100 Greatest Songs of the 00’s #71 At The Drive In – One Armed Scissor

Released: 2000

It’s hard to reprise American rock music at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of this without thinking of Fred Durst. Nu-metal’s would-be king was everywhere, all over MTV in the wake of Limp Bizkit’s debut album Three Dollar Bill’s sleeper success: by late 1999 it had sold almost two million copies in America alone. One of it’s tracks Counterfeit was a direct beef with other bands who effected their suds-and-thuds package, Durst pithily skewering the audacity with “Oh, let’s get baggy pants and dress like kind of hip-hoppy and, you know, play heavy metal and rap.”

From a deeply off the grid El Paso, At The Drive In had spent the Three Dollar Bill era being almost completely ignored. Mainstays Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodríguez-López were outside looking in, imposters in more ways than one, ATDI’s first album Acrobatic Tenement for example had been made for $600 and was released by a Los Angeles fanzine in 1996. More angry packages followed, but whilst live there were few more intoxicating spectacles, at home and abroad the landscape remained dominated by bro’s, beatz and brewz.

Something had to give and against the odds perhaps, it was the seemingly impermeable barrier that kept the band from full realisation without descending into chaos. Appearing before the new decade had begun to understand itself, Relationship of Command vibrated with unspent energy, a feral blast of twisted post hardcore, punk and metal. One Armed Scissor has since become almost as well known for the near total state of disassembly achieved when the band played it live on British television, but with it’s lung-shredding ugliness and rage a flea had just sunk it’s teeth into the ass of an elephant. In that moment, the other America had found it’s voice again.