Lync were only around for two years, just a blip on the timeline. In the brief window between late 1992 and fall 1994, the Olympia, Washington, trio released four 7"s, three compilation tracks, and their lone LP, the beloved These Are Not Fall Colors. That’s the sum total of their official output, save for a six-track demo cassette that never reached beyond their friends around town and scenesters they met on Econoline jaunts up and down the West Coast. If Lync had called it quits before completing their only full-length, they might be remembered no more vividly than scores of other groups that spent a year or two in the DIY trenches before disbanding, leaving behind a few pieces of wax as the only evidence of their existence.
But with this whirlwind of an album, Lync articulated something exceptional: a blurry expression of youth, fleeting and ineffable. There was something else in the record’s inchoate swirl, too, if you listened for it: a proposal for where rock music might go next. Still—and this is a big part of the record’s approachable charm—their designs were hardly as grandiose as all that. These Are Not Fall Colors is not a manifesto but a personal statement, the sound of a fistful of wrinkled notebook pages covered in blurry blue ballpoint. Marked by an evident lack of calculation or self-consciousness, the record wasn’t an attempt to set any kind of bar; it was a simple bloodletting, wild and joyous and pure.
Olympia, a smaller town located an hour southwest of Seattle, had been an incubator of independent music since the early 1980s. That was partly thanks to Evergreen State College, a public institution, founded in 1967, whose freeform methods attracted restless thinkers from all over. But it had even more to do with the efforts of Calvin Johnson. A Baltimore native, Johnson had moved with his family to the region in 1970, when he was 8 years old. Despite Olympia’s relative isolation, he discovered punk in its very earliest days. By 1978, still a high-school student, he had his own show on KAOS, the fledgling Evergreen College radio station, and in 1982 he launched K Records, a cassette label with a quirky, homespun aesthetic.
K began as an outlet for music by Johnson and his friends—bands like Mecca Normal, Girl Trouble, and his own Beat Happening. The sound of the label was lo-fi by default. Early releases were recorded straight into a boombox; Beat Happening tracked part of their second album, 1987’s Jamboree, on the porch. The label’s scrappy feel was partly a function of Johnson’s tastes, partly a function of necessity. They Xeroxed sleeves and colored them by hand because it was cheap; they used stick-figure drawings because they were unpretentious. When other punks were festooning their boots with spikes and chains, Johnson had a pink bandana tied around his ankle. (“This guy’s a kook,” his friend Ian MacKaye recalled thinking.) At 1991’s International Pop Underground Convention, a six-day festival that definitively put the Olympia scene on the map, Johnson threw fistfuls of vegan-friendly candy into the crowd.
At the center of K’s aesthetic was an inextinguishable innocence, a sincerity summed up in a letter that Johnson wrote to the New York Rocker in 1979, when he was just 17 years old. “I know the secret: Rock’n’roll is a teenage sport, meant to be played by teenagers of all ages—they could be 15, 25, or 35. It all boils down to whether they’ve got the love in their hearts, that beautiful teenage spirit.”
By the early 1990s, K had become a hub in an international network of musicians, artists, and zine-makers. They had forged links with like-minded folks in Japan and the UK, and had found kindred spirits in Washington, D.C.’s Dischord, swapping artists and sharing tours. Shielded from the glare of Seattle’s grunge boom, Olympia’s scene was flourishing, developing its own idiosyncratic character. (“One of the reasons I kinda was pretty heavy-handed about having us be from Issaquah is I didn’t want to get pigeonholed with either Seattle or the Olympia thing,” Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock would later say. “You know, the Seattle music scene, i.e. grunge or whatever, was a little more straightforward rock or metal, and Olympia seemed to get a little stranger.”) The riot grrrl movement had its roots in Olympia, where Bikini Kill and Bratmobile got their starts. Another young man with strong ideas about teen spirit also briefly lived in Olympia before he moved to Seattle and became world-famous: Kurt Cobain even wore a stick-and-poke tattoo of the K Records logo on his forearm.
All the while, new labels like Kill Rock Stars, Yoyo Recordings, and Punk in My Vitamins were springing up to accommodate the growing number of bands in town. “You’d just walk down the street and talk to people and meet all these people,” Lync’s Sam Jayne would later recall. “People would come from out of town… to play a show, and they end up staying there for a week because there’s nothing else to do. It was really transient, and there were lots of kids that were scenesters… It was a total network of kids that were crashing on each others’ couches and moving from one town to the next.”
