, Bastards, but dedicated fans will find this release a treasure.
    Although the band officially called it quits in 1997, last August Lifetime played three well-received, long-awaited reunion shows and donated profits from these shows to charities such as The OUT Fund and The Nature Conservancy. In November, they announced three more reunion shows, then days later followed with an announcement that they had decided to reform.
    Since then they have appeared at the 2006 SXSW Festival, and will be playing at New Jersey’s Bamboozle Festival in May. They are currently teamed up with Shirts for a Cure, donating an exclusive T-shirt design to help raise money for underprivileged women with breast cancer.
    By inspiring a shift to express emotion and melodicism within hardcore, Lifetime may have helped keep the form alive and vital for the foreseeable future. In the liner notes of Somewhere, Norman Brannon, a member of several bands that played with Lifetime, expressed it best.
    “ Hardcore is not a background beat for you to move your dancing feet, it’s the life for those who love living,” he said.