Product Code Database
Allister is an American pop-punk band from Chicago, Illinois. The four-piece formed in 1994 as Phineas Gage when the original band members were still in high school. In 1998, Allister became one of the first bands to sign to Drive-Thru Records. They went on hiatus in 2007, then reunited in 2010, and have been touring and recording again since. They have released six studio albums: Dead Ends and Girlfriends (1999), Last Stop Suburbia (2002), Before the Blackout (2005), Countdown to Nowhere (2010), Life Behind Machines (2012), and 20 Years and Counting (2019). The band also made a cameo appearance in the 2004 film Sleepover.
In 2004, Allister toured the world (including Europe and Japan) and scored a small guest appearance on the big screen in the film Sleepover, before releasing their third album Before The Blackout (2005) and supporting it by co-headlining the "Before the Blackout, after the Breakup Tour" with Fenix TX.
In 2006, the group was invited to a two and a half-month tour of Japan with Japanese band Ellegarden, with whom they had become friends while playing together at the SXSW music festival in Austin, Texas. The tour consisted of 40 sold-out shows all over Japan. At this time, the group released a cover version EP titled Guilty Pleasures, on which Murphy sang half of the songs in Japanese. Before the departure, Rogner learned that he was becoming a father and made the decision to take a job where he was more available to his family. As such, Allister decided to go on hiatus following one final Japanese tour that the band had already committed to in the spring of 2007 – for which former Allister member Chris Rogner took his brother's place – and a final farewell show in Chicago at The Metro on 20 July 2007, at which Tim Rogner returned to perform. Former member John "Johnny" Hamada returned to sing backing vocals on the final song, "Somewhere on Fullerton", as well as other members of support bands Punchline and The Fold.
In 2008, Scott Murphy signed as a solo artist to the label Universal Music in Japan, recording his debut solo album, Guilty Pleasures II, as a continuation of the band's past work. The album contains a number of Japanese and English songs. On the album's release date, "Scott Murphy" was the number 1 searched word on Google in Japan. Murphy released another follow-up EP, Guilty Pleasures 3, on 3 December 2008. Guilty Pleasures 3 was certified Gold by the Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ) for shipment of 100,000 copies on 10 September 2009 and Guilty Pleasures II was also certified Gold by RIAJ on 10 December 2009. Throughout the following years, he released several more albums in the "Guilty Pleasures" series, including: Guilty Pleasures Love, Guilty Pleasures 4, Guilty Pleasures Animation, Guilty Pleasures Christmas and Guilty Pleasures Thriller, a track for track rock cover of the Michael Jackson album Thriller.
In 2010, Murphy began working on a project with alternative rock band Weezer's frontman Rivers Cuomo entitled Scott & Rivers. The pair met in Los Angeles in 2010, and soon began writing and recording an album of original songs sung in Japanese. They share lead vocal duties and play guitar in the group. They played their first show at the Countdown Japan Festival in Chiba on 31 December 2012, as the first non-Japanese act to perform at the 10-year-old festival. They released a full-length album, Scott & Rivers, in 2013.[1]
In 2012, Rogner recorded and released a solo acoustic EP entitled "The Ravenswood Sessions."
On 19 December 2018, Tim Rogner announced that the band would release a new record to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the release of You Can't Do that on Vinyl. The record, called 20 Years and Counting, is a "20 song compilation that features songs from previous records as well as four brand new tracks." Since Allister did not own the recording licenses for songs on its first three records, but owned the rights to the songs themselves, the band re-recorded and "re-imagined" some of them. A video for the re-recording of "Somewhere on Fullerton" was released on YouTube the same day as Rogner's announcement. The new record was officially released through Universal Japan on 30 January 2019, available digitally via iTunes and Google Play.
Former members
Session guests
Timeline
| 2002 |
| 2005 |
| 2010 |
| 2010 |
| 2012 |
| 2019 |
|
|
