DISCLAIMER: These won’t be proper reviews -as if I could write those- or have interesting technical tidbits on them. These are more of a “ah, that song reminds me of…” thing. Like the part you skip on a recipe. So it goes.

Album: Title of record.

Release date: August 24, 1999.

Track: 2.

Moods: Industrial hopefulness, Acceptance, Carefree youth ending.

I didn’t “get” Filter until I got The Crow: City of Angels’ OST as a gift after a major surgery. There were some excellent cuts on that album, but the fierceness of Jurassitol made me a fan.

For years, all we had was Short Bus and a couple of soundtrack appearances, like Spawn, The X-Files, and the aforementioned Crow sequel. Come the end of summer of 1999. End of a decade. End of a century. End of a millennium. Weird feelings of desperation and anxiety mashing with a languid “oh, well, whatever” response from myself and many others. I was almost done with university. My degree was electronic communications but I didn’t particularly enjoy the later half of university, as instead of honing engineering skills, this university, which some of you will guess, focuses more on creating “leaders” and “business owners”, they don’t care much about problem solvers. It was frustrating.

Thankfully, Filter to the rescue. Title of Record came out on that summer we found Vince McMahon was the greater power and it was the right moment for a brutal industrial album.

An ominous intro with Sand yields Welcome to the fold. It’s intense, boastful, and an enormous masterpiece that grabs your attention. I used to test stereos with the first three tracks of Title of Record, the mixing was so phenomenal I had to check that as many times as possible.

The interlude with “Momma give me my medicine the one that makes me feel so tall” is eerie, smouldering through your ears, building up to a chaotic end and a classic Richard Patrick scream. It’s perfection and you barely feel the almost 8 minute running time.

Celebrate nothing. Feel a-ok for one day. Crank it up because you deserve to blast your fave song and lift your mood. Doo doo doo dooo!

-Sam J. Valdés López