Regardless of how you feel about the short-lived genre that was nü metal or the whole seedy music business selection process in general (and this was years before fucking American Idol), I still have a soft spot in my heart for Fairfax, VA rockers Sev. A local band crushing cities up and down the Eastern corridor, they were the first group signed by Farmclub - a web/TV show/record label hybrid (which back in 2000 was huge). Farmclub was backed by the heads of Interscope and Geffen respectively - Sev got the record deal, a $300K budget and their future was brighter than a thousand IEDs. Amazingly, the WWF of all things destroyed their future. "Monday Night RAW" (originally airing the hour before Farmclub TV) switched networks and the forgotten music show tanked without its drunken redneck regular viewers. Sev got pushed to Geffen which had no interest in the group and put their mainstream debut on hold until 2002 with little to no support whatsoever. Amazingly, an epic lifeline came along in the color of a blue soda - Pepsi was gearing to launch the then-revolutionary Pepsi Blue and picked Sev's "Same Old Song" out of every other song on the fucking planet to helm the worldwide advertising campaign. But lightning does strike twice. Pepsi Blue tanked. Badly. Along with the advertising campaign and any last shred of Sev's musical future. The band changed/lost a few members and tried to record a follow up to Geffen's All These Dreams but it all finally fell apart in 2007. A repectable website is still maintained by the band which offers a whole bunch of unreleased material left over from the post-Geffen days as well as Farmclub-era demo stuff. While a tad dated style-wise, the early 2000 stuff fucking kills, solid nü metal before the genre got agonizingly boring. The late-2007 material struggles - a band trying to come to terms with their extraordinary bad luck. Unbelieveable.
