Help Me Love: Hometown Heroes, Lost Media, and Alligators

Remembering a Local Band that Changed How I Thought About Music

I sat beneath the unhelpful shadow of a flagpole under the July sun while the dull roar of shredded screams and guitars banged from next door. The squall got louder any time someone opened the door to the purportedly Christian coffee shop. My friends and I hung outside like we were waiting out a storm. I respected that there was so much love for “screamo” music in my hometown, but it wasn’t what I was looking for.

I was here for one thing: a band called Alligators. Ostensibly the headliner, but outsiders on the bill. We sat outside all night waiting for the barrage of angst and guttural yells to subside. Finally, as the late summer sun set, we heard Alligators setting up. A good chunk of the audience—those who were there to mosh—left, which meant we could get right up close. My favorite spot to be in those days.

I can remember the feeling of the room so vividly: humid and dark, with smatterings of coffee tables and framed pictures on the walls. The amplifiers hummed while the band fiddled with cables. Blue and green lights beamed on the stage, creating a swampy haze—perfect climate for Alligators. It felt like we were watching a show inside an electric bug trap. To be honest, it felt even a little awkward. But once they got started, all that summer sweat and heat exhaustion turned into euphoria.

Their slow, fuzzed-out guitars rumbled and hissed through the room. The singer’s voice somehow felt so cool—and weirdly prehistoric. Not prehistoric like a caveman, but like a pterodactyl, as his voice crawled from a cool indie-rock rumble into a howling, shriek scream. The songs were poppy, catchy, and weird—from the pounding drums to the shaky guitars. There was no mistaking it. I was in love.

Maybe you’ve had a band like this. A “hometown hero” you were sure would break out but never did. The band with potential, underrated everywhere except your local scene. While it’s easy to love a breakout story—like, say, Nirvana coming out of Aberdeen—it’s bands like Alligators that I think are the lifeblood of local music scenes. These groups become local legends and folklore. They’re the bands that, at least for me, matter most.

It’s hard to separate taste from nostalgia. I still listen to Alligators regularly and often think, man, they should’ve been bigger. Do I love this band just because of these memories and how attached I feel? Or were they really that good? Or, more importantly—what does it matter? Maybe I don’t need to qualify it at all.

The tough thing with a story like this—trying to explain a band who lived and died in a small scene—is how little of their music I can show you. In 2019, MySpace revealed they lost all the music uploaded to their platform prior to 2016 during a server migration. The loss is estimated at 50 million songs—a truly staggering amount. It’s easy to scoff at MySpace now, a relic of early social media, but the volume of music that lived there and is now gone is heartbreaking. Much of it wasn’t released by record labels or preserved on physical media.

Gratefully, Alligators’ album Piggy & Cups is still on Bandcamp. But much of their early work, which existed primarily as MySpace streams, has effectively vanished—unless you had the foresight to download it. I’m one of those folks still devoted to the MP3. I’ve “preserved” these songs, keeping them on every hard drive, cloud storage account, etc., that I’ve ever owned. I simply can’t bear the idea of losing them. I considered uploading some full tracks to this post but questioned the ethics. Instead, I’m including short clips to give you a taste of some of their early work. If anyone from the band sees this and would like me to remove them, I’ll be glad to do so.

MySpace itself was a gateway. For better or worse, it mainstreamed the idea of social media. But what fascinates me most is how well it functioned as a music discovery tool and how it built community around music—something Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even TikTok have never fully replicated (not for lack of trying). The closest contemporary might be Bandcamp, a mighty force in music distribution that has leveled the playing field for artists. But even then, the social element feels different. Maybe it was the novelty of the times, or maybe it just had that intangible something.

But I do know this: putting a song on your profile felt like being given the aux cord to the world’s speaker. It felt powerful. When several people at school told me they fell in love with The Coral’s “Dreaming of You” from my profile, I was terrified to change it to anything else. What a rush.

More importantly, it opened a door into local music. I wasn’t plugged into what was happening in Kitsap County when I got MySpace around age 14. I wouldn’t have even known where to look. The idea that there were bands in Port Orchard or Bremerton, Washington, felt impossible. Seattle? Sure. But even being just an hour away, it felt like another world.

Digging through MySpace Music, I discovered there was so much being created in my backyard. Not cover bands—original music. Good music, even! I became especially obsessed with a band called Mary Jane Watson (a math rock/emo band who claimed my hometown and referenced my favorite comics? You’ve gotta be kidding me).

Soon I was immersed in the short, distorted discographies of bands like Valley of the Dinosaurs, Claymore, and The Helen Killers. I found pop bliss in Patterns. Got a taste for scream through Kane Hodder. Even Seattle artists like David Bazan, Rocky Votolato, Schoolyard Heroes, and The Divorce regularly played in town. I’m digressing, but you get the point. So much was happening, and I had been completely oblivious.

Alligators via Facebook

Being “into local music” became my personality. I logged into MySpace every day after school, looking for new bands to obsess over. One day, a new one emerged. A group called—yep—Alligators.

It’s worth noting that I came into this “era” of my scene late. Alligators, I learned, were something of a supergroup. They boasted members of the bands Map of June and Time to Fly—two groups that, in their time, seemed poised to break out. Time to Fly, in particular, seemed close, with their revered album Birth.Work.Death., something of a lost underground emo masterpiece.

I didn’t know any of that at the time, but I picked up on the reverence online. And when I hit play, it felt like nothing else I’d been hearing locally—or at that point, nothing I’d heard period. Nor did it sound like Time to Fly or Map of June. It was murky, strange, melodic, and hypnotic. I felt my music taste changing like the elevator scenes in Severance.

I refreshed the page every day, dutifully waiting for new songs. And slowly, more emerged. I’d download them before even listening. And when I did listen, it was on repeat.

