Best Old Music - Hoarse - Happens Twice (1997)

Hoarse - "Diamond"
Hoarse - "Happens Twice"
Hoarse - "Trivial"

I first heard Hoarse when I was driving home from high school. I was unironically listening to the local rock station, Banana 101.5 expecting the standard Zeppelin/Nirvana/Metallica programming when out of nowhere comes this completely perfect song. When I got home, I ran inside, called the station and asked what in God's name that glorious song was. The DJ told me the song was called "Diamond" by the band Hoarse. I locked this into my brain (I couldn't go download it, this was like '97/'98) until I was able to pick it up at Best Buy.
A lot of times in my younger days, and sometimes even now, I had this terrible listening habit where if an album has one spectacular song, I had a really hard time listening to any other song, even if the rest was great. Happens Twice is a perfect example of that. In fact, I was so oblivious and irresponsible that at some point, I thought it would be totally okay to copy "Diamond" to my computer and just trade the album in. Of course, I lost track of "Diamond" and more or less forgot about Hoarse.
Then sometime in the last year or so, I was flipping through the 7"s at Encore, and by the grace of God, there's a copy of "Diamond." Even though I couldn't remember exactly what the song sounded like, I remembered my love for it, and figured it would be worth a buck or two. Sure enough, the song was as great as ever. At this point, I figured I've got what I need from Hoarse.
That is, until riding home from NY with Ol' Jer Bones, one of us decides to put the album on and I'm pretty much stunned. I've probably searched for the album online once a week since that time and I've never been able to find it. So finally this week, I ordered it on Amazon for a cent, and got it in the mail today.
It's a really awesome set of mid to late era Replacements-style minor key emotional rock songs, complete with whiskey & cigarette-ravaged vocals, big guitars, and big choruses. I don't know that I can say it's a totally perfect album, but the few low spots aren't that low and pretty easy to overlook. In fact, it could probably be argued that they really help balance out the intensity of the better songs.
Anyways, it's a total shame that these guys seem to be more or less forgotten by pretty much everyone. They were formed out of the ashes of Sponge and made songs at least as good as "Molly" and "Plowed" (which I think is sayin' something), and went on to form The Fags, who don't sound like either band and are not very good. Maybe they were too "rock" for the emo/punk kids and too vulnerable for the rock dudes. I've been through the album three times, and "Diamond" probably at least twice as much (and still kinda have a hard time getting past it without hitting repeat), but at least I know I'm not gonna end up trading it back in this time.