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Reborn again
Jeremy Enigk finds new life after Sunny Day with the Fire Theft
BY MATT ASHARE


After the meteoric rise and sudden implosion of Kurt Cobain in 1994, the then three-year-old quest to discover the next Nirvana from among an ever growing number of young, grunge hopefuls took on the unsettling air of a bitter tragi-comedy. That one might stumble upon such an heir apparent in the Pacific Northwest seemed as unlikely as it was absurd. But then the implausible suddenly seemed possible with the 1994 emergence of the willfully eccentric, emotionally consuming foursome Sunny Day Real Estate. They’d already laid the grass-roots groundwork for the kind of rabid devotion the young Nirvana had enjoyed by releasing a series of limited-edition singles on their own One Day I Stopped Breathing label, each featuring tracks with numbers for titles ("Song #1," "Song #2," etc.). So when Sunny Day inked a deal with Nirvana’s old label, Sub Pop, and released the cathartic, guitar-driven Diary in ’94, it seemed as if the stage truly had been set for the band’s frontman, singer/guitarist Jeremy Enigk, to step in as a more centered spokesperson for an alienated alternative nation.

Seeing the band live, upstairs at the Middle East and then over on Lansdowne Street, where they opened for Kurt’s old pals the Jesus Lizard, only confirmed such suspicions. Here were a band with a throttling rhythm section (drummer William Goldsmith and bassist Nate Mendel) that was accurate enough to rival the explosive force of Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, and a singer who bled empathy as he poured his smashed soul into cryptic shards of broken verse. Sunny Day didn’t sound like Nirvana — that job was left to lesser bands like Bush and Stone Temple Pilots. Indeed, the combination of Enigk’s soaring vocal outbursts, Daniel Hoerner’s intricate guitar refrains, and self-searching yet hopeful lyrics like "The mirrors lie/Those aren’t my eyes/Destroy them/Raise my hand/Reflected in savage shards/A new face/A soul reborn" (Diary’s "Seven") brought to mind an Americanized, post-hardcore, punk-inflected U2. Perhaps even more than Hole’s Live Through This (Geffen), which also came out in 1994, Diary was an album with the power to heal the wounds left festering in the wake of Kurt Cobain’s suicide.

But within a year of Diary’s release, Sunny Day were no more. In what remains a subject of controversy — albeit a somewhat tired one — Enigk announced his born-again conversion to Christianity and set to work on what would become a fully realized orchestral solo album, 1996’s Return of the Frog Queen (Sub Pop). And Goldsmith and Mendel signed on as Dave Grohl’s first Foo Fighters rhythm section. Sub Pop did cobble together a homonymous Sunny Day album for release in 1995 (fans know it as both "Lp2" and "The Pink Album"), but at the time it seemed like little more than a cruel taste of what might have been.

The band did reconvene without Mendel for two more Sub Pop studio albums that did nothing to diminish Sunny Day’s standing as one of those crucial bands whose influence on the underground had far outweighed their record sales: 1998’s How It Feels To Be Something On and 2000’s The Rising Tide. A live album, Live (Sub Pop), came out in ’99. But the early momentum that might have catapulted Sunny Day beyond a loyal cult audience had been lost. Instead, like a handful of other mid-’90s bands (Jawbreaker and Jawbox, to name two), they can be credited with (or blamed for) planting the seeds for the emocore explosion of the last few years. In the meantime, Enigk and Goldsmith opted to make a decisive split from their past in 2002 by leaving Hoerner to form the Fire Theft, who will be playing this year’s Phoenix/FNX Best Music Poll party next Thursday.

In a pleasant twist, Mendel took a leave from his Foo Fighters duties to participate in the recording of the Fire Theft’s homonymous 2003 debut on Rykodisc. (Mendel continues to perform with the band when his Foo Fighters commitments allow.) As a result, The Fire Theft isn’t nearly a big a departure from Sunny Day as Return of the Frog Queen was. If anything, it seems a conscious attempt to split the difference between the lushness of Enigk’s solo recordings and the powerful guitar surges of Sunny Day. Which begs the question, why even bother changing the band name, especially when it wouldn’t be the first time Sunny Day have carried on with only three of the original four members?

"We just had to let Sunny Day go," Enigk explains over the phone from his Seattle home. "I can’t get too specific because I don’t want to hurt anybody. I just think it was time for us to set Sunny Day down. And for us to try to move into a different era of our lives. We had a chance with Sunny Day to do something, and we sort of kept it at the same level for 10 years, and I started to feel really old in it. I wanted to feel fresh and new. That was kind of the spiritual reason behind quitting Sunny Day."

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Issue Date: May 28 - June 3, 2004
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