Alt-metal’s premier brother band, Chevelle have been a consistent force to be reckoned with for 30 years.
Across nine albums, the Illinois outfit of vocalist-guitarist Pete Loeffler, drummer Sam Loeffler (and, early on, bass-playing bro Sam Loeffler) customized Chevelle with colossally grooving rhythms, nu-brooding melodies and uniquely vulnerable vocal performances. All that and more has helped the outfit sell over 6 million albums since the Nineties.
But what’s the band’s single greatest song? The one heavy-yet-hooky track that still works wonders after all these years? The cut that does you in the second it starts up? We asked Revolver readers to rev up their picks, and these were the top five vote-getters.
“Vitamin R (Leading Us Along)”
As the first guitar-crunching preview from 2004’s This Type of Thinking (Could Do Us In), “Vitamin R” had Chevelle fans hooked. 21 years later, Revolver readers rank it high as a memorable nu-rock anthem addressing mental health and big pharma profiteering.
The song, reportedly about a friend’s ADHD misdiagnosis and subsequent hallucinatory Ritalin usage, barrels through a dark and brooding verse before launching into a chorus that’s both anthemic and unsettlingly out-of-phase — that first guitar octave, in particular, is compellingly weird. In a sense, that melodic disorientation fits the theme nicely.
“The Clincher”
It was pretty clear early on in the voting process that This Type of Thinking’s second single would clinch a spot in the top five.
The song begins with a spidery, chromatic walkabout and a seismic mega-scream from Pete Loeffler, though Chevelle step off the gas a touch through the more spacious verses. All told, there’s plenty to gain from repeat listens of this dynamic, mid-Aughts alt-metal classic.
“The Red”
Unless you were a super early adopter and glommed onto the band’s independently released first album, 1999’s Point #1, “The Red” may well be your entry point into the Chevelle-verse. It’s certainly their big breakthrough, with the lead-off single to major label debut Wonder What’s Next notching up plenty of radio play and MTV promotion back when it dropped in the summer of 2002. And what an introduction it was.
The song still hits hard, between its depressive TOOL-esque swing, efficient-and-aching octave-trill solo, and Pete Loeffler’s lines about getting caught up in a red-eyed rage.
Nevertheless, “The Red” still soothes you savage beasts.
“Send the Pain Below”
The video to “Send the Pain Below” is oddly literal, in that it initially finds a snowboarder just eating it time and time again as he slams ass-backwards down a mountainside like a winter sports Wile E. Coyote. The single, a major fan favorite, seems to reflect a more inward and emotional kind of trauma.
What’s dropping down are Pete Loeffler’s feelings through a trying relationship, the vocalist-guitarist seemingly embodying anyone trying to dissociate from a toxic relationship. The stress of that can be suffocating, though “Send the Pain Below” mercifully acts as a cathartically nu-bounced breath of fresh air.
“Comfortable Liar”
Our take on why Revolver readers rank this Chevelle song so highly is simple: “Comfortable Liar” crushes.
Wonder What Next’s second song isn’t quite the calm before the storm, out-heavied in many ways by the record’s first track, “Family System.” But it also gets so much right. It’s driven by a hypnotic and deceptively simple two-note groove that penetrates the primal psyche, while Pete Loeffler also gives the song fragile gravitas between his micro-growls and skybound falsetto work.
Aurally, it’s full of pain and pleasure. Salt in the wound, as it were, but it hurts so good.
No foolin’, it’s a Chevelle classic amongst their many classics.