DALY
Meet Daly. This trio of under-socialized, pizza-faced brats once ruled the subdivisions of North West Jersey with a sound many have called “unpopular”.
Their brand of punk music
fused the emotional immaturity of Dag Nasty with the fart jokes of Descendents
to create a uniquely polarizing racket.
Jim was the q-tip-quaffed C student with a Pringles can collection. With a talent for falling off skateboards, burping in your face and climbing stuff, he was an energetic presence behind the drum kit. His singular sense of meter and overuse of the crash cymbal provided the runaway train quality present in all of the band’s best work.
Josh: the towheaded bassist with the improbably high speaking voice. When he wasn’t honking out basslines for the boys, Josh could be found breaking the speed limit with his car on the way to play with his skateboard. His spirited stage banter not only got the pit going every time, it provided the rest of the band with an opportunity to laugh at him.
Brent was the group’s principle songwriter. This triple-rectified riffmaster enjoyed exposing his genitals, vandalizing his neighbor’s property, and wearing shorts. While his slender fingers channeled both Stephan Egerton and Warren DeMartini, his mid-pubescent caterwaul evoked a young Jim Henson.
Crucial to the development of the band’s live show was Brent’s acquisition of the Nady wireless guitar system. Now this hotshot young guitarist was free to stalk the stages of Obsessions and the Rusty Nail with an off-putting intensity. Bonds were formed with titans of the local scene like the unpleasantly tone deaf, Hodgepodge, and the band with girls in it, Anchor. Soon no VFW hall or Knights of Columbus chaperone was safe from Daly’s spastic proto-emo din.
Daly entered the hallowed halls of Scranton PA’s Windmill Studios to produce a hollow sounding demonstration tape. The luxury and affordability of a half-day block of studio time provided the boys ample time to create recorded music so powerful it was referred to by the attendant engineer as “unmixable”.
More underground concerts with bigger bands followed: The Smoking Popes, Weston, Plow United. The gang even traveled to Springfield, Massachusetts to play a Food Not Bombs benefit with Gilman Street’s trach hole grating poppunk also-rans, Fifteen. Awkward basement shows in places like Long Island and New Brunswick followed.
Voices dropping rapidly, the boys needed to act fast. They quickly booked a weekend at East Chester PA’s famed Creep House Studio to record their new demo. It was during their stay at “The House” that the band collectively watched Grease for some reason. When The Creep House recordings were made semi-available to the public on the cassette format, big things started to happen to Daly. Inexplicably, they were asked to perform on WFMU in the winter of 1995. Also inexplicably, they used the wider audience this opportunity provided them to showcase Jim’s impression of Paul Stanley’s stage banter for 2 minutes. But that wasn’t the only thing that sounded like a muppet that night; never before had Brent’s vocals sounded so emotionally raw and vulnerable.
The WFMU recordings are perhaps the band’s most lasting legacy... kjhkjhzkjhkdjshkjdhkjzdhkjzdhkfjhdzkjfhakdjhfkajhkdjhfkjhfdkajhkhkadjhkjdahfkjhkjhfkjhfakjhdakfjhdkfjhdkajhkjdah