I remember the first songs feeling low and lo-fi, carrying a sense of despondency. But gradually, they started to pick up. Their song “Help Me Love” had undeniable swagger. Gritty, punchy, with a chorus that hit like a lit cigarette snuffed out on the heart: “everyone’s gotta die sometime / so help me love while you’re still around.”

I was already in the bag for Alligators when I caught them that July night. (An aside: it’s amazing how many of my formative punk and underground moments happened in church basements and “coffee shops serving a higher mission.”) But that night took my love for the band to another level. Before I left, I picked up a demo CD from the merch table. They’d arranged a collage of CDs on the table, each with a unique cover drawn in crayon. Jesus Christ, I wish I could find where I put that thing.

On the disc were an entirely new batch of songs. And that’s when I found another joy of following local music—watching a band grow and level up.

The first song on the disc, “Matters,” floored me. They’d unlocked a new gear—from the opening harmonies to the fidelity, the grooves, and the overall energy. Singer Joshua Trembley’s scream seemed to cut through dimensions like Majin Buu escaping the Hyperbolic Time Chamber.

It’s still one of my all-time favorite songs, casting the spell of wonder, joy, and—yeah, sure—nostalgia. I told everyone I could about the band. My cadre of friends and I went to every show we could, which in turn led us to even more music. And it made me want to get involved—daring me to start my own (very bad) band.

A band which shall go unnnamed

Good or not, it built into me an understanding of the devotion and love it takes to be in a band. And more than that, it taught me how a scene, even in a small Navy town, could feel like a universe unto itself.

In 2008, I moved to Seattle for college. That same year, Alligators finally put out their debut album, Piggy & Cups. I made a point to ferry back for their album release show and even interviewed them for the university paper (never say I didn’t try to do my part). The name Piggy & Cups came from the fact that, while making the album, they took frequent breaks to play football outside (which they called “piggy”) and drank lots of coffee (hence, “cups”). I thought it was strange at the time, but now I actually find it endearing—wholesome, even. It was indicative of the band’s weird humor and also... drinking coffee and goofing off with your friends—what could be better? Still, I felt like the title didn’t quite capture the great artistic leap the band made on the record.

Piggy & Cups felt like they were giving it everything they had. It was the Kitsap music scene’s Pet Sounds. Songs flowed seamlessly into one another, their layering and effects more intricate. The songs were ambitious, even grandiose in scope. They were somehow getting even weirder. But at the core was something I’d come to appreciate about the band going back to the demo days—these were love songs. The most human emotion anchoring their experimental inclinations.

The album, of course, didn’t catapult them into fame like I (or others) had hoped. I thought the band at least deserved underground cult status—and maybe in some ways, they achieved that. I know for certain I’m not the only fan out there still holding a torch for Alligators.

When the band broke up, they played one final show at The Charleston in Bremerton, where they promised to play all of their songs. It was a promise they made good on—ending with a rapturous performance of fan favorite “Yeshua,” which had briefly lived on their MySpace and was almost never played live (to my recollection). It was a generous act. To give their fans everything they had. And in that packed room, I felt the emotion and gratitude from everyone.

A few of the members have gone on to other projects over the years. I just saw recently that Trembley has started a promising-sounding band called summercoat, and bassist/vocalist Tyler Lewis has released a multitude of work and regularly puts out music on Substack. Years ago, I ran into drummer Kit Arper at a mutual friend’s house and tried (and failed) to play it cool.

Bands like Alligators deserve their due beyond just label deals (though, of course, that would be great). This music opened my eyes and my heart. It’s a shame so much of it has been lost to digital ash. But still, the legacy remains. At their final show, Alligators projected the phrase “We Are Alligators” on a screen behind them—a kind of meta motto they’d adopted going back to those first demos. And if I were to be corny—and, regularly, I am—I’d say that we all are Alligators. A local scene can change your life if you let it. And a local band might just be the best band in the world.

STRAY THOUGHTS

LISTENING: Loscil - Lake Fire

Over the weekend, I had the chance to visit the Oregon coast with my family, my wife’s cousin, and some friends. We always love going to the coast—its gorgeous, dull grey skies, cool and soft sand, and remarkable views everywhere you look. But it got us thinking about the last time we went out that way, years ago, when we inadvertently planned a trip during a forest fire. We remembered the air thick with ash, the sickening feeling of toxicity all around us, and the eerie sense of accepting it as part of our new reality in the Northwest.

All of these feelings are captured beautifully and wordlessly in Loscil’s latest record, Lake Fire, inspired by similar wildfires in Vancouver, B.C. (which—thanks to the wind—we in the Northwest often feel the effects of, too). While the record is largely ambient, it’s a powerful reminder that ambient music isn’t always about “creating a peaceful atmosphere.” In fact, Lake Fire does a remarkable job evoking what an uncomfortable, murky atmosphere feels like. If ambient music is a reflection of environment, this album serves as a reminder of what we risk losing if we don’t care for the one we have.

That’s not to say there aren’t moments of transcendent beauty—there are many—but there’s also a heaviness that demands to be reckoned with. Ambient music isn’t necessarily passive, and this album drives that point home. I just wish it weren’t under such grim circumstances, but I’m grateful to Loscil for creating art that reflects the state of things while reminding us of a brighter future worth working toward.

20th Century Ambient Coming in November

My upcoming book, 20th Century Ambient, is now available for pre-order! If you’ve been enjoying the blend of music deep dives and comics in Another Thought, I think you’ll really love this.

“Through text and comics, 20th Century Ambient searches through ambient music's recent history to unearth how the genre has evolved and the role it plays in our daily lives.”

It’s out November 13, 2025 from Bloomsbury Books. Don’t miss your chance to reserve a copy now.