Cascadia Calling 2026.1.19
"c'mon you haven't got a thing to say with such a big vocabulary"
January 2026 has been dense with red-letter days for me. The 20th anniversary of getting my first job in the tech industry, my 5th anniversary with my employer and also my last day with said employer, and my partner’s 40th birthday all happened in the first few weeks of the year.
Today is my first day of a few weeks of voluntary unemployment. I’m trying to resist my nature, which tells me to try to cram as many little projects and efforts as possible into my time at liberty. I’ve always been the type of guy to try a dozen things and accomplish one of them rather than try three and accomplish them all.
I’m trying to trick myself by writing dozens of things on my to-do list, but half of them are things like “Go see The Bone Temple” and “Relisten to that one Peter Parker album you like so much.”
You all get the privilege of helping me with that second one.
Peter Parker were a Seattle-based rock band from the late 90s and early 2000s1. They released two records before entering the kind of local band half-life of occasional shows and studio rumors. I first discovered them when they opened for someone (I can’t recall who, which is a sign of their talent as an opening band) in 2001 or 2002. I bought both of their albums on CD and fixated hard on their debut record, Migliore!.
This was the era of my life when most of my listening was either late at night while doing school work, or driving around in my white Chevy Astro van (windows, not panels, lest you get the wrong idea) which was always in various states of disrepair. I have a potent sense memory of driving the dusty highways of Eastern Washington listening to Migliore! on repeat.
I’d belt along with “Eliot” and feel a deep kind of anthemic loser pride of the kind that only crunchy, noisy grunge will ever be able to elicit in me. That angry, self-pitying “I’m sorry, but I’m not that clever, okay” still demands to this day that sing along. The punchy, chaotic, minute-and-a-half track that it kicks off is also one of the best breakup songs to come out of a fertile era for Seattle rock music.
The opening of “Goldenstate” feels like a window into another era where Peter Parker decided to be a hardcore band instead of the grunge punk they ended up. One thing that has struck me listening to this album end-to-end for the first time in years is how interesting some of the songs are, despite not being that technically complex. There’s no particular virtuosity on display here. It has the DIY, low-effort feel of the best grunge and punk, but it’s hardly the traditional ABABCAB rock song.
The lyrical style differences between the verse and chorus, as well as the staccato interjections (“find a golden state way to articulate it”) make it feel raucous and chaotic while always flowing naturally from one to the other. The subdued but constant drums and fluid, noise-laden guitars give a great texture and support the thin melody of the vocals. It’s a masterclass in how to make a compelling, catchy song without falling back on traditional four-chord song construction.
I’ve always felt that grunge punched above its weight class in evocative lyrical hooks. Many of my favorite lines come from Seattle bands of that era and I think of those kinds of lyrical gems as being key to the music’s charm, even if (perhaps especially if) they are never elaborated on. “Clean living is easy in the Midwest, so you’re moving to Haight-Ashbury” is one of the all-time bangers of the grunge bon mot genre. Peter Parker excels in these kinds of quips throughout their entire discography. They give a smart edge to a genre that has often been cast as both blue collar and mindless. (In no small part due to grunge bands themselves leaning hard into the aesthetic and embracing a fatalistic, ironic frame.)
Which isn’t to say grunge was dumb music, of course. But rather it came from largely poor, working class folks from an industrial town. As Nathalie Olah pointed out in Steal as Much as You Can, artistic taste is a reflection of class, not quality. When grunge was derided as dumb or inartful, it was usually by people who felt it was in poor taste simply because it was blue collar. (They couldn’t say that, of course. Even in the 90s, just dismissing it as “music for poors” would have been too on the nose.)
So I think the grunge propensity for a good quip is a way to signal intelligence and craft while not shedding the working class loser aesthetic. Of course, co-option is an iron rule of Capitalism, so many of those grunge bands that made it now have their music soundtracking ads and blockbuster movies.2 Peter Parker’s knack for great and clever lines is an example of one of the reasons why grunge was more than just a local phenomenon.
Throughout this post I’ll refer to them as “grunge”. Grunge wasn’t ever actually a single thing, but it was a real moment and scene and Peter Parker seem to me to be deeply influenced by it. And there’s not other good label that I’ve found to describe them that highlights those commonalities with other Seattle-area bands from the 80s and 90s.
I’ve been more obsessed with this process than usual, so expect an essay about it from me later this week. Unemployment has the advantage of giving me much more time to write.