The Posies: Fall Apart With Me
[purchase]
I grew up listening to Seattle pop kings The Posies and when they announced in 1998 that their fifth album Success would be their last and after a farewell tour they would call it a day, I was more than a little bummed.
But it was probably time for the two singers, guitarists, frontmen and songwriters Ken Stringfellow and Jon Auer to go their separete ways at that point. If songs like Every Bitter Drop, Fall Apart With Me, Looking Lost, Farewell Typewriter, Who To Blame and Fall Song are anything to go by, all was not well within the group. The signs had been there for a while - the song Please Return It on 1996's Amazing Disgrace was written by Ken during a period when Jon contemplated leaving the band.
Success could almost be categorized as a "divorce album", it has a quite bittersweet feel to it and even if you weren't aware that it was the band's last outing you could probably tell intuitively.
After a while though, the formerly inseparable childhood friends gravitated back towards each other and started doing acoustic gigs as a duo, once again as The Posies.
Soon they had recruited a new rhythm section and released new material. To be honest, by then I had outgrown them. Their recent stuff is great, but nothing touches those first five albums that shaped my teen years.