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Rating: You might prefer their debut, 30° Degrees Everywhere, but the horrible recording quality negatively affects the overall quality of the album. Nevertheless, the second album, Nothing Feels Good, works well to discuss a small but great band from the '90s. Considered amongst the most important "godfathers" of current emo, Promise Ring are overall one of the most beautiful realities of '90s American indie, at least in my opinion, when it comes to their first two albums.
The most appropriate definition for Nothing Feels Good is "shambolic punk", meaning fast, melodic music, a direct descendant of '90s Californian punk, yet also incredibly irregular, melancholic, and above all "childlike": it almost seems as if the singer Davey Von Bohlen is singing 11 nursery rhymes rather than real songs, where he repeats the same phrase (or the same two or three phrases) throughout the track with his unmistakably shrill voice.
It's the free spirit of a child that adorns Nothing Feels Good like a kaleidoscope, giving each track a different atmosphere: thus, if Is This Thing On is pure melodic punk, Red and Blue Jeans takes on an almost post-rock character with its neurotic mood swings; Make Me A Chevy is very close to New Wave, and A Broken Tenor is so off-kilter it could feature on a Pavement record. All this without forgetting the various ballads that close the album (Pink Chimneys, Is This Thing On, Forget Me), once again a decidedly atypical expression (it's 1997, and most of Emo is still to come!) of how Promise Ring understood Punk.
Tracklist Lyrics and Videos
05 Make Me a Chevy (02:33)
Make me a Chevy because an old Chevy made me.
And a young one makes me a Chevy.
Where would I go and how do I explain your body to the rest of my day.
I'm not as good as the interstates are I just can't take you that far.
Maybe Dick Clark and Davey move a car
but not as good as the interstates are.
I can't take you that far away.
So stay.
08 Raspberry Rush (02:34)
Down the ferry, our eyes eager for Indians,
down the ferry with wild Irish you never know where you are.
And you never know our eyes, eager for Indians.
Down the ferry with wild eyes even lately.
Where you're wearing a dirty coat of sound.
11 B Is for Bethlehem (03:15)
Your neck is craned a lazy quarter of the distance down your back
creating a reason for the blood to go there.
To know now my only veins are your hands across my back where you're resting.
Where you rest broke from the sins of our shoulders to struggle and end.
Run its motors to waters and everything follows.
Cried at the funeral because you can go anywhere to be hallowed by thy name
and mine name ours.
I'm dying to try to stop the wind,
leave the leaves left and leave to be hollowed by thy name and mine name ours.
It's hours to be where b is for Bethlehem where Jesus was a fisherman.
I know he starts and finishes men but I Don't know why.
Jesus was a fisherman,
fishing men from the devil hands,
so the devil was made red to live a damned life.
And the red in your face is touchable to the blues and the Muscles in a memory.
Where I have lost my voice
and I smell like paste again where we'll be resting,
when we rest.
My bends bend my anchor to pull people out of the bible
to stand in the rain and be where b is for Bethlehem.
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