It’s easy to look back today and think of this era as a monolithic movement. But terms like “grunge” and “Pacific Northwest” (or, more frequently, “Seattle”) were just metonyms for other forces impossible to pin down. In 1992, punk and what today is called indie rock were in flux; the scene was a tangle of ideas, musical styles, and social networks. Hardcore, pop punk, emo, screamo, white-belt, pigfuck, metal, thrash, sludge, powerviolence, riot grrrl, indie pop, lo-fi, alt folk, alternative, college rock, and yes, even grunge—they all overlapped, feeding off one another even when they were at odds, and Lync, who refused to pick a lane, reflected the beautiful chaos of it all.
Sam Jayne, James Bertram, and Dave Schneider were teenagers when they formed Lync. There is very little documentation of their early years as a band; their debut appearance seems to have been on the October 1992 cassette compilation This Is My World, on Seattle’s Excursion Records, alongside local bands like the straight-edge Undertow and the similarly NYHC-inspired Brotherhood (featuring Greg Anderson, later of Sunn O)))). Lync’s placement on 1993’s Julep: Another Yoyo Studio Compilation, with groups like Heavens to Betsy, Slant 6, and Kicking Giant, earned them a mention as “up-and-comers” in that October’s SPIN. A Seattle scene report published in the inaugural issue of Punk Planet, in May 1994, noted, “Three good things about Olympia—Unwound, Mary Lou Lord, and Lync. I sure can’t think of anything else.” (Clearly, the inter-city rivalry was real.)
Its rarity notwithstanding, Lync’s 1993 demo cassette, Codename is not a particularly auspicious debut. The audio is tinny, the timekeeping ramshackle. Jayne’s voice sounds like he’s singing through the wrong end of a telescope, Schneider’s drums are just a cracked glaze of crash cymbals, and it’s difficult to make out Bertram’s bass at all. Stylistically, the six songs are a mix of by-the-numbers emo and pop punk, with some jangly garage rock thrown in for good measure. “Lightbulb Switch,” sung from the perspective of a boy who can’t reach the lightswitch, has a yelpy viridity that suggests the Dead Milkmen covering Shel Silverstein.
Lync’s February 1993 session with Pat Maley at his YoYo studios yielded sharper sound and clearer vision: The three-song Pigeons EP situates them halfway between the impassioned pop punk of Jawbreaker and the tortured post-hardcore of their scene-mates Unwound (technically from Tumwater, just down the road from Olympia). Slow and brooding, “Pigeons” riffs metaphorically on the extinction of the passenger pigeon, Jayne’s voice shifting between muttered spoken passages and the raspy sing-shouting that would become his trademark; the peppy “Electricity,” obliquely about the ecological cost of hydroelectric power, wouldn’t have sounded out of place on the Bay Area’s Lookout! Records, where Green Day got their start.
If those lyrical themes sound awfully emo, the music also occasionally waded a few too many steps in that direction; in “Friend,” Jayne’s voice breaks as he shrieks, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” the raw wounds of teenage angst rendered just a smidgen too performatively for comfort. It’s clear that Lync were still finding their sound. “We had our influences and I don’t think we could even step out of them for a second to see what those were,” Jayne later observed. “Like, I had no idea what kind of music that Lync was making. And somebody would try to explain it to me, and I’m like, ‘I don’t know what that is.’”
Lync recorded again in late 1993, this time with Nation of Ulysses’ Tim Green at the Red House, an unassuming Olympia studio that would turn out records from Bratmobile, Karp, Unwound, and Sleater-Kinney in its brief run. They were getting closer to the sound of their album—thickening the guitars, alternating between ringing open chords and thorny patches of dissonance. On “Two Feet in Front,” a 1994 single for K’s International Pop Underground series, they approached their arrangements first like glassblowers, drawing out elegantly elongated tones, then blacksmiths, hammering bent chords till sparks flew. “Lightbulb Switch” reappeared on the B-side, this time as a frenetic two-minute blast of double-time hardcore.
In May and June 1994, Lync set up at John & Stu’s Place, in Seattle, with Phil Ek in the producer’s chair. A former grocery store, the studio was the place of grunge lore. Green River, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, and TAD had all recorded pivotal albums in previous incarnations of the space. It was also the site of Nirvana’s first recordings, two of which would end up on Bleach. It’s striking to think that Ek, just two years into his career behind the boards, was recording Built to Spill’s There’s Nothing Wrong With Love at the same time he was making These Are Not Fall Colors. The two bands may have had overlapping histories (in 1993 and 1994, Doug Martsch recorded a number of songs with Calvin Johnson, one with Bertram and Schneider as his rhythm section, that were later released on K as The Normal Years), but the albums bear zero resemblance to one another. Where There’s Nothing Wrong With Love is all layers and light—close-harmonized vocals and clean-toned jangle filigreed against Martsch’s incandescent soloing—These Are Not Fall Colors is dense and humid, sticky as the browning leaves in a compost pile.
“B,” the album’s opening song, might as well have been the work of a different band than the one that had recorded those earlier 7"s. It begins with a gust of feedback and a spidery, dissonant guitar figure; Bertram’s bass enters, briefly teasing a reassuringly consonant resolution, but then the axis slips, throwing the harmonies into disarray. Schneider’s drumming is just a sea of flayed cymbals punctuated by the occasional snare. Things only get messier in the chorus, where Bertram mashes at his strings as though his hands had not quite worn off a local anesthetic. Can something so formless even be called a chorus? There’s no actual melody to speak of; bass, guitar, and drums merely tumble in rough concord, like a rockslide moving grudgingly uphill. Jayne is sing-shouting front and center, something about seriousness and serial killers, while in the background, another voice screams bloody murder.
Anyone paying close attention to the rapidly evolving sound of emo might have recognized some of these sounds. Heroin had explored parallel ideas on their self-titled 12" the year before, and closer to home, Unwound had spent the previous three years developing a remarkably similar grammar of feedback flare-ups and detuned strings. But with These Are Not Fall Colors’ next song, “Perfect Shot,” Lync showed that they weren’t simply angling to be the next signing on Gravity, the San Diego label that brought screamo into the world.
The song begins with a trim, almost jaunty guitar riff; for a moment we’re back in Jawbreaker territory. Then Bertram mashes a bass chord, Jayne shouts something unintelligible, and Schneider smacks the snare, just once. This is the drummer’s favorite trick: to signal an impending shift with a snare crack as unmistakable as a rifle report. Then all hell breaks loose. Like the album itself, “Perfect Shot” is a collision of errant vectors, a tug-of-war between competing impulses. Schneider’s toms swirl like leaves in an updraft; Jayne’s guitar and Bertram’s bass are perpetually jabbing and sparring. The album’s arrangements boast a newfound complexity, the changes mapped out in hasty, back-of-the-napkin calculations that lurch between consonance and dissonance.
The real signature is the music’s immediately identifiable texture and weight: Its bottom-heavy sonics and ringing harmonics give it the heft and dull gleam of a lump of tarnished bronze. Everything is supersaturated. It’s frequently difficult to tease out the bass parts from the guitars; Jayne and Bertram don’t voice their chords so much as wring them from the coils. It’s a murky, logy sound, which only makes Jayne’s sandpapered howls and slightly nasal sing-speaking come off all the more unhinged. The muddiness feels intentional: not the obfuscation of a poor recording job but a sense of surfeit, as though there were so much sound in the room, so much turbulent, intractable feeling, that it overwhelmed the circuits and the tape.
For all the ferment, the record is not without its anthems. “Silverspoon Glasses” strikes the perfect balance of pop-punk hooks and screamo turmoil, and between its shout-along chorus (“Bombs go! Krakakowkrakow!”) and conspiratorial muttering, contains one of Jayne’s most compelling vocal performances on the album. “Cue Card” is a wistful triumph of soaring chords with lyrics vague enough that you could find just about any meaning that you wanted in it. “Heroes & Heroines” harnesses the chaos of Universal Order of Armageddon before sinking back into the album’s sweetest chorus: “It’s you, it’s you, it’s you/You know the sky’s the limit for you.” As much as Lync mirrored some of their contemporaries, These Are Not Fall Colors cast a wider net: “Cue Cards” channels the full-spectrum shimmer of Sonic Youth and Hüsker Dü, and “Turtle” evokes Slint forebears Squirrel Bait’s “Sun God,” from their 1985 debut EP on Homestead Records, with almost uncanny precision. However accidental the resemblance, the comparison is instructive. Consciously or not, Lync were reaching back to the punk and indie rock of a decade before and picking up strains that had largely fallen by the wayside.
The yearning “Pennies to Save” might constitute the album’s emotive peak. Even if you couldn’t make out the bulk of the lyrics, that pleading chorus was plain as day: “Where has it gone?” It’s as though even here, in the brightness of their youth, Lync could feel the carefree days slipping away, calcifying into adulthood. Written from the perspective of a grownup who has woken up one day and realized that their youth is behind them, the song represents a remarkable feat of empathy. Punk taught to live fast, die young, but here, Lync understood the necessity of grappling with life’s inevitable denouement.
