One of My Favorite Albums: Ignite — Our Darkest Day (2006)

“I wasn’t born a failure” — from the song “Live for Better Days”

It’s funny how music affects us. Albums can connect with you through the happiest of times, or can be shunned entirely due to being a reminder of bad times. Conversely, those harder times can sometimes only be tolerable with the help of music, and the albums that get you through, those are the ones you’ll remember forever.

“Our Darkest Days” by the melodic hardcore punk band Ignite, is a perfect album. From the first note, to the very last, there isn’t a single wasted moment. It even manages to do the impossible — make me like a U2 song. In this case, the bands cover of “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” which as far as I’m concerned, is a fucking Ignite song. I anxiously wait for that palm muted guitar chug after lead singer Zoli finishes the line “but I won’t heed the battle call,” and it hits me, hard, every single fucking time.

It whirls through 40 minutes of the catchiest, and most passionate, punk songs you’ve ever heard, ebbing and flowing through topics like loss, grief, war, famine, and working with your heroes, before ending, at least on the European release (my preferred version), with the acoustic song “Live for Better Days,” a heartstring-pulling little ballad about predestination. That’s right, heartstring-pulling from a hardcore band. That’s the fucking sway this album has over me.

I don’t listen to it often, which is standard practice for me and my favorite albums, that way they still retain some of their original power, and when I go to listen to one it still have the same impact as when first discovered, played into the ground allowing it to attain that position among the rest.

This album dropped during a tumultuous time in my life. I was two years out of art school, having been fired from my first “official” job for not being able to edit porn videos for cellphones to a high enough standard, and was working at an office supply store, as well as a local pizza chain, constantly strapped for cash, not even living paycheck to paycheck, in a failing relationship that had turned into a “Groundhog Day” like procession of constant arguments about how I wasn’t able to make enough money, or how I was wasting my time, and theirs, with my creative endeavors that would never amount to anything.

The only lights that shown into this cave was from two recently befriended, creative weirdos who brought distinctly passionate, albeit wildly different creative energies into my life, and this album. Every time I listen to it I’m reminded of them, working diligently into the night on personal art projects, or joint efforts with one, or the other friend, the songs blasting through the room I’d cordoned off in my shared apartment where I could just, if only for a moment, fucking breathe.