“Woodwell” gave the record a healthy heaping of the band’s jazz influences, removing Werner from the equation and allowing the band to offer up a track that could have passed as a vocal-less demo of a Promise Ring song. On “The Sweetness and the Light” and “Woodwell,” the latter being a full-on instrumental piece, Saetia showed a level of restraint that had been entirely foreign in hardcore. It gave the songs the feeling of a jump-scare-that, at any second, you could be accosted by something unnatural and alarming. And when the band shifted into a quieter passage, he’d forgo singing for a borderline spoken word approach. His voice was shrill, sitting atop the mix and accosting the listener with piercing shrieks meant to disarm and disorient them. Plenty of hardcore bands were built around their singer’s ability to goad, or maybe intimidate, the audience into singing along, but Werner opted for something more impressionistic. This line was indicative of what Werner was reaching for with Saetia. It gave the song’s first minute a sense of uncertainty, as all its jagged angles poked and prodded, while vocalist Billy Werner yelped out an opening line that only a 20-year-old could commit to: “I bleed onto a page for you.” Behar and fellow guitarist Adam Marino rarely fell into the discernable roles of rhythm and lead guitarists, instead playing around each other, like they both showed up to practice with ideas and decided to just fold their riffs into one another. When the band followed him in, they made the kind of squall that was impossible to ignore. “Notres Langues Nous Trompes” which, when translated, means “our languages deceive us,” opened with a cloud of feedback that slowly filled the speakers, making drummer Greg Drudy’s four quick hits on his ride cymbal feel like a warning siren alerting the listener of a coming storm. The first song on Saetia encapsulated everything the band had hinted at with their demo, but with a more pronounced confidence in their approach.
The songs he wrote weren’t structured in the traditional pop form, as he’d play a riff for only a measure or two then leave them dangling out in the open, unresolved and unexplained. There was a bit of jazz undercutting Saetia, with their name being a reference to Miles Davis’ 1960 album Sketches of Spain, but it was Behar’s avoidance of hardcore tropes that cemented their forward-thinking approach. Saetia’s frantic compositions-written predominantly by guitarist Jamie Behar-pushed the band into unfamiliar territories that had yet to be integrated into punk. By the time Saetia headed to Washington, DC, to record their debut album over one long weekend, the band’s sound had taken root. At the time, they were still considered a hardcore band, but they’d retroactively get the screamo tag applied to them-just as some of their influences would, too. When Saetia released their nine-song, self-titled album in 1998, they didn’t so much invent a subgenre as much as they defined one that had long felt nebulous. It would be one of the first true documents of screamo, one that, even now, people are still trying to match. In 1998, five NYU students called Saetia made an album that would fit this mold.
While some of those records sound dated now-or worse, quaint-others remain powerfully singular, documents that have yet to show their age. But there was a charm to all that confusion. And when the 90s hit, and metalcore claimed its place of prominence in the scene, every album, be it by Integrity, Earth Crisis, or Acme, sounded convoluted and messy when committed to tape. Void and Siege unknowingly laid the groundwork for fastcore, and the poor engineers tasked with recording those records clearly couldn’t make heads or tails of it. It’s true of hardcore progenitors in the scene’s first wave, from Black Flag on down to the Bad Brains. Those albums became artifacts, the kind that saw a bunch of (usually) teenagers articulating things based on impulse instead of know-how. What made punk rock so exciting in its early years was that everything felt like an accident. The Shape of Punk revisits some of the seminal albums turning 20 years old in 2018, tracing their impact and influence on the future of the scene.
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