High Risk Group - "Flag" 7"

High Risk Group – “Flag” 7”

Harriet Records, 1989

Acquired: Love Garden, Used, 2009
Price: $1

 

Through the 1990s, the Cambridge, Massachusetts based label released almost exactly half as many 7”s as Sarah Records. They brought us the Magnetic Fields, the Mountain Goats and the Extra Glenns, Tullycraft, Vehicle Flips, and Hulaboy. While Harriet’s releases were much more varied than the uniform, rainy day pop of Sarah, I still want to collect as many as I possibly can. It was pretty easy to find all of the Sarah Records releases on the internet, but the Harriet Records 7”s are near impossible to track down in digital form (or they were the last time I tried to find an MP3 version of that amazing Ampersands “Annabelle Bleach” 7” I own) which makes hunting down the vinyl all the more thrilling. Though I usually associate Harriet with indie pop, their first release—High Risk Group’s “Flag” 7”—is a hearty slice of DIY post-punk. The music is repetitive, bass-driven, and the band attempts to carve out interesting sonics with their guitar sound but it gets lost in the shoddy mixing (especially on the B side tracks “Tapped” and “Katrine”). Ultimately it’s the title track that feels like the best distillation of High Risk Group (go figure, huh). It’s a murky, serpentine and lulls you into that dark, post-punky sound with its cycling minute-and-a-half long intro that consumes half the song. Hilariously, I played this at 33 1/3 because I’d noticed side two was designated for that speed. What I got was borderline sludge metal and even when the vocals finally kicked in, I still couldn’t tell I was playing it wrong. That’s versatility right there!

"Flag"

Flag from Sue Metro on Myspace.

Heavenly - "Space Manatee" 7"

Heavenly – “Space Manatee” 7”

K Records, 1996

Acquired: Love Garden, Used, 2010

Price: $3

 

Heavenly know how to get it right. Every single is a total joy. They’re like the clutch hitter who knows when to come through when the game is on the line. In my head, I just uttered the line “Heavenly are the Evan Gattis of twee pop.” I got baseball on my mind. The Royals are in the wild card race and have a legitimate shot of making the playoffs if they stay hot! This is new to me! I’m so used to my lovable losers being light years away from the playoffs in September, my fantasies are running wild. Granted, my fantasies involve the Royals getting that second wild card slot and losing in five games to whoever they would have to play, but still, it’s somethin’. Today I was thinking about how I like sports the wrong way. Whenever I have to talk to a real Man about sports, I feel like I’m doing it wrong. I care about stats and numbers and the beauty of Chris Davis’s swing and admire the real effort Eric Hosmer shows when he tries to run out an infield groundout. Most sports fans don’t really give a shit about this stuff, at least in my experience. I like sports like a sensitive loser in my own private little way. But back to Heavenly, who are pretty much the end all be all of indie pop in my book.

I love this band, and while indie pop gets an unfair rap for being frivolous or without substance (haters gonna hate, I spose), Heavenly served up some of the best singles of the 90s (or any decade for that matter). They didn’t get any radio play out side of college stations, but they totally won my heart with Amelia Fletcher’s wonderfully normal yet incredibly appealing vocals and the sort of pop hooks that makes you want to stop everything and sing along. They managed to be sweet without being cloying, which is the hardest line to walk in indie pop. “Space Manatee” is culled from their final full-length Operation Heavenly. It’s a brilliant little gem that’s maybe not as memorable as “Our Love is Heavenly” or “C is the Heavenly Option,” but it hits all the right buttons and adds a nice twist with a bass line that sort of pummels you through the intro and verse and makes the chorus all the more powerful once it comes crashing in. The b-side features covers of the Flamin’ Groovies’ “You Tore Me Down” and the Jam’s “Art School,” both of which are the sort of fun and enjoyable covers that are nice to find on the b-side (opposed to finding more tracks from the album which really, what’s the point?).

Lemuria - The Distance is So Big

Lemuria – The Distance is So Big

Bridge Nine, 2013

Acquired: Mail Order from Lemuria’s Website, New, 2013

Price: $14

 

