“I WILL LEAVE THE ROOM IF YOU START PLAYING THE USED”

It is 8:13am and I have been listening to new records by Ceremony, Knocked Loose, and Anxious, which dropped the morning of this writing. I need coffee and my work schedule next week is a nightmare, which means the article slated for the Monday after might be late or I may need to take a week off. But I’m writing about the Used, which means that none of these material conditions matter, because it’s always 4 in the fucking morning and I’m watching Fuse.

A couple people have messaged me to say that they don’t exactly get the point of this series because they were never shamed for liking these bands growing up. I’m hoping that this article finally brings them around because there is no band that I get more shit for liking in 2019 than the Used. My partner has literally threatened to throw me out of the car if I ever put them on the aux. Their broader reputation runs the gamut from “washed up losers who should have broken up in 2005” to “absolute legends but only to people who non-ironically enjoy Twiztid and get unreasonably excited for sales at Spencer’s Gifts.” With that said, I’m here to set the record straight on the Used, a band that never got enough credit during their prime or now, and probably gets too much credit for their missteps.

UTAH– NOWHERE

Utah sucks. There’s no real other way to say it. Some of the more laid-back areas, like Cedar City, are pretty tolerable, and some of the landscapes are pretty, but it’s pretty much a hodge-podge of boredom, suffocating religious sentiment, and an overwhelming lack of fun things to do. My grandparents live in Hurricane (pronounced “hurry-ken” by locals), an rednecky little burg that sits at the outskirts of the St. George area, so I’ve been unfortunate enough to have spent a decent amount of time in Utah growing up. There are exactly three things to do in Hurricane: rent VHS tapes from the video store, wander around looking at the various animals, and go “plyg-spotting,” which is an activity where you go to the local Wal-Mart (the closest Wal-Mart is about twenty minutes away from anywhere that people actually live, so it’s a lengthy affair) and try to identify polygamists. Religiously insensitive? Maybe, but when you’re eleven and bored out of your mind, you’re not left with too many other options.

All of this to say, I can see where the members of the Used were coming from. They’re from the Orem-Provo area, which is pretty big but not exactly a hotbed of culture. And I just want to get this out of the way up front: kids from Utah who get into any form of alternative culture get into it hard. Talk to any 90s hardcore veteran and they’ll mention the Salt Lake City straight-edge scene in the same breath as Boston and Reno, insofar as it was populated by extremely militant kids who pretty much had nothing else to live for besides their cause.

One of those kids was named Blake Donner, who, in 1998, was a student at a high school for troubled youths. A recent convert to the then-popular Hare Krishna subset in hardcore (which honestly deserves a whole post unto itself, but check out 108 if you’re genuinely interested and go from there), he was determined to give up his material possessions and live a committed life. He decided to give a box of CDs to one of his classmates, a sixteen-year-old named Robert McCracken who had recently been kicked out of Timpanogos High School. That box contained records by Sunny Day Real Estate, Ink & Dagger, Converge, and Texas Is the Reason, among others. One-half of the musical basis for the Used was born.

(As a particularly sad post-script for that story, Blake Donner– who was a major member of Utah’s Food Not Bombs chapter and did vocals for the hardcore band Parallax– drowned in a Utah County tunnel in 2005, along with his girlfriend and two of their friends. Rest in peace.)

Around the same time, guitarist Quinn Allman, vocalist Jeph Howard, and drummer Branden Steineckert were all playing together in a band called Dumb Luck. Although they had a pretty strong sonic foundation, the songs themselves just weren’t there yet. If you listen to 2000’s self-released The Naked Truth EP, it’s possible to hear the echoes of Midwest emo (Elliott, Chamberlain, Knapsack) and post-hardcore (Quicksand, Sense Field, Shift) in the music, but it lacks hooks and Jeph’s vocals are of a fairly ugly post-grunge variety that drags the whole endeavor down.

