or better or worse, we here at Stylus, in all of our autocratic consumer-crit greed, are slaves to timeliness. A record over six months old is often discarded, deemed too old for publication, a relic in the internet age. That's why each week at Stylus, one writer takes a look at an album with the benefit of time. Whether it has been unjustly ignored, unfairly lauded, or misunderstood in some fundamental way, we aim with On Second Thought to provide a fresh look at albums that need it.

Sometimes, it’s by process of elimination that I find myself choosing what to listen to on a weekday evening. If I’ve got twenty minutes to kill before a Simpsons or Kids In The Hall rerun, chances are I’ll throw on something brisk (and, more often than not, forgettable). If it’s a bit too early for me to leave for class, I might try to improve my mood through the psychedelic pop of Love or Os Mutantes, or else let off some excess nervous energy with two or three Bad Brains songs. More often than not, though –- as seems increasingly to be the case given my ambivalent pre-college-graduation relationship with much of my typically collegiate, typically not-quite-oddball-enough-to-be-that-odd record collection –- I can’t decide what to listen to. All the old punk and post-punk records I have seem to merge into one indistinct blur of dated rage; most of the recent stuff I own, which I’ve usually burnt myself out on not too long ago, seems mild and lackluster. This might be the time when I dip into my MP3 collection to listen to some mainstream hip-pop track of the moment, but more often than not I fail to glimpse the crystalline moment of nuts-and-bolts production genius I once saw in it (witness the Neptunes, who I’m willing to defend against the current tide of naysayers, but whose work seems to me like one of those is-the-pie-missing-a-slice optical illusions: when considered from the right angle, it’s brilliant, when not, absurdly shallow). So, when all else fails, it’s to my most recent musical love: early-90s chaotic emocore released on the rife-with-mystique, fairly pretentious Gravity label, specifically Antioch Arrow.

Say what you want about the bad bands (and bad fashion) created by those noble souls who dared to follow in the footsteps of this ex-Heroin San Diego band (The Locust, for certain, are an aquired taste, and, even then, one best savored rarely), but they fulfill a certain function for me; they illustrate a certain state of mind that nothing else quite does adequately. From the moment when the low-key studio-chatter that begins “Angel’s Lawn” yields to an explosive flood of off-time drumming and caustic moans, it’s clear to me that I’ve found just what I’m looking for; midway through there’s an astonishing breakdown in which the song sheds its skin and the music proceeds to cannibalize itself, then a triumphant riff cuts a swath through it all (the only catch is that it’s played on a scratchy-sounding keyboard) and I’m in, well, a musical heaven of rapid-fire delights I haven’t felt since hearing the first Ludacris single -– all this is conjured up by the 1:20 first track on Antioch Arrow’s merciless collection of EPs and live cuts that encompasses their discography, save for a farewell album that treaded too far into gothic territory for many. Aside from a good deal of twisted vocal melodrama, though, you’ll find none of that here, just good, clean, thought-provokingly chaotic fun.

Each track on the initial EP seems devised with a rewind-hungry, bewildered “what the fuck was that?” response in mind. One moment vocalist Aaron Montaigne is letting out a nervous, quavery whine that evokes prepubescent fury, stammering and trilling out indecipherable lines like “Twenty-four thousand drowning in virgin-in-in-in-in-ity” and “She was found out like a goddamn gummy worm,” the next he’s growling like David Yow’s younger, nerdier brother; a distorted burst of drum-machine opens the skittery “Chaos Vs. Cosmos,” and just as soon we’re hearing the scantiest of bass solos and some near-yodeling from Montaigne before things come to a sudden halt and the next track begins. It could feature a menacing bit of wiry, unaccompanied guitar that yields to a rambling bass-and-drums thrillride and atavistic vocal bleats (“This Great Wall”), or just as easily a trembling, almost perky series of keyboard-and-guitar figures that resemble the work of a band of primitives trying to careen their way through a synth-pop cover on cheap equipment (“The Blessed Test”) while intermittently giving up and playing different songs at once.

What follows on the CD (actually recorded earlier) isn’t as immediately striking, but we soon understand that the band sacrificed something in the way of coherence for dramatic effect; as a result, more conventionally pissed-off tracks like “Conspiring The Go-Go” and “The Fixed Orbit” and feature muscular, rhythmic playing, less zaniness among their chord progressions, and occasionally muffled, cascading shouts; since three-fifths of Heroin are present on this release -– though Montaigne served as their drummer –- it’s understandable that these songs often resemble the work of that band. For fans of the band’s later work, though, it’s basically a dream come true; I, however, think I prefer the second phase of Antioch Arrow’s existence, if only because I’m such a big fan, these days, of lunacy. And lunacy we get on the disc’s extras: after some embryonic and sloppily-recorded -– albeit in a pretty good way -– tracks from a split 7”, which occasionally reveal the method behind the band’s madness, and a hilarious soundbite from a certain well-known documentary on the Los Angeles punk phenomenon, some muddy live tracks appear that, musical merits aside, are phenomenally effective at conjuring up the atmosphere of the Antioch live experience. I’m guessing that you can imagine what that’s like (hint: tons of feedback, a song dedicated to all those big, tough boys in the crowd, and another [falsely, to my knowledge] announced as “Pee-Pee Hiney!”).