Sounds From The Junkshop #119 - Amen

 

"There's fear in your valley/Get on your skateboard and split" - Amen - California's Bleeding

It seems weird to think it now but there was a brief time in the early noughties when Amen genuinely did seem like one of the most vital US rock bands around. Rising up during the nu-metal era, they managed to not only get good press in the usual places of Kerrang! but even the NME were briefly featuring them regularly - I remember in one review, they were describing Amen's frontman Casey Chaos as the new Jello Biafra, high praise indeed.

Me? Well, I hate to admit it but Amen were one of those bands who by rights I should've liked but I never quite got my head around. And it wasn't for lack of trying - I had all three of their albums in my CD collection at some point and I saw them live on a few occasions (they toured with the Wildhearts quite a bit as the two bands were good friends which will become relevant in a few paragraphs' time). Their sound was the classic US hardcore punk fed through a nu-metal filter (Ross Robinson produced their first two albums) with some vicious political anger in the lyrics making a nice change from the witless likes of Limp Bizkit et al.

I'm not sure...I think my problem with Amen was that for all their vitriol and undeniable hearts in the right place attitude, they were just a bit too heavy and bludgeoning for me. I mean, look, as one casual look back through the history of Sounds From The Junkshop will make clear, I've always had an ear for the heavier end of music right back to my love of the Wildhearts, Therapy? and Love/Hate way back when but despite owning a few Metallica and Maiden albums and a couple of ones by the likes of Slayer, Venom and Napalm Death, I tend to be the sort of guy who just likes a bit of melody and a decent shoutalong chorus hook in there to let the attitude break through rather than burying the message under a landslide of distorted riffs and death-piggy grunting. It's why I've always preferred the Dead Kennedys to Minor Threat, the Angelic Upstarts to Discharge and Motorhead to Megadeth. And I think Amen were probably just on the wrong side of that line to really become one of those bands who graduated from me quite liking to becoming a proper fan of.

The group gained a sizeable underground following here in the UK with a number of singles, starting with 1999's Coma America, breaching the lower end of the Top 75. As I mentioned earlier, I clearly thought enough of them to buy both of the group's first two albums but I think they both ended up going to the record exchange after about a year or so - both of them had a good three or four crackers on them but you couldn't help feel towards the end that the band were starting to repeat themselves a bit.

It was the group's third and (to date) final album Death Before Musick which I'd probably rate as their strongest as it showed them starting to take a slightly more measured approach to things with the like of California’s Bleeding, Hello (One Chord Lovers) and Money Infection being probably some fo their strongest stuff to date but by this time, their heyday had kind of been and gone and they'd already been thrown overboard by their original label Virgin after their sophomore effort We Have Come For Your Parents (kudos for the Dead Boys reference there) undersold. Columbia would pick them up off their proverbial life raft for Death Before Musick only for that label to then do a mass roster cull the following year due to the change in music trends towards downloading which Amen didn't escape. The group would limp on for a few years before calling it a day in 2009. Casey would reform the band in 2014 and reportedly a new album was being worked on but it all went a bit quiet on that front after a year or so and nine years on, we're still waiting.

As with a few bands we've featured here, Amen are really most notable for what various ex-members went on to do afterwards - bassist Scott Sorry would, of course, go on to join the Wildhearts for their two late noughties albums and guitarist Rich Jones (who'd joined Amen from the Black Halos) would move on to the Yo-Yo's, the Loyalties, Ginger Wildheart's solo band and can now be found in Michael Monroe's band as well as back in a reformed Black Halos which puts him in the position of having been a part of two of the albums in the Nite Songs Top 10 Albums of the Year for 2022! Sorry and Jones would also reunite in the excellent Sorry & The Sinatras in the early 2010’s. Elsewhere, drummer Shannon Larkin (who'd previously been with Ugly Kid Joe of all people) is now with Godsmack while his replacement Luke Johnson would move on to the noughties line-up of the Wonder Stuff and still works with Miles Hunt occasionally to this day (not as odd as it might seem - his dad was the Stuffies’ manager in their commercial heyday). Elsewhere, guitarist Piggy D would move on to working with Wednesday 13 on his early solo albums post-Murderdolls and is now Rob Zombie's bass player while on a similar note, Murderdolls guitarist Acey Slade also had a blink-and-you'll-miss-it spell with Amen in their later days.

I dunno...maybe I need to give those Amen albums another listen. Like I say, they were always a band I really wanted to like so maybe time'll have been kind to them. Certainly, at least they provided a much needed voice of genuine anger and unrest in the mass of nu-metal numbskulls and for that at least they deserve some credit.