My Vitriol Album Recommendations

The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

My Vitriol

[#] Finelines (2001)

Uniquely (unfortunately) singular.

Reviewed October 13, 2024

Oh, My Vitriol. You are the posterchildren for the idea that you have your whole life to write your first record and six months (or maybe two decades) to write the second. Far be it from the mousy monolith of guitars you'd expect from the shoegaze label that constantly gets applied to it, Finelines is a heavy, gothic-tinged 48-minute masterwork with the gutsy screams and sighs of singer-guitarist Som Wardner on all but four of its tracks. For a debut, it's unusually realized. This is the kind of album a band makes three albums in, but a couple of UCL grads knocked it out in two years, laying the foundation for 2000sgaze as a movement—and that was it. 23 years and counting, no followup ever materialized.

The backstory aside, what makes Finelines so distinctive is how much musical muscle the band displays on it. While Som's singing and Seth Taylor's shimmering, rumbling guitarwork conjure the storm, Ravi Kesavaram's tireless, pummeling drumming keeps the studs nailed to the floor. It's another reason I don't find the shoegaze tag altogether fitting; the vocals are always present, never buried, temperamental like all good rock vocals are, and these guys blast out walls of sound like the effervescent "Always: Your Way", the ominous "Ode to the Red Queen", or the fittingly psychotic "Losing Touch" like absolutely nothing. I hate to belabor the point—one instant classic is more than any of us ever fucking accomplished—but these guys really could've been one of the best-selling rock bands in the world.