Penfold's Our First Taste of Escape was like a walk in the rain

A very early album in my collection that felt so unlike everything I had found previous.

Dec 09, 2024

There was a great chain of record stores in Utah called Gray Whale; the nearest one was two hours from my house (everything was at least an hour away from my house).

My buddy Breckon introduced me to Gray Whale – we headed to the west side of the valley, through Freedom, and took 34 into Idaho, which wound you around Tincup. There’s a part of the highway that barrels around a steep rock face overlooking farmland, doing a complete about-face of 180° (coming home one late winter night, my father rounded this corner and ran his F-150 smack into a lazy, escaped cow). After that crook in the road, you head south past Bear Lake, and an hour or so later you’re in Logan, Utah.

I haven’t been to Logan, Utah in twenty years; there’s no way the Kmart is still there, but we stopped there every trip to take a picture in their 1980s photo booth. I’m almost certain the Gray Whale is also gone, though it seems the company is still up and running.

I don’t remember anything about navigating Logan (though I know I did go to that record store a couple of times by myself during my “learning to be independent after dropping out of college” period. I don’t remember where the record store was, and I don’t know what greasy, high cuisine we got for lunch (fast food barely had a foothold in Star Valley), but I do remember some of the albums I bought at Graywhale: You Can Play These Songs With Chords by Death Cab for Cutie, A Newer More Shattered You by Prevent Falls. I still regret not buying Precious Blood by a band called Ghosts and Vodka; I’ve spent twenty years not remembering how it sounded, but I was so enamored with the album art (update: it’s a bit post-rocky, mathy, and it rules; I would have spent hours over the years with it, and my regret is immeasurable).

I spent my fair time with those records, and others I made – I think I bought my first full The Appleseed Cast album there, and I can assure you it changed my life. But the album I most remember buying – and opening in the car on the way back to Star Valley – was Penfold’s Our First Taste of Escape.

Penfold’s “I’ll Take You Anywhere” had made its way, through the pirate alchemy of early-2000s CD-Rs and file sharing, into the constant shuffle of my listening sometime in the preceding year and a half. The band almost certainly crossed my path by way Deep Elm Records’ The Emo Diaries, which had been split apart into its component MP3s by a handful of friends and shared around. “Microchip”, the song that made it onto The Emo Diaries Chapter Three: The Moment of Truth (yes, that’s the real first name of the compilation), would have been in the shuffle as well.

“I’ll Take You Anywhere” made it onto some unguessable number of mix-CDs I made in the years following its discovery — at least two or three of which went to freshman year of college crushes. I loved its narrator’s frank insistence that he would cherish the song’s subject; the song might not be romantic, but it had that romantic desperation a lovelorn teenager like me felt was necessary. The singer’s frantic yelp of the song’s title, near the end of the song, felt universal to me, a feeling I had never felt but which I believed everyone does.

I suspect that many songs from The Emo Diaries made their lasting legacy on the lovelorn mixes of sad boys hoping to impress marginally less sad girls. To be fair, it worked for me – at least two of those crushes kissed me that first year at college.

Though “Everywhere” was on the band’s first album, Amateurs & Professionals, I ended up with Out First Taste of Escape for the most common reason any kid ended up with not-quite the album they went looking for: the first wasn’t in stock, and the latter was sitting right there.

The CD release of Escape is striking when you first open it — whether this is in the passenger seat of your best music buddy speeding north from Utah and into Idaho or otherwise. The ethereal cover art turned out to be an elaborate outer wrapping for the lyric booklet, and that was novelty enough for it to become a cherished object in my very nascent CD collection (I loved a good packaging novelty). But when we put that album in the CD player for the first time, I didn’t know exactly how to process what I was hearing.

If “ethereal” is the word I use for the album art, so must it be the word for album-opener “The Opportune Moment”: floating, warbled, unidentifiable notes twirl from one speaker to another. You feel as if you are underwater or — and this is the distinct feeling I had — in some sort of aural fogbank, unable to quite see until the opening guitar notes of “Fate, Coincidence and an Encounter” begin laying their arpeggiated breadcrumbs into the album proper.

I hadn’t found a record that felt so much like atmosphere — the closest thing, in my yet-inexperienced mind — was The Appleseed Cast’s Low Level Owl, though I now realize the comparison is completely off. Owl, in its two parts, is an epic journey of an album; it takes you climbing over obstacles from one place to another.

Our First Taste of Escape leads you, as well, but it isn’t an epic: it is interior. Their insistence of being “on my way home” is an apt one, as Penfold’s journey is a small one — walking from one side of a small, midwestern city to another, say, through dusk-falling sleet.

The album rarely gets as rocking as “I’ll Take You Everywhere”, and somehow I respected it for that. I didn’t get a copy of Amateurs & Professionals until Count Your Lucky Stars re-released it on vinyl a decade later, in 2011 (looking that year up just now made me feel as if I time-traveled — I was sure I only just pre-ordered that release), and though it is rockier, it doesn’t stick in my mind as such.

What’s strange about my relationship with these releases is that my favorite song — still — is “I’ll Take You Everywhere”; I have listened to Amateurs & Professionals maybe a total of ten times in my life.

I have listened to Our First Taste of Escape thousands of times. Front to back, the album feels inherent in my bloodstream, those warbled early notes like my first blinks upon waking. Even now, when the song hits pockets of lyrics I don’t quite know, I know the exact pitch, the exact notes, the number of syllables my yawp must match.

This is A+ emo, is something beyond emo, is such a unique variation on the band’s initial vibe. It’s a treasure.

These are the things that made me fall in love with music when I was first learning how to fall in love: a spur-of-the-moment journey with a friend, my first proper record store, and the unexpected beauty of an unheard album. Tastes may evolve with time, but the classics stay classic, stay bloodborne, stay integral to the listener even as they become the soundtrack of one’s own escape into adulthood.

This essay was written last month; not a month later, Penfold began teasing a new version of the record on their Instagram: re-recorded, re-mixed, re-mastered. I’m not fully sure what that means, but the short audio samples they’ve posted are fresh-sounding without overwhelming my nostalgia brain. As of writing, this is all the information I have. I’m stoked regardless.