Kiss the Bottle & Travelers

Two songs, both alike in dignity...

These one have been paired up before. They both appeared on a comp called Music for the Proletariat:

Allied Recordings arranged these bands alphabetically, placing J Church and Jawbreaker side by side. This seems fitting. There’s a kinship between these bands, and not just because they once shared a drummer. They don’t sound identical, but they’re the sort of bands you’d mentally pair together. Both come from a tradition of punk that was a bit more thoughtful and sentimental. In its day, the correct word would’ve been “emo,” but that no longer seems like a nice thing to say about someone.

Jawbreaker is clearly better known, and this would still be the case even if they’d never swung and missed at fame with Dear You. Blake Schwarzenbach seemed to be universally regarded as this scene's the poet laureate for a good many years—and for a good many reasons. 

J Church had a respectable following, but I doubt anyone was into them without also being really into Jawbreaker. The video file I’ve included for “Kiss the Bottle” has almost half a million views. The song has been covered by several bands, including the Foo Fighters. As for J Church’s “Travelers,” I had to post it to YouTube myself.

Both songs offer a bleak landscape, but with just enough youthful romanticism to let you feel a bit dreamy about being down and out. “Travelers” contains fewer verses, but there’s a strange turn at the end that, for me, elevates this one beyond simply being a description of despair: But I had to walk away / convince myself that I'm above this / Three AM and I start to feel annoyed / Like the show around Christmas time I watched when I was a kid / with an island inhabited by broken toys.

As advertised, it's not a contest... but I find myself rooting for the underdog here. I feel like J Church got chalked up as a band for people who just couldn’t get enough of Jawbreaker. But in this instance I feel like they both sketched out their own drawings of the same model, and their results are very much their own—and very much worth a listen.