Branden had been sending endless tapes to John Feldmann, superstar producer and vocalist of third-wave ska heroes Goldfinger, in an effort to get a deal, but all he got back was continual advice, one piece of which was to get a new vocalist. With Jeph having decided to switch to bass (his original instrument of choice) anyhow, the band decided to audition a rotating cast of comically bad vocalists before Quinn finally remembered a friend of his from high school that he thought might be right for the gig, Bert McCracken.

Bert, who had dropped out of high school and ran away from home shortly after Donner had given him that box of CDs, was in a pretty bad way. Working at Subway, living in various garages or on the couch of his girlfriend Kate, and cycling through endless belief systems– first he was a stoner, then he was Hare Krishna, then he was straight-edge, then he was a full-blown addict and alcoholic– he finally scraped bottom when he was arrested for possession of meth and his dad had to bail him out of jail. Back with his parents, he got the call to audition for Dumb Luck from Quinn and leapt at the chance.

The band gave him an instrumental cut of their song, “Maybe Memories,” a pretty enticing piece of post-hardcore fury, and Bert wrote some lyrics and laid down vocals. The band was so impressed that he immediately got the gig. Somewhere around this time, they changed their name from Dumb Luck to Used– because a lot of their friends said they felt “used” by them, see– and then the Used, because some random band from Boston had trademarked “Used.” They played in living rooms and cut a demo in a basement to little interest, but Branden was still sending stuff to John Feldmann. The minute that Feldmann heard the song “A Box Full of Sharp Objects,” he flew the band out on his own dime and started shopping them around to record labels, eventually settling on Reprise Records and beginning to record their self-titled debut.

A MATERIAL ANALYSIS

The very things that made the Used so irritating for many are the exact same things that endear them to me. In much the same way that a lot of the hatred for nu metal was rooted in classism and a hatred for the genre’s often white trash, blue collar, and/or trailer park fanbase, the Used kind of suffered from being put into a box. Their look was unfashionable even by the standards of the time, characterized by gaudy and gauche raccoon eye makeup, baggy and dirty black jeans, and festooned with greasy, long, dyed-black hair. Hell, even their frontman’s name— Bert McCracken?– is the most hillbilly-ass shit you’ve ever heard in your life. They were seemingly shit out by a major label system, but let’s be real– when you’re from Nowheresville, Utah, have problems with drugs, are consistently homeless, and are offered a way out by doing the thing that you love to do, how are you not going to take that deal as soon as you can?

It makes sense that major labels were excited by the Used. The early 2000s were a phenomenal time to be a heavy band with screaming. The commercial success of nu metal had created a weird gestation period in the music industry. Glassjaw’s Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Silence was a minor hit due to splitting the difference between nu metal and post-hardcore. At the Drive-In’s Relationship of Command, contrary to popular belief, was legitimately successful at the time of its release and would have been a career-making record had the band not imploded in short order. Thursday’s Full Collapse, the culmination of the past decade of basement hardcore packaged for a big-room audience, became one of Victory Records’ all-time best-sellers and ignited a large-scale major label bidding war.

At the same time, “MTVmo,” as it was called, was reaching a critical mass where it could no longer be contained by the underground the bands were coming from. In many ways the polar opposite of the macho posturing of nu metal and post-grunge, kids were falling head over heels for the heart-on-sleeve sensibility and melodic rush of records like Saves the Day’s Stay What You Are, Jimmy Eat World’s Bleed American, and Dashboard Confessional’s The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most, all of which were released in 2001.

Just four months prior to the release of The Used’s self-titled effort, Taking Back Sunday released Tell All Your Friends on Victory, which combined the catchiness and sensitivity of the emo-pop bands with the bloody-throated aggression and relentless energy of the post-hardcore bands. Music journalists began to hear the “screamo” tag bandied about– initially a handy term used to differentiate more roots-faithful emo bands like Saetia and You & I from the more soft-edged and friendly iteration proliferating through America thanks to the Get-Up Kids and the Promise Ring– and thought it appropriate to apply it to bands like Taking Back Sunday, Thursday, and even metalcore bands like Poison the Well (who at the time were poised to sign to Atlantic). Here’s one of the absolute weirdest examples of this trend— Jim DeRogatis simultaneously conducting solid interviews and woefully misunderstanding what either screamo or emo actually mean. This is the climate that The Used was about to enter when it was unleashed upon the world, and it seemed like the band took all the traction that had been created and slid full-force into instant success.

So if you ever manage to see that famous episode of The Osbournes where Bert shows up as Kelly’s boyfriend and elicit’s Sharon’s immediate distaste and disapproval, just imagine that it’s a metaphor for the Used’s impression to the world at large: uncomfortable misfits who were successful in spite of themselves, due to forces largely outside of their own control, and who were met with an almost universal disgust by the establishment and those who thought themselves the arbiters of common sense and taste.

“THE USED MADE IT AWFUL FOR ALL THE TRUE PUNK ROCK BANDS”

The Used is a fantastic album. I’ve listened to this band’s discography ad nauseam in preparation for this article, and gone back and forth on which record is actually my favorite, but at the time of writing, it’s their self-titled debut.

The first thing that sticks out is the production. The Used sounds spectacular, in a way that is almost unbelievable when you look at Feldmann’s resume, which includes hyper-compressed and fussed-over messes like blink-182’s California. In contrast, The Used shines with a three-dimensional depth and spaciousness, every bit of the mix getting proper room to breathe and providing an absolutely immersive and immediate experience.

Each element of the band’s sound is at its best here. Quinn Allman, who would eventually be relegated to embarrassingly unoriginal and simplistic hard rock riffs, shines as an inventive genius, mixing an undeniable flair for pop-punk hooks with an impressive knack for the post-hardcore noodling that would come to define bands like Circa Survive, as well as an unshakeable sense of both when to press the gas pedal for maximum heaviness and when to pull back and maybe throw in an acoustic guitar for extra texture.

As for the rhythm section, Jeph Howard’s bass work is exceptional; ringing out clearly in the mix, he never feels the need to stick to root notes and goes wild all over the neck, adding counterpoints and melodic sophistication to the songs that allow them to enter places of resonance that I don’t think the genre had really reached at that point. Branden Steineckert is one of the unsung heroes of this record, adding tasteful fills and controlling the atmosphere to a pitch-perfect degree, and I have to talk about the snare tone on this record, because this is one of my favorite snare tones ever committed to tape. It’s on par with the sound captured on Snapcase’s Progression Through Unlearning and the self-titled Vision of Disorder record– it’s that crystal-clear and kinetic.

Finally, we have the band’s secret weapon in Bert McCracken. I think at the time there was a tendency to relegate him to the same nasally category that the genre was known for, but that undersells both his range and his commitment to the material. Bert is an emotional bulimic on this record, singing every song with so much force that he often threw up from the intensity during live shows. For one thing, he has a shockingly wide breadth of performance– he can hit gorgeous high notes with precision that singers like Anthony Green and Craig Owens would later take to even greater heights, but his straight singing voice is so passionate, often hitting points where he’d yelp and break, leading you to believe that he might not be capable of the screaming that the heavier bits of the record would require. That’d be a mistake, because in my humble opinion, Bert has the most powerful screaming voice of the era, a full-toned and cement-solid thwack to the face that takes me off guard no matter how many times I listen.

The songs, of course, are almost universally perfect. “Maybe Memories” is a great choice for an opener, being both the first song the band ever wrote together as well as an excellent statement of purpose, beginning with a lazy palm-muted bob before assaulting the listener with an extremely well-written volley by turns both tuneful and throat-shredding. It’s immediately followed up by the big hit from this album and most likely the band’s most lasting legacy, “The Taste of Ink,” which expertly mixes a staccato bounce verse with an instantly anthemic chorus and never deviates, rather continually building intensity with each new verse and chorus, Bert becoming more and more frantic as the song goes on (admittedly difficult, since he starts the song off already in sicko mode). “Bulimic” caps off the initial run of songs with a more straightforward, conventional structure that’s nonetheless compelling (try to get “goodbye to you” un-stuck from your head after listening– I can’t).

From there, the album alternates between blasts of unremitting aggression and more sensitive and intimate moments, universally united by the intensity with which the band attacks every song. “Say Days Ago” and “A Box Full of Sharp Objects” are two of my favorite songs by the Used, the former a genuinely unsettling purge of inner demons that utilizes what is probably Bert’s most unhinged performance on the record and Quinn’s most eerie and off-kilter guitar work to strong effect, and the latter a straight-up banger about Bert’s nascent drug addiction that remains a perennial fan favorite and show closer thanks to its extremely physical heaviness. Elsewhere, “Poetic Tragedy” overlays Bert’s most accomplished singing with guttural screaming as well as the first appearance of the band’s knack for contrasting soft and loud to stunning effect, “Buried Myself Alive” is a masterful slow build that manages to somehow overcome one of the most cringe-inducing lyrics on the record (“If you want me back, you’re gonna have to ask nicer than that”) by sheer force of will, and “Blue and Yellow” is a gorgeous ballad about the disintegration of Bert and Quinn’s friendship that holds up as the best of the Used’s softer moments.

The back half of the record used to be a place where I kind of tuned out, but repeated listens have yielded a lot of surprising satisfaction– “Greener with the Scenery” is an offbeat R.E.M.-by-way-of-Sunny-Day-Real-Estate monster, “On My Own” is a last-minute acoustic reprieve from the chaos that functions very well as a penultimate track, and “Noise and Kisses” and “Pieces Mended” are both by-the-numbers classic Used tunes that benefit greatly from the band’s commitment and the production. The Used also contains what is perhaps one of my favorite hidden tracks of all time, “Choke Me,” which is both undeniably the heaviest song the Used ever made and low-key might be a “true” screamo song. I can’t exactly parse what the fuck “Choke Me” is about– I think a botched drug deal? Or maybe a comparison between a doomed relationship and a drug addiction?– but that’s honestly kind of irrelevant when it goes so goddamn hard, and caps off the record perfectly.

The Used was a pretty immediate stratospheric success, to the point that just a year later the band released a retrospective CD and DVD, Maybe Memories, that eventually went platinum. Maybe Memories both includes some of the band’s finest B-sides and demos– “Just A Little,” “It Could Be A Good Excuse,” “Zero Mechanism,” and “Alone This Holiday” all could have slotted onto their self-titled with relatively little tinkering– and a snapshot of the Used as a live band par excellence, sounding damn near identical to the studio recordings, as much as only one guitar and only one vocalist would allow.

In the time between their self-titled and their 2004 follow-up, In Love and Death, the Used went on tour with New Jersey miscreants My Chemical Romance, who were touring off their Eyeball Records debut I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love and would shortly also sign to Reprise for their 2004 follow-up Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge. The relationship between the two bands would be both fraught and fruitful throughout the mid-2000s: My Chem would snake the Used’s sound engineer, Bob Bryar, to be their drummer; Bert would contribute some screams (“DO YOU HAVE THE KEYS TO THE HOTEL?”) to My Chem’s “You Know What They Do to Guys Like Us In Prison,” reportedly about Bert and Gerard Way kissing; the bands would collaborate on a bizarre and kind of awful cover of “Under Pressure” to benefit victims of the November 2004 hurricanes; and the two bands clearly were an influence on each other throughout the recording of their respective sophomore records, with My Chem becoming more raw and emotionally untethered, and the Used tightening up the screws and discovering a different sort of pop sensibility.

Of course, there was also the famous friendship between Bert and Gerard, as the two legendarily addictive personalities became drinking and drug buddies on tour and fueled rumors of a possible relationship between the two. Eventually, Gerard went sober and Bert didn’t (at one point, Bert’s drinking was so bad that he collapsed on stage and ended up being diagnosed with acute pancreatitis), which slowly introduced a rift between the two that culminated in Bert holding a sign up next to My Chem’s stage on the 2005 Warped Tour discouraging people from attending their shows. There were lots of hurt feelings and songs written (“The Sharpest Lives” from The Black Parade is about Gerard and Bert’s partying days, while “Pretty Handsome Awkward” is a petty kiss-off to Gerard) and neither party currently talks to the other. It can’t have helped that the Used tacked the cover of “Under Pressure” onto the deluxe edition of In Love and Death, as the bands had agreed prior that neither would use the song for profit.

None of that ugliness had quite happened by the time the Used were recording In Love and Death, but late in the recording process for the album the band received a crippling blow: Kate, Bert’s ex-girlfriend and muse for many of the Used’s songs, had overdosed and died while pregnant with his child. Most of the songs had already been tracked, but the songs now carried an overbearing sense of trauma, especially since some of the songs, most obviously “Cut Up Angels,” were so clearly about Kate and Bert’s damaged relationship. John Feldmann reportedly dragged a suicidal Bert to the studio and forced him to write a song as therapy, which resulted in the heart-wrenching, spacious ballad “Hard to Say,” which is both a musical highlight and emotional lowlight of the record.

For a while, I would have probably said I preferred In Love and Death to The Used, but after a week of heavy listening, I admit that In Love and Death falls short in a few small ways that just keep it from reaching the same heights as the self-titled. First of all, the production seems just a little less potent than the debut, slightly more compressed and constrictive, which almost forces the songs to be written around the production rather than vice versa. The songs themselves, while often good, lack the visceral edge of tracks like “Say Days Ago” and “A Box Full of Sharp Objects,” corralling themselves into more straightforward structures that feel a bit more contrived and deliberately aimed for radio play. Plus, the sequencing of the album is a bit rough; it’s not that the songs aren’t consistently good, but the record is divided into two halves– the screamy pop-punk bangers in the first and the soppy ballads in the second– that makes the record lack the variety of The Used, despite the appearance of late-album heavy hitters like “Sound Effects and Overdramatics” and closer “I’m A Fake.”

Still, though, that iconic hanging heart on the cover has become an extremely popular tattoo for good reason– many of these songs still stand up as the Used’s best. “Take It Away” is a fittingly punchy opener, announcing the Used’s more polished and sanded-down intentions from the get-go. Singles “I Caught Fire” and “All That I’ve Got” split the difference between “The Taste of Ink” and “Blue and Yellow,” combining the pained vocals and theatrics of the band’s past with a more mature pop songwriting that pays off in spades (along with some of Quinn’s best guitar work). “Let It Bleed” and “Listening” are throwbacks to the debut in the best way, even with the new constraints on their song structures, thanks to Bert’s masterful vocal control. Every song on the album also benefits from the rhythm section’s A+ performances, which is a bit more urgent than on The Used and supply the songs with plenty of infectious bounce.

This might be a hot take, but my favorite song on the album– and maybe my favorite song the Used ever wrote– is “Cut Up Angels,” an extremely weird song about sexual dysfunction in a dying relationship. For one thing, the entire song is dissonant as fuck– not just in the jauntiness of the music contrasted with the desperate and bleak lyrics, but in the slightly-wrong vocal melody contrasted with the ascending chords in the chorus. Bert is often a hit-or-miss lyricist, but the lyrics on this one are stellar– “If we cut up the bed, well then we’d have nothing left” and “I lost my head, you couldn’t come/This lust to my brain almost feels just like a gun” are both evocative and evincing sketches of a relationship that’s fallen apart in every possible way. Bert has described the end of his and Kate’s relationship as extremely toxic, and having been in a similar one to what he’s described, I can say that this song is disturbingly accurate.

As for the ballad-filled back half, I think the post-punk/goth influence on several of these songs isn’t recognized as much as it could be, especially in the very pretty slow-build masterpiece “Light with A Sharpened Edge,” which sounds exactly like a song the Cure would have written if they’d formed in 2001. “Yesterday’s Feelings” is a drunken, smeary farewell that’s honestly just pleasant to listen to, and “Lunacy Fringe” is often name-checked as one of the band’s best ballads, for good reason– it’s one of the catchiest songs in the Used’s repertoire. In fact, I think the ballads are strong enough that if they hadn’t been broken up by “Sound Effects and Overdramatics,” they would have functioned better as a stretch that showcased the band’s softer side. “Sound Effects” itself is a really strong heavier song, but I can’t help but think it should have been placed differently (maybe switch it with “Cut Up Angels”). Meanwhile, closer “I’m A Fake” is one of the band’s strongest moments (well, if you ignore the legitimately terrible spoken word poetry at the start of the song, which matches the stunning lows of Pete Wentz’s spoken word bits on “Get Busy Living” and “Twenty Dollar Nosebleed”) and the closest they come to replicating the magic of their debut, just a little bit faster and more frantic. It almost doesn’t even fit in with the rest of the album, with Bert sounding more desperate than ever, but I love it even so.

“I’m A Fake” also functions as a pretty good cap of this period of the Used’s career, as Bert vomits all of his dissatisfactions with the trappings of alternative fame– people constantly fake-complimenting his tattoos and incessantly asking about his personal life– and wraps it in a neat package where he announces that he’s his own biggest fan and renounces the interrogations of authenticity by declaring that he’s fake anyway. That was the essence of the early records by the Used, and foreshadows the cancer that would befall their later records– who gives a shit if we’re fake or real? Who gives a shit if we have credibility? Not us, as long as you look at me.

LIES FOR THE LIARS

So they kicked out Branden, which honestly baffles me, seeing as without him, they literally would not have ever been signed or experienced any of their success. They’d eventually replace him with Dan Whitesides of New Transit Experience (who Bert and Quinn had previously called the best band in Utah). It makes sense, though, since Branden was the only straight-edge member of the band and the rest (especially Bert) were pretty clearly descending into some of the nastier depths of their vices. In any case, on 2007’s Lies for the Liars, they enlisted Dean Butterworth (who’s worked with acts as disparate as Morrissey and Good Charlotte) to drum, and the result is the most confusing and frustrating album of their career, telegraphed by the truly dreadful album art.

Look, I understand that The Black Parade was a game-changer and a massive commercial success, but Lies for the Liars is such a weirdly naked attempt to copy that record’s shift from scare-quotes “emo” to canonized, capital-R Rock that it bogs down even the record’s most truly successful moments. “Pretty Handsome Awkward” is a hard rock anthem par excellence, nearly reaching the heights of Eighteen Visions’ butt rock phase, “Hospitals” is a restlessly catchy and energetic, and “Paralyzed” is maybe the most successful of their experiments on this record, a dancey boogie rock track with a sinister piano undertone and even a few horns. “The Ripper” isn’t a bad opener either, fast-paced and filled with the ripshit Quinn guitar noodles of old.

Every other song on this album, however, betrays a growing predilection for, um, “rawk,” I guess? “The Bird and the Worm” incorporates strings for seemingly no purpose beyond pretending to add depth to an empty, shapeless mess of a song, “Earthquake” is embarrassingly boring and pointless, and the rest of the songs range from forgettable hard rock garbage (“With Me Tonight,” “Wake the Dead”) to misguided attempts to capture their former glory (“Liar, Liar (Burn In Hell)” which, I swear to GOD, actually uses “liar, liar, pants on fire” as a hook) to, well, genuinely fuck-awful ballads (“Find a Way” and “Smother Me” send chills down my spine in a bad way– just absolutely disgusting songs).

I think that Lies for the Liars deserves its own section inasmuch as it serves as a dividing line between eras of the Used. If you were willing to stay on board after this abject mess, you’d probably be okay with the direction the band was soon to go. If you, like me, couldn’t abide this garbage after the genuinely exciting one-two punch of their debut and follow-up, well, I’ve got bad news for you– it doesn’t get better from here.

PURGATORY

2008-2015 was a pretty bad time to be the Used. The zeitgeist in rock music started to shift from the twists on pop-punk and post-hardcore that had defined their rise in the early-mid aughts to the more extreme descendents of their sounds– something that was still in the same family tree, but ultimately much more “metal” or more blatantly pop. The Used weren’t rock stars anymore, eclipsed by the “boy bands with breakdowns” like Attack Attack, Asking Alexandria, and The Devil Wears Prada, as well as the neon Disney punk of bands like Cute Is What We Aim For, Boys Like Girls, and All Time Low. Who would have thought that when Killswitch Engage, Senses Fail, Unearth, and Saosin were achieving commercial peaks in their prime, that they’d eventually lead to this world? Definitely not the Used.

I know people who are into the Used probably want me to go in-depth on 2009’s Artwork, which is sometimes regarded as their artistic peak (Alternative Press even called it the best album of their career), but like, you guys, it’s so fucking bad. They just clearly don’t even care. Why should I? There’s no hooks, no energy, no passion– I have no idea what happened to Quinn’s guitar work, which has collapsed into some sort of hard rock gunk, and Artwork is almost certainly the nadir of Bert’s vocal performance. The cover of the record is so self-consciously edgy– an arm with the title carved into it– that you’d expect it to be their heaviest album, but literally nothing is going on. During the press cycle for this record, Bert took to describing its sound as “gross pop,” an absolute insult, seeing as that term most accurately applies to the twists on pop structure and dalliance with truly uncomfortable subjects that defined In Love and Death. It’s fitting that this was their last record for a major label– despite the creative freedom offered to the band, it was clear they were out of creativity, and the lackluster public response to the records betrayed that.

Even by the time Bert got sober for 2012’s Vulnerable and decided to sort of develop a political conscience for 2014’s Imaginary Enemy, it seemed clear that the Used had completely run out of ideas. No amount of experimenting with electronic or hip-hop elements could disguise the fact that they no longer knew how to write a chorus. For these two records the band had jumped ship to Hopeless Records, ostensibly because they offered more transparency and a more honest business relationship, but if you compare these albums to the records being made by Hopeless’s most successful band of 2010-2014, the Wonder Years, it seems more like Hopeless took pity on a flagging band because they had the critical and commercial capital to do so.

It’s also worth looking at the Used’s peers in Senses Fail, who had also ascended to stardom based on two all-time classics, Let It Enfold You and Still Searching, before succumbing to sonic stagnation on Life Is Not A Waiting Room and The Fire. However, at the same time as the Used was experiencing the lows of their career, Senses Fail was sneakily reigniting theirs, by noticing that the mainstream zeitgeist had shifted and that they could make a bigger splash by focusing on the renaissance of hardcore-influenced pop-punk that was dominating the underground at the time (and regarded early Senses Fail as a cultural touchstone). In 2013 they released the heavier-than-ever Renacer and, lo and behold, they were signed to the massively successful indie Pure Noise within two years and experiencing an extremely healthy amount of underground success that continues to this day.

Meanwhile, the Used kicked out Quinn Allman in 2015. The fact that they were still together at all was truly bewildering, and anyone still paying attention to them had to wonder how much longer they could really last.

TRAUMA

2017’s The Canyon is a record that, by all rights, has no reason to exist. You’ve got a band that was pretty much a nostalgic touring unit by this point (hell, the year prior, the Used had embarked on a very successful 15th anniversary tour playing only material from their first two records). Ostensibly hollowed out by the exit of their founding guitarist, and experiencing a dearth of any critical or commercial acclaim, the last thing anyone wanted to hear was an 80-minute double album from a band that seemed to have no tricks left up there sleeve. Well, there are two things to consider.

First, Quinn was replaced by Justin Shekoski of Saosin. Although on a personal level, I have to imagine some things aren’t quite right (he was kicked out of Saosin after 12 years for “no reason,” and last year the Used kicked him out and put a restraining order on him for threatening violence and suicide, which is extremely concerning), it’s pretty hard to deny his creativity and talent as a guitarist, both when you listen to Saosin’s foundational Translating the Name EP and the riffs he came up with for The Canyon. (For the record, Shekoski was replaced in the Used by Joey Bradford from Hell or Highwater.)

Secondly, one of Bert’s best friends, Tregen Lewis, committed suicide after going off his anti-depressants for a week shortly prior to the recording process for The Canyon. There was an extra layer of tragedy to the situation, as Tregen was the person who had given Kate the drugs that she overdosed on in 2004. This event informed the entirety of The Canyon, giving it the vibe of an extended therapy session, and accordingly Bert’s most impassioned vocal performance in years.

The Canyon is, weirdly, kind of a masterpiece. I don’t think I’ve given it enough time to really sink in yet, but from the unsettlingly intimate acoustic opener “For You” to the bone-snapping heaviness of “Selfies In Aleppo” to the full-throttle beauty of the album’s only (!) single, “Over and Over Again,” this album is an extremely poignant and gorgeous ride through the band’s shattered psyche.

The Used is assisted in this endeavor by production from Ross Robinson, who made it a point to make this record sound like it was recorded live. At times, the album admittedly sounds a bit lacking in sonic depth, but the experience is so immediate and visceral that I can forgive it.

Isolating individually impressive moments in this album is nearly pointless. It’s one that demands a sit-down listen. Unfortunately, I don’t think this album exactly reignited the Used’s career, but their career as a touring band definitely isn’t going to suffer from an album full of deep cuts like this one. I will say there’s all sorts of weird detours on this record (there’s like, rapping, kind of, on “The Quiet War”). Shekoski stacks jazz chords on top of flashy solos on top of palm-muted filler riffs that collide with the honestly kind of funk-influenced rhythm section to create something that almost reminds me of mid-period Dance Gavin Dance (not in a bad way, mind you).

And of course, this might be Bert’s most potent lyrical moment, filled with excellent details like “I see the bass guitar in your room/PJ’s Ten on the wall/Just what did it take to trigger the end?/I could’ve been there/I miss you, my friend” and “I stood with you through How It Feels To Be Something On/Tom played my favorite song.” It’s private enough to be uncomfortable, personal enough to immediately connect. I can’t recommend this record enough; even if you don’t like it, I think it’s worth it listening to at least once.

REDEMPTION

I’m still not quite sure what’s going on with the Used in 2019, with lineup shuffles and personal obligations contributing to a sense of unease within the band (Bert lives in Australia, meaning it’s a long commute to tour in America). I know the Used headlined a tour with support from Glassjaw to promote The Canyon, and I know that they’ll probably be around and kicking in time for a twentieth anniversary tour in a few years. If they can make something as good as their first two records, or hell, something that can stand up to the burst of inspired therapy of The Canyon, I might be able to convince one or two of my friends that the Used deserve a second look.

In the meantime, I wish the members well, and I want to thank the Used for proving that the much-maligned cohort of MTV scene bands weren’t just spoiled suburban brats. They could be just as fucked up as the lost kids they appealed to, and they showed that it was possible to healthily work through your demons in music. Standing in stark contrast to other bands of their era who seemed to dwell in the negativity, and use it to make money, the Used always seemed like a band that balanced the cathartic melodrama of their music with an earnest sense of honesty, something more concrete than the vague promises of “hope” and “positivity” that others might pay lip service to. Bert’s always been extremely open about his addictions and the traumas that informed them, and although the music might have suffered as time went on, I’ve always gotten the sense that he’s a pretty solid and genuine dude who’s made mistakes and has done his best to atone for them– as a testament to that, he’s been married to the same person, Ali Schneider, since 2008, and has two children with her, which means he got clean and has stayed clean for seven years strong to keep his family and his band together, and I have nothing but respect and admiration for that. Am I embarrassed to be a fan of the Used? Their painful mid-period records aside, no. Keep on keeping on, homies.

NEXT WEEK: Like I said before, I have a pretty wack work schedule, but if I manage to get an article out, it’s gonna be about Senses Fail. Stay tuned, kids.