20 years of Alexisonfire's Watch Out!
Revisiting the last ubiquitous moment in Canadian DIY
Alexisonfire’s success is a strange and uniquely Canadian phenomenon. The post-hardcore act from St. Catharines, Ontario spent the entire first leg of their career struggling to fill small bars in the US, but played their Canadian farewell show in an NHL-sized hockey arena. Our Country’s relatively artist-friendly grant system and protectionary broadcast laws occasionally make it possible for homegrown talent to flourish in this weird way. Still, arena status for a band whose vocals are half-screamed is an abnormality anywhere. The “emo” explosion in the mid-2000’s, mixed with a rare set of cultural circumstances, offered AOF the type of magic opportunity we’ll probably never see again.
In 2004, ALexisonfire were a relatively young band trying to do things the old-fashioned way. According to guitarist Wade MacNeil, they spent 300 days on tour each year between the release of their 2001 self-titled album and their sophomore effort Watch Out!. This hard work, combined with an iconic and highly syndicated video for the song “Pulmonary Archery”, earned the band cult status in Canada.
In America, they were playing skateparks, or opening four band tours supporting slightly bigger acts, like pre-Colors era Between the Buried and Me. International success eluded AOF, but they didn’t let it stop them from trying.
The band’s earliest material is an energetic, if not entirely cohesive, take on what groups like Underoath and Thursday were doing around the turn of the century. The second record sees them expand their range beyond the chaotic thrashing of their direct peers. According to vocalist George Pettit, during the writing process for Watch Out!, AOF was “hugely influenced by [early 2000’s] emotive indie and ambient rock, so [they] attempted to inject a little bit of [that] into their songs.”
I'd never seen the record through that lens before, but it makes a ton of sense. Watch Out! peels back the metallic post-hardcore sound of their earlier material in favour of a more lurching, atmospheric, loud/soft kind of thing. The songs are also better structured. They aren’t entirely conventional, but most of them have choruses and bridges, whereas the self-titled record takes a more free-form, part by part approach.
The clean sung vocals of Dallas Green feature much more prominently on this record as well. On the self-titled, Green’s voice serves primarily to inject melody, while Pettit’s screams do the heavy lifting. Green shifts to become the de facto lead singer on much of Watch Out! Pettit mostly provides dynamic emphasis – the bulk of his work comes during the chaotic loud parts, while Green handles the verses and hooks.
The band apparently considered eliminating Pettit’s role completely as they shifted to a more mellow and melodic style. I wonder how much the success of bands like Thursday and The Used, who’d almost entirely phased out screaming by this time, factored into that idea. Keeping Pettit around was the right move, though. His interplay with Green and McNeil is one of Alexisonfire’s hallmarks, and arguably something they mastered over their contemporaries.
In a weird, butterfly effect kind of way, this entire blog might not exist if Pettit left the band. Music with screaming was anathema to me until AOF’s 2007 follow-up Crisis started getting radio play on local stations. I had a crisis of conscience hearing “Boiled Frogs” for the first time. I still remember sitting in my basement scratching my head. “Music with screaming is gay” I thought to myself, “so how can this Alexisonfire song be so good?”
It was a deep question for the 17-year-old mind to ponder, kickstarting a lifetime of artistic discovery that’s led me to spend my 30’s exploring important topics like the cultural significance of brutal slamming death metal. One of the first steps along that path was buying a copy of Watch Out! from HMV, smoking a shit-ton of reggie in my backyard, putting the CD in my Walkman and having my mind completely blown by its visceral antagonism.
It’s funny to think how this relatively conventional, subdued post-hardcore record felt so extreme. Nowadays, I put it on when I need something a bit lighter than my normal diet of abrasive horseshit. At the time, it opened my boundaries and helped me connect with the scene kids I met in college, who put me onto harder music by proxy. Without AOF, I would not have found Hot Water Music, which means I’d miss the glory days of Title Fight, and likely never get into hardcore. I shudder to think what kind of stuffy, self-important indie rock I’d be fawning over if I never bought this album.
Watch Out! also introduced me to the concept of struggling with mental health, something I was intrinsically aware of but never heard articulated so bluntly. The lyrics on this record range from poignant and insightful, (“Happiness by the Kilowatt”) to meaningless and fun, (“Hey It’s Your Funeral, Mama”) to painstakingly preachy {“White Devil”). AOF approach everything earnestly. Sometimes it leaves you scratching your head (do we really need a punk band’s humourless opinion on wait times in Canadian hospitals?). Still, the introspective tracks on here helped me examine my relationship with my own mind in ways I never had before. I think AOF deserve credit for how they tackle those subjects, especially when their peers were swamped in morose, overly romantic infatuations with their own suffering.
Watch Out!’s more polished and accessible sound didn’t exactly impact the American market like AOF hoped it would, but in Canada, the band catapulted to new levels of success. The record debuted at number six on the Billboard Canadian Albums Chart as its singles received radio airplay and heavy rotation on MuchMusic.
This was the last great era of Canadian popular media, when CANCON rules still protected our cultural ecosystem and made it possible for DJs and program directors to take wild chances. A few years later, Corus Entertainment decided it wanted to become a national media conglomerate and started suffocating independent programming across the country.
After 15 years of buyouts, layoffs and mergers, Canada’s broadcast landscape is all but stripped of its quirky local identity. The odds of a subculture band achieving the same mainstream crossover as AOF seems practically impossible. While Alexis play reunion shows on the same stages as Pantera and Wu Tang Clan, today’s DIY acts face venue shortages, increased travel restrictions and a gutted media landscape. Things are getting worse, too. We unfortunately can’t relive the weird, wonderful, wild world of 2004, but we can appreciate the music it produced.