‘But there are things I would stand up and fight for, there are things I would lay down my life for, convictions in my heart, my soul have meshed with, I’d give you all the blood that flows through my wrist’. (Toy Boats & Battleships)

It takes real creative courage to set out to play music that goes against the grain of your contemporaries.  Many who do simply get swept away by the force of the flow in the other direction, while some successfully sow the seeds for a new direction but they too disappear before the fruits are yielded.  Ahead of their time reads the epitaph.  One such band was Seattle’s Stay Gold in the early 2000s.  They were a band whose name always cropped up amongst mid-2000s melodic hardcore bands as a key influence, even the inspiration to start playing.  Yet, outside of the Pacific Northwest region, they had flown largely under the radar by the time they called it a day in 2002.

When Stay Gold formed in 1999, they consciously wanted to reconnect with the roots of US hardcore, a tradition that they felt was being subsumed under the weight of the heavily metallic interpretations that dominated US hardcore at the time.  The aim was for high energy, melodic hardcore with a social conscience.  The band released two EPs in 2001, Staygold and Caught Up In The Moment, before embarking on what was to prove a pretty disastrous East Coast tour, including the ritual border issues wiping out the majority of the Canadian dates.  By the time, the band returned home to record their debut full-length, relationships were rather frayed and Pills And Advice was to be the band’s swansong, with the album release show proving to also be their final show.

And quite the swansong it is.  The album embodies the essence of what Stay Gold were seeking to achieve – urgently robust, melodically charged hardcore, saturated through with a deep sense of the unrequited, the never to be realised.  And it was, perhaps, this intriguing intertwining of aggressively energetic hardcore with deep-seated melancholy that was to prove the band’s most important legacy.  And the depth of the song writing still shines through – from the surging opener Best Kept Secret to the raucous Below The Surface, from the bristling aggression of 40 Smith And Wesson to the cathartic eruption of Toy Boats And Battleships.

This is the 2022 reissue by Indecision Records, who also released the original record in collaboration with Years From Now in 2002.  As with the original, it closes with a cover of Thursday by Turning Point, which wasn’t / isn’t included in the track listing.  Eagle Barber, the band’s drummer, went on to play with Frontier(s), Lost Lands, Suspect, and now No Plan.