Five Eight

Athens, GA emo unit Five Eight was the vehicle of singer/guitarist Mike Mantione, a self-professed manic depressive whose music exorcised his personal demons in grim detail. Debuting in 1989 with the self-released Passive-Aggressive cassette, the band — which also comprised longtime bassist Dan Horowitz, guitarist Sean Dunn and drummer Patrick '"Tigger'" Ferguson — resurfaced two years later with Inflatable Sense of Self. Signing to the Sky label, in 1992 Five Eight issued their first full-length CD, I Learned Shut Up, releasing The Angriest Man a year later; however, after 1994's Weirdo, the group spent the mid-1990s largely out of the spotlight, finally returning in 1997 with the Ed Stasium-produced Gasolina! That winter both Dunn and Ferguson abruptly left the lineup, and with new drummer Mike Rizzi, Five Eight issued 1999's "The Road Beat the S**t Out of My Favorite Band," a split single with Clemente. The full-length The Good Nurse followed on Deep Elm in the spring of 2000. Five Eight returned in 2004 with a self titled CD, the first to be released by the band itself.