Various Artists – Tribute: The Smoking Popes CD

Suburban Home / Double Zero 2003

I don’t know if it’s always been this way and I just never noticed, or if there’s some sort of new trend going now, but it just seems like there are more and more tribute albums coming out every month. And so many of them are doing it so badly, that I feel like I need to maybe lay out some guidelines to how to do it right. No, I won’t keep you wondering until the end: this is one of the albums that succeed.

Number one, a tribute album allows rockstars to publicly thank bands, especially incredibly popular bands, and show that even rockstars were once music geeks too. This is sometimes actually sincere.

Number two, it’s often interesting to see what bands were influenced by the Tributee that you wouldn’t have expected. This is far more interesting if you know the bands already before you get the tribute.

Number three, you can take a band that is relatively unknown but defunct, and help them to achieve their proper historical context by having today’s popular bands show how much they were influenced by them. Generally, this is more sincere.

Number four, it’s fun to hear renditions of the songs that are fascinatingly different and delivered in the style of the band doing the cover. This is where most tributes fall apart: the bands spend so much energy trying to duplicate every guitar line and vocal styling of the original, either through leftover fandom, having spent too many hours singing along in their teenage bedrooms, or just plain laziness, that the songs wind up just a step up (or sometimes down) from a bar band cover. It’s even worse when a band sounds like they’re just phoning it in - like their agent told them they had to do it, so they learned the song just before playing it, and don’t even understand what emotion they’re supposed to be portraying.

And the fifth, and probably most important thing, is that by taking the songs out of the context of the original recording - by allowing others to perform them - it can bring to light just what incredible songs they were to begin with.

For number one, I have no doubt that the bands appearing here are thankful to The Smoking Popes, but the whole stepping-down-from-the-pedestal thing rings a little hollow since I don’t know who at least half of the bands are. And since most of the bands that I do know were already so obviously influenced by Smoking Popes (especially Death on Wednesday), there is very little surprise factor to qualify for number two. Many of the slots seem to be filled up with Double Zero recording artists, which I guess points to a sixth reason: to get exposure for unknown bands by attaching them to a name the listener already knows and loves. I wish they’d bothered to get a more diverse palette of bands to choose from, though it is refreshingly odd to see the former band members of The Smoking Popes (lead singer, Josh Caterer, and brother/guitaris Eli Caterer, now in Duvall, and drummer Mike Felumlee, now solo) doing covers of their own songs. I also wish that they’d gotten more of the big names of melodic emo-punk (Get Up Kids, Alkaline Trio - where Felumlee did a short stint recently - or even Dashboard Confessional) to admit that Smoking Popes influenced them and all-but created this genre almost fifteen years ago. But whatever. Maybe it was a budget thing.

But on number four, this album shines. Though many of the apples fall pretty close to the tree, there is a heartwarming earnestness that manages to make the songs sound brand new - not a single performance here is phoned-in. And on the songs that take a much larger leap - especially Grade’s punchy and thrashing version of “Days Just Wave Goodbye” and The Ataris legitimately moving piano-ballad emo on “Pretty Pathetic” - would make amazing songs, even out of context. There are also two more acoustic hidden tracks not attributed to any band, though I think they may be more from The Ataris, that are some of the best on the album.

Which brings us to number five, where it simply shoots off the charts. I think I had forgotten how good the Smoking Popes were. I think I had forgotten what incredible and moving songs they wrote, and how infectiously catchy the tunes are. Especially when I heard them played by other bands, I fell in love with these songs all over again. Or maybe I really paid attention for the first time. I’m not sure. All I know is that now, despite the lack of big names of music to tell me to, despite the lack of surprising versions, I am remembering to go back and love The Smoking Popes. And on some level, that means that this album has succeeded in what I guess is the seventh way: completely separate from one through six, I love to listen to it.

- Michael Houghton