The Promise Ring
Nothing Feels Good

THE REVIEW

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.