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Honor Role: Rictus LP (Homestead Records, 1989)
My nephew Brody just spent a few weeks staying with my wife Jet and I. The original plan was to hang out for a bit in Raleigh and then go on a mini-vacation on Ocracoke Island, North Carolina for Memorial Day weekend, but a big storm came in, the ferries weren’t running to the island, and we had to cancel our trip. That was a bummer, but it was fun to hang out with Brody for an extended amount of time. He’s 19, a student at Ohio State, and he’s super into music and skateboarding, so we get along like a house on fire. It was nice to have a buddy to skate with, and while he was here we spent most evenings playing music for one another.
Something I realized about myself during these listening sessions with Brody is that I have a strong bias against music from the 90s. Brody played a lot of stuff from the 90s, and it made me realize I almost never listen to music from that entire decade, no matter the style. There’s probably a deep psychological reason for that… like I see the 70s and 80s as some sort of unspoiled golden age, but the 90s make me think of real life, being in high school and feeling like I didn’t belong, being stuck in a rural Virginia backwater while the interesting stuff happened somewhere else. Most recordings from the 90s have a distinctive sound, and while a lot of things about that sound are pretty good—it was an era known for big-sounding, polished recordings, even for underground bands—the sound doesn’t take me to a place I want to go. Even when Brody brought up punk and hardcore bands, I realized I hardly ever listened to them. He told me he’s been into Orchid’s Chaos Is Me, and I told him about how I bought that record when it came out and how Orchid’s guitarist, Will Killingsworth, masters like 50% of the music we sell at Sorry State (including several releases on our label), but I realized I haven’t listened to Orchid in 20 years. He also texted me the other day to tell me he’d been listening to His Hero Is Gone’s Monuments to Thieves. Again, a record I loved when it came out, but I haven’t listened to it in many, many years. So many of our conversations went like this, Brody bringing up something from the 90s and me driving the conversation back into the 80s and earlier or forward into the present millennium.
Having this realization about myself, I was particularly excited when a copy of Honor Role’s second and final album, Rictus, came through the shop. Brody, like most young people it seems, has broad tastes, but I think his favorite style of music is the post-hardcore math rock of the early 90s… he loves Slint, US Maple, Don Caballero, and stuff like that. So I was excited to bring home this Honor Role record because I know they were a big influence on that sound. I think he liked Rictus, but the first thing he said was “this sounds like Tweez,” Slint’s first album, which actually came out in 1989, the same year as Rictus.
I feel weird writing about Honor Role because I’ve heard so much about them from older people in NC, all of whom insist they were one of the best bands they ever saw, way better than their studio recordings. Honor Role played Raleigh a lot… people tell me they came down from Richmond so often they were pretty much considered a local band. Since they broke up in 1989, though, I never got to see them play, and for years I never even checked out the records because of how vocal everyone was about how they didn’t live up to the live experience. However, at some point their 1985 single “Judgement Day” came into the shop, and noticing it was on the legendary Raleigh label No Core Records, I checked it out. I listened to that 7” so much… I even ripped mp3s of my copy so I could put it on my phone… I was so addicted to it I needed the ability to hear it any time I wanted. Contrary to my expectations, “Judgement Day” has a great, powerful recording, raw in the manner of low-budget 80s recordings, but clear with good separation between the instruments and a big drum sound. And the songs, “Judgement Day” in particular, are just so good. They’re a long way from pop, but still so memorable. “Look around me, all I see, waves and waves of… MEDIOCRITY!” Classic.
Converted, I started picking up Honor Role’s records when I saw them. Rictus, though, proved elusive, sitting on my want list for years before this copy came in. It was worth the wait, though! When I first popped it on I was digging it so hard… it had everything I loved about the “Judgement Day” single, namely the catchy vocals and dense, poetic lyrics and the powerful, punk-informed rhythm section, but so much more than that too. Honor Role is lauded for their ability to play in odd time signatures and the relentless riffage of guitarist Pen Rollings, and both are in full effect on Rictus. Some timings on these tracks are just wild. And beyond just being quirky, they’re executed with so much fluidity. I love complex, proggy rhythms, but often bands who play like that can feel overly tight, like the music is laid out on a grid and everyone is playing to the grid rather than with one another. But Honor Role sounds like a band who has abandoned the grid, locking into rhythms that are more organic and human than any math equation. And the riffs… fuck! A lot of them sound like they’re grounded in the big classic rock riffs of bands like AC/DC and Thin Lizzy, but skewed and bent into something subtler and more interesting. Like Greg Ginn, Pen Rollings’ style is instantly identifiable and I could listen to him shred forever.
It’s a shame I never got to see Honor Role play live, because if they were exponentially better than these records, they must have been something truly great, which everyone insists they were. There are a couple of gigs on YouTube, and these sets from CBGB in 1987, DC in 1988, and Chapel Hill in 1989 (the band’s final show) are indeed powerful. I’m not much for watching video footage of bands playing live, but all three hold my attention. If you want to check out Honor Role’s studio recordings, Merge Records collected everything from their post-punk era (I can’t believe I didn’t even mention the band’s hardcore years above… oh well) on a CD called Album, which is available on streaming services. That CD starts with Rictus and then proceeds in reverse chronological order through the rest of the band’s catalog, ending with the “Judgement Day” single. While it’s a lot of this very dense music to absorb in one sitting, at least it’s out there and accessible. If you want to follow my path into their discography, keep an eye out for used copies of the “Judgement Day” single and Rictus in your local used bins… it might take a while for them to turn up, but they shouldn’t cost you much when they do.