Why was this band not a bigger deal?
Review of Letters to Cleo’s Aurora Gory Alice
Letters to Cleo — Aurora Gory Alice
Released initially October 1993
Around the time we got a family computer for the living room, we went one by one through all the CDs in the house and imported them to iTunes. This was how I learned a lot about ’80s New Wave, the discography of U2, and a style of ’90s alternative that you might call college radio, but I always called “anything that sounds like it would be in the 1995 movie Empire Records.”
Unfortunately no songs from Aurora Gory Alice were in Empire Records, so I bring it up only as a means of recommending it as it is an incredible movie, but Letters to Cleo was the band featured in 10 Things I Hate About You so it still fits in the ’90s teen movie soundtrack vibe.
Released sometime in 1993, but then re-released in 1994, songs from this album were featured in episodes of Daria and Melrose Place, which leaves me deeply confused why I haven’t more about this band or this album outside of it being in my living room CD cabinet. Apparently when it was re-released in 1994, the album debuted on Billboard’s 200 chart and “Here and Now” reached #56 on the Hot 100. The band broke up in 2000, but reformed in 2007 and have played yearly shows in Boston where the band was formed. At a show this past November, the band celebrated the album’s 30th anniversary by playing the album live in its entirety. So it’s not like they broke up and were never heard from again.
Recently with artists like Olivia Rodrigo taking cues from Alanis Morrisette, Liz Phair, Gwen Stefani and No Doubt, I’m surprised Letters to Cleo hasn’t found a new audience amongst Rodrigo’s demographic. Especially with lead singer Kay Hanley’s voice being so emblematic of this ’90s teen style that’s so big right now.
Before listening to the rest of this album, my preconceived notion of this band, based solely on the lyrics of “Here and Now” and the fact that Kat Stratford was a Bikini Kill/punk rock girl, was that this was a punk band. I was fully expecting shorter, punchier songs but what I found instead was longer tracks with personal, diaristic lyrics. Songs like “I See” has a similar theme to No Doubt’s “I’m Just a Girl” while “Mellie’s Coming Over” has a quintessential teen girl bedroom feel. There are songs like “Rim Shack” and “Get On With It” that take an angstier sound, but that angst rings true to the teen experience just as much. It makes sense that this would be the band for Kat Stratford, it speaks to a version of girlhood that’s confused, angry, and working through it all. This album feels like it’s speaking to girls like Kat Stratford and even me, which makes them punk after all.
And while they might not be necessarily straight-forward punk in sound, they certainly are in regards to their anti-establishment attitude. Hanley said she was “a real pain to work with” because she “didn’t have that thing in me that wanted to be a pop star, and be paid attention to and in that way.”
My favorite songs are “Here and Now,” which I loved ever since I first heard it as a child coming from my parents’ iPod while they did dishes, “Big Star,” “Get On With It,” and “Come Around.”
This album, and this band, sound so specifically of this time in ’90s alternative, if I may say given that I wasn’t alive to experience it firsthand. But music like this feels like it keeps the spirit of the time in music like a time capsule for those of us looking back. And while it feels uncool to like your parents’ music, I’m grateful that I was given such a strong musical foundation, all in that dark brown wooden CD cabinet.
