A common cause for the common good

This is going to be another easy one, and by that I mean that I know very little about this band, but want to share the music with you anyway. What I could find out is this: Fall into the Sear and Yellow Leaf were from Tyler, TX, and released a 7“ on Watership Records sometime in the mid-nineties. The songs on the EP are numbered four through eight, so perhaps there was an earlier demo recording, but I don’t think they put out any other records after this one.

The first thing you see when you open the inside cover is an illustration of bunnies, squirrels and the like with the heartwarming caption “The giddy forest animals celebrate the end of the human race.” But that by no means sums up what this band stood for, which I can tell you a little more about because they also provided extensive explanations for the lyrical content of all of the songs. One deals with hardcore kids preaching to the choir, another with getting bullied by corporate America. Song #5 pits peaceful resistance against mindless molotov-cocktail-throwing and #7 espouses the ‘virtues’ of the military industrial complex and its recruiting methods. This may sound like run-of-the-mill radical rhetoric, but the actual lyrics always seek, and frequently touch upon, a more personal angle that keeps them from being overly preachy or contrived.

Singer Matt delivers the lyrics in throaty screams that are nothing out of the ordinary, but that fit nicely with the music – pounding mid-paced hardcore weighted toward the low end, yet with enough variation and drive to keep the songs interesting. Groundwork comes to mind as a comparison.

Two members of Fall into the Sear and Yellow Leaf resurfaced in other bands – drummer Kevin in Quien’ es Boom! and Matt in Pop Unknown, along with former members of Mineral.

Fall into the Sear and Yellow Leaf – #6
Fall into the Sear and Yellow Leaf – #4
Fall into the Sear and Yellow Leaf – #5
Fall into the Sear and Yellow Leaf – #7