I really don’t think 2013 has produced a better song than “Brilliant Dancer.” I’ve listened to that song a hundred times and I’m sold. Song of the Year. Hand’s down. No one else even comes close. Jenny loves it too, and I often find her singing it around the house, in the car, etc. It does everything right. It’s got a breezy intro with Sheena Ozzella’s pleasing vocals before Alex Kerns’ drums pummel their way in and the chorus totally sweeps you away. It’s like being on a boat, rolling with the waves. Imagine the empty heart meter on a video game getting filled to the brim. And the thing is, I’d be totally content with the song if it just repeated the verse and chorus for two and a half minutes, but halfway through everything switches up and Lemuria do everything they can to make it sound like a totally different song while keeping it rooted to the first part of the track. The pianos come in on the refrain of “brilliant dance dance dance dancer” and punch it into your brain and Ozzella, despite having those beautifully plain not-a-singer-singer vocals reaches absolute transcendence after that first refrain. This is what pop punk sounds like when it grows up, and it’s exhaustingly great. And that is the first fucking song on the record. What follows is the sort of tour de force that restores my faith in indie rock. This band is wonderfully inventive and has so much depth, and yet they still seem to be having a lot of fun. The hooks are like pure joy. The vocal interchanges between Ozzella and Kerns is playful and effective, and it’s one of the most replayable and straight-up fucking enjoyable albums I have had the pleasure of listening to in 2013. 

"Brilliant Dancer"

"Scienceless"

"Oahu Hawaii"

Note: Every time I listen to this record, I pay a little debt to Nick Spacek, who has been responsible for introducing me to three of my favorite albums of the year via his blog Rock Star Journalist. Of all the people on earth, he is the person whose taste in music I implicitly trust the most. So while the Internet is great for letting you listen to anything you could ever want to listen to at any time, I still find it refreshing to navigate that morass of MP3s via the recommendations and/or blog post nudgings of a friend.

Gut Feeling: Waxahatchee - Cerulean Salt

Waxahatchee – Cerulean Salt

Don Giovanni, 2013

 

Cerulean Salt is a small album. It clocks in at just over thirty minutes and most of the songs hover around the two-and-a-half minute mark. Those are the sorts of stats that make my eyes light up, and Katie Crutchfield’s understanding of concise songwriting is what really makes this album work. It makes frequently often heart wrenching songs that much more potent, and while Cerulean Salt may not be my favorite album of 2013, it’s one of the albums I have listened to the most because Crutchfield’s (mostly) quiet songs are just the sort of thing I like to listen to late at night.

Crutchfield seems to have a lot in common with Laura Stevenson. Both have played in pop-punk bands, both have released albums on well respected DIY labels (No Idea for Stevenson and Plan-It-X for Crutchfield), and both are signed to Don Giovanni records. That’s really where the comparisons end (other than the obvious fact that they are both supreme tunesmiths). Stevenson is more soulful and more idiosyncratic where Crutchfield is fragile and hits you straight in the gut with her confessional lyrics. Her songs oscillate between acoustic and electric guitar, but they almost always feels hushed, stripped down, and spare with the exception the punk-tinged pop tune “Coast to Coast,” the jaunty “Lips and Limbs,” and “Peace and Quiet,” which highlights what the album does best via its quiet verse and big catchy chorus. The quiet little songs are where this album lives and breaths. Though the songs feel small, they’re never slight. Crutchfield has one of those beautifully plain voices that really works to sell the humanity of her songs. Cerulean Salt’s most potent asset is that you feel like you’re sitting right next to this person spill their guts onto the floor.

"Misery Over Dispute"

"Peace and Quiet"

"Lips and Limbs"

Hair Police - "Mortuary Servants" 7"

Hair Police – Mortuary Servants 7”

Gods of Tundra/Freedom From, 2002

Acquired: Half Price Books, Used, 2013

Price: $1

 

Despite the awesome black metal font and design of this 7”s cover, Hair Police are a noise band. I was just curious. One of my favorite things about 7”s is that you can just drop a buck or two on something that looks cool. It’s not a financial investment or something that’ll leave you kicking yourself at the end of the day. This particular band of skronky miscreants hails from Lexington, KY. Their music sounds like Wolf Eyes. Pretty much all noise bands sound like Wolf Eyes in my head. This band features a former member of Wolf Eyes, so there you go. It also features members of Burning Star Core, which is the other noise band I know. I haven’t the finely tuned sense of musical adventurism it takes to appreciate this stuff. I recognize it’s function and its boundary pushing form, but I would never go out of my way to listen to this stuff. I think this is at least partially due to the fact that the big noise music advocate at KJHK was a colossal jerk and I was severely annoyed that he would push dissonant noise records into spotlight rotation. It struck me as extremely misguided. While one of KJHK’s functions is to broaden the horizons of its listeners and expose them to music they wouldn’t hear elsewhere, if I played the title track of this 7” on the radio I guarantee 99% of listeners would tune out. There is a place for noise music in the world, but that place is in some adventurous music nerd’s headphones or a venue where people know what they are getting into. On the radio it feels like being alienating for the sake of alienation. It feels weird espousing such conservative views about art, and I’m sure there’s a counterargument to the necessