The Visible Reminder
celebrating two decades of Volcano and Between the Heart and the Synapse
The Song Album
Title: Volcano
Artist: Gatsbys American Dream
Year: 2005
The Song Other Album
Title: Between the Heart and the Synapse
Artist: The Receiving End of Sirens
Year: 2005
The Story
Gatsbys American Dream took me like an infection. My initial exposure, when a friend introduced me to 2003’s Ribbons & Sugar a few months after its release, didn’t reach a critical load. That album was unlike anything I had ever heard before, but it didn’t quite stick, didn’t immediately leave its mark. How could it? There were no repeating parts, no use of the simplest and most effective means that music has of making memories: repetition.
Ribbons & Sugar, like most everything by Gatsbys, is largely through-composed, which is to say that its sections don’t repeat. You could, I suppose, label the distinct parts of Gatsbys songs as verses and choruses and bridges, but you'd have to strip those words of much of their meaning for those descriptors to be truly accurate.
There’s a little trick at play here that took me years to understand: Because of that lack of repetition, Gatsbys’ songs are short, their albums brief, and therefore, the repetition needed to dig into and absorb these rich compositions is the listener’s responsibility. Gatsbys respected their listeners’ time too much to repeat parts over and over, even if that’s what most listeners expect (and even if that's what record labels most certainly demanded). To fall in love with Gatsbys, you have to manufacture that repetition yourself; you have to listen to their records over and over again.
God, have I ever done that. Ribbons & Sugar didn’t click for me immediately, but it wouldn’t let me go, either. I found myself spinning back to it over and over again, even if I couldn’t quite fathom why, even when I couldn’t tell where one song ended and the next began. By the time my freshman year of college was drawing to a close in the spring of 2005, I was carrying a critical load. I was infected.
There is no cure, and I wouldn’t want one anyway.
If Gatsbys’ hyper-concentrated brilliance required repeated exposure to infect me, to worm its way into my brain and heart and soul, The Receiving End of Sirens needed only a moment. TREOS1 shared Gatsbys’ love of high-brow lyricism and deeply layered composition, but came not from the school of Lagwagon and Propaghandi but of Coheed and Thrice. Their songs were heavy, their verses intricate, their choruses huge, their outros triumphant. That was very much the sonic language I was speaking in 2005 and when friend-of-the-newsletter Bob shared the demos of “The War of All Against All” and “Dead Men Tell No Tales,” I was immediately hooked.2 I played those two tracks hundreds and hundreds of times on the chunk-ass wheeled iPod that carried me from my dorm to my classes and back again. (Ribbons & Sugar got the same treatment, pushing me closer and closer to that critical mass.)3
The day after I got home from that pivotal freshman year, I woke up and unpacked my things, and then I drove to Best Buy to pick up four albums: Ben Folds’ Songs for Silverman,4 Mae’s Embers and Envelopes,5 TREOS’ Between the Heart and the Synapse—the long-awaited debut that had been heralded by those much-loved demos—and Gatsbys American Dream’s Volcano, the band’s follow-up to the now-beloved-by-me Ribbons & Sugar.6 Those latter two albums began shaping my life immediately.7
In the months leading up to that late May day, my two best friends and I had been talking about starting a band. We had played together in a snot-nosed pop-punk/screamo act in high school8 and were looking to do something more serious and ambitious, taking inspiration from acts like Thrice, Taking Back Sunday, and The Sound of Animals of Fighting.9 And then we heard BTHATS and Volcano and decided to just do that. Of course, we couldn’t “just do that” because no one outside of TREOS or Gatsbys themselves could.10 Some shadows can’t be escaped.11 But we poured ourselves into those songs and that band, making some of the most honest art I’ve ever been a part of, and forging bonds that will last a lifetime.
Somehow it’s been 20 years since that all-important summer of 2005, when I’d wake up and read and write lyrics and listen to BTHATS and Volcano while reading their lyrics and liner notes and then drive to Borders (R.I.P.) to buy the next book referenced by Gatsbys then come home and sneak in a last bit of reading12 before heading to band practice for the night. My schedule has, uh, changed a lot since then,13 but I still spin BTHATS and Volcano with regularity. And why wouldn’t I? With two decades of hindsight, I can say with confidence that those are two of the three most important albums of my life. (Third Eye Blind’s self-titled debut is, fittingly, the third.)
It’s tempting to tie that longevity to nostalgia, and of course, that plays a part—I’m an elder millennial, so nostalgia has been part of my life since before I was old enough to experience it—but there’s so much more than that. I was desperately trying to find myself in 2005, and I was conducting most of my search through art. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I fell in love with TREOS and Gatsbys and Ursula Le Guin in that same summer. (Naturally, I came to Le Guin through the allusions to her work that are scattered across Volcano.)
Willa Cather wrote of being young and introduced to a work of art that changed her life, noting that it “introduced me to the world of ideas; when one first enters that world everything else fades for a time, and all that went before is as if it had not been.” I felt that way about Volcano and BTHATS in that summer of 2005. And I can’t remove or isolate the nostalgic, formative element of my love for these records, because you can’t remove the nostalgic, formative element of anything that you’ve loved for a long time. But I didn’t come to love these records because of nostalgia. I came to love them because I was searching in 2005, for who I was and the parts of the world I wanted to participate in.
Sometimes you find what you’re looking for.
Back in March, I flew out to Boston to meet up with a few friends and see TREOS on back-to-back nights, the band’s first shows in years.14 It was wonderful to see old friends in the crowd and old heroes on the stage. I struggle to open up sometimes—it’s frightening!—but, for all the isolated individual importance it’s provided me, this music that I love so dearly really does tie me to other people in a way that few things do.
Albums like BTHATS and Volcano are the sound of the things I can’t share, the feelings I can’t communicate, the words that I think but cannot speak. T.S. Eliot said that light is “the visible reminder of invisible light,” and, yes, that’s it for these two albums that I have loved so deeply and profoundly and personally in ways that I will never be able to share with anyone and yet have shared with friends and family and, in some ways, the artists themselves. What a wonderful gift that contradiction is.
J.K. Rowling may be a piece of shit, but she got it right when she put these words in the mouth of the headmaster of a school for wizards: “Ah, music … a magic beyond all we do here!”
In one of the essays from her 1978 collection The Language of the Night, my beloved Le Guin (who was writing about wizard schools while Rowling was still potty training) said that it was always easier to write about things for which you have criticisms, because what do you say about things that are flawless and perfect?
She’s right. (Of course she is.) And so there’s not much else that can be said. These albums are wonderful. They are the externalization of some of the best parts of me. If you’re here, in this weirdly personal place that I’ve created on the deeply impersonal internet, then it’s likely that you either already know those records or you already know me, but if you want to know either the albums or the author better, there’s only the one thing to do: Turn up your stereo and listen to two timeless releases from 2005. After a spin, who knows, you might know yourself a little better, too.
To Between the Heart and the Synapse, The Receiving End of Sirens, Gatsbys American Dream, Volcano, Ursula Le Guin, the summer of 2005, and old friends, I give my endless devotion, my profoundest thanks, and an infinite number of stars.
20 years later and I can finally confirm that the band pronounces the acronym TREOS as TREE-ose, not TREY-ose. When questioned about this by friend of the newsletter Carl Lavigne, author of the excellent Shut Up, I Love This Song, TREOS guitarist and vocalist Alex Bars admitted that the pronunciation doesn’t make sense considering the spelling. (I’m still going with TREY-ose.)
Tip of the hat, Bob.
Two other records that also got an unbelievable amount of play as I hoofed around Ann Arbor that year: Underoath’s They’re Only Chasing Safety and My Chemical Romance’s Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge. Was I painfully emo even though I’d never have admitted it? Of course! Did my sophomore year roommate and I pick our apartment partially because it was across the street from a cemetery and we were obsessed with “Cemetery Drive”? A gentleman never tells!
But yes, we did.
As long-time readers will know, I’m an even-longer-time fan of Folds.
I was late to come around on Mae. Weirdly, my primary initiation to their work was 2004’s Destination: B-Sides, and I only became a full-fledged fan with the 2005 release of The Everglow. Another feather in 2005’s very impressive cap.
It’s here that I’ll note that Volcano has my favorite album art of all time. The front cover, the back cover, the entire insert—all of it, perfection. Just remarkable. Of course, I was an archaeology major so, you know, the whole thing was very much in my wheelhouse what with the volcano and the archaic woodcuts and the angels and the serpents and what have you. I don’t think Gatsbys was specifically pandering to me in creating the album art (they did not know that I existed at the time), but they certainly hit the mark.
I still can’t shake how wild it is that Volcano and BTHATS entered my life on the same day. What a day!
None of that is meant to be condescending, by the way. We had a blast with that band, and our farewell show at the end of my senior year was as close as I will ever come to being a rock star: We packed the local Legion hall (a classic scene-kid venue, if ever there was one) and absolutely roared through a bunch of originals that our fans sang along to, played a handful of covers that our friends loved (my favorite: friend of the newsletter Dan joined us on bass for one song so that we could play Saosin’s “Seven Years,” whose high notes I couldn’t reach even at 17 years old), and then we got mobbed on stage (read: the floor) as we hammered out the show’s final chords. It was fucking awesome.
Tiger and the Duke was yet another 2005 release. What a goddamn year.
All of our songs had TREOS vibes and one song carried the working title “Gatsbys,” so we really did our best. In retrospect, mixing the length and scale of TREOS with the through-composition of Gatsbys proved to create a substantial barrier to entry for potential fans. Those few we had—all twelve of them!—freaking loved what we were doing, though. (One such fan later joined the band—big shoutout to Kemper.) Most everyone else forgot about us before I had packed up the drum machine and my heavily-taped mic. (Did I tape my mic like Nic Newsham of Gatsbys? You’re goddamn right I did.)
Substack won’t let me do a footnote to a footnote, so I’m just adding another paragraph here: When I joke about having 12 fans, I’m not really joking. When the band ended, friend of the newsletter and obvious-bandmate Kevin Ann Dye wrote a Myspace blog post (yup!) entitled something like “Thank you to all 12 of our fans—no really” in which she specifically thanked all 12 people who had been our diehards. I think about that post every few months and it makes me smile every single time.
Though they can be loosed! God, not enough people are going to get this joke about a niche band’s deep-cut track despite the fact that I was so happy to write it. It is possible that this is why my band that made lyrical references to [checks notes] Truman Capote novels, Winston Churchill speeches, John Keats’ gravestone (?!?), and the 1984 animated Transformers movie was not particularly easy to digest.
I’m pretty sure I ended up reading somewhere around 35-40 books that summer, most of them brilliant classics. What an incredible summer that was.
As that schedule indicates, I wasn’t working in 2005. By 2006, I had a job. And so 2005 was the last pure—and arguably purest—summer of my life.
Back in 2020, I was going to fly to California with some other friends to see a TREOS reunion that was, obviously, canceled when that year unfolded the way it did. When the band was unable to reschedule that date, I assumed that they’d never play together again. I cannot stress enough how happy I am to have been wrong about that.
Excellent read! Can totally relate.