When Chicago punks Rise Towards’s spirited third album, Siren Track Of The Counter Tradition, rewarded them with their first main chart success in 2004, nobody was extra shocked than the band themselves.
“Our only goal was just to sell enough records so that when we were home from tour, we wouldn’t have to get jobs,” bassist Joe Principe mentioned on the time. “That was the beauty of [being in a band]. But the longer we did it, more things just kept coming our way.”
Having first fashioned in 1999, Rise Towards have been long-established Windy Metropolis punk scenesters. Famend for his or her songs’ clever social commentary, they adhered to punk’s DIY values, initially selecting to stay a part of the underground, recording two well-received albums for the US indie label Fats Wreck Chords. Neither their 2001 debut album, The Unraveling, nor 2003’s Revolutions Per Minute, hit the Billboard 200, however they earned spectacular evaluations, with Rolling Stone proclaiming the latter title to be “easily among the finest punk records of the past decade”.
’Their religion in us was an eye-opener’
With their profile steadily rising, the band additionally got here to the eye of potential major-label suitors. Although initially cautious of constructing the leap, they have been impressed by DreamWorks, notably when Rise Towards found that the label supported their politically charged lyrics. As frontman Tim McIlwraith admitted, “Their faith in what we do and the fact they cared about stuff we cared about was an eye-opener.”
Accordingly, Rise Towards signed with DreamWorks, although throughout work on Siren Track Of The Counter Tradition, their new label merged with Geffen Information, who finally launched the album. Creatively, the band was granted carte blanche, and – in a bid to rid themselves of their pop-punk picture – they selected producer Garth Richardson to helm the recording classes. It was a strategic selection, as Richardson’s engineering and manufacturing credit included hard-hitting rock data corresponding to Alice Cooper’s Constrictor and Rage Towards The Machine’s incendiary, self-titled debut.
To the credit score of each band and producer alike, Siren Track… ended up ticking all the suitable packing containers. A winningly accessible mix of punk, hardcore, and anthemic pop, it discovered Rise Towards decrying social injustice on “The First Drop” and the livid, Anti-Flag-esque “State Of The Union,” however simply as convincingly tempering their aggression on melodic tracks coping with private points, corresponding to “Paper Wings” and the smoldering break-up track “Blood To Bleed.” Considerably, the tracklist additionally made room for the rousing “Give It All” and the unashamedly poppy, acoustic-based “Swing Life Away,” each of which swept into Billboard’s Different Songs Prime 40.
‘It hit a lot of people in a lot of different ways’
First launched on August 10, 2004, Siren Track Of The Counter Tradition initially offered modestly, although the band’s relentless tour schedule saved them within the public eye and gave the album the enhance it wanted. Rise Towards have been additionally eternally grateful that Geffen labored exhausting to advertise them at this significant stage.
“We weren’t calling every day asking them to get us the next U2 tour or whatever,” Tim McIlwraith instructed Punk Information in 2006. “But [Geffen] had seen we were autonomous and we got a lot of respect from them for that. At that point they really helped us out and that was when the record, to all intents and purposes, really started to do well.”
With band and label mutually aligned, Siren Track Of The Counter Tradition finally gate-crashed the Billboard 200 and went gold within the US, transferring round half 1,000,000 copies. The common attraction of the document’s key observe, “Swing Life Away”(which finally rose to No.12 on Billboard’s Different Songs chart), contributed considerably to this mainstream breakthrough, which Rise Towards additional constructed upon with the US Prime 10 success of “The Sufferer And The Witness.”
“I love ‘Swing Life Away’,” Tim McIlwraith mentioned, reflecting on the track’s chart success in 2006.
“It’s the graduation song, the prom song, the wedding song, and it’s the funeral song too. It definitely hit a lot of different people in a lot of different ways. I’m really glad that a band like Rise Against was able to do a song like that.”
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