Artist Analysis: Chokebore
Hi, welcome to the first in my series of "Artist Analyses," where I take a look at the discography of an artist or band. For a smaller discography like this one, I'll try to go through all the main albums, but for a larger discography, I might only select highlights for brevity's sake. Anyway, without further ado, let's get right into this
Chokebore is a band from Honolulu, Hawaii, which then later moved to be based in Los Angeles. They were mostly active in the mid 90s to the early 2000s. Their most successful releases tended to be some odd mix of slowcore, indie rock, and a touch of noise rock, though this would vary from album to album as seen later. As a part of the Amphetamine Reptile label, or AmRep for short, they released 5 albums, 1 live album, and several EPs. I'll be covering all the stuido albums and the live album, but I won't be touching on the EPs, with one small exception. Let's begin with their debut album, Motionless.
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Motionless
Chokebore began life as a post-hardcore band mixed with indie rock and maybe a touch of noise rock. While they would maintain parts of this aesthetic on later releases, particularly the indie rock and noise rock, they also slowed things down tremendously on albums after their debut, Motionless, released in 1994. As such, this album is something of an oddity in their discography, still being somewhat depressive, but having a post-hardcore edge later albums just didn't have.
In all honesty, I find this album fairly uninspired, and don't think that they found their sound completely at this point. At this point in time, their songwriting and lyrics were rather underdeveloped. A surprisingly large amount of the songs mention blood and bleeding as a lyrical motif, but not really to great effect, so in a sense it just sounds kind of repetitive and uninspired. The songs meanwhile, trend to the shorter side, with most hovering around the 2-3 minute mark. As such, they aren't as developed as they could be I feel. Some of them have really solid ideas, but then just don't do much interesting with them.
The flipside to this is that the songs that ARE longer, such as Nguyan, Line Crush, and Sadavia are more fleshed out and developed, and thus better in my opinion. There are hints of later Chokebore in here too, with Sadavia and Cleaner in particular being slower and less aggressive. They would fit in on albums like Anything Near Water, or maybe A Taste for Bitters. Sadly, nothing comes close to the genuine brilliance of the opener, Shine, which despite being short, opens the album on a legitimately ominous and foreboding note. It's a driving, yet brooding song, with a chaotic guitar solo to close it out. In 2 minutes this song does quite a bit. This is another one that might fit on later albums.
The last major thing to note about this album is that it is rather lo-fi. It's not produced very well, and while I sometimes like the lo-fi aesthetic, here I don't think it works incredibly well. Later albums sound better mostly, and are better for it. Overall this isn't a bad debut, but it's far from their best. They would go on to do much better I feel, and while their later works don't really fall under the post-hardcore umbrella, they tend to be more enjoyable, sadder, and more cathartic. Besides, if I want to hear a post-hardcore record, I would reach for a different band, maybe Unwound or Lowercase. Anyway, solid debut, but not great, fairly one note and repetitive. For fans only, 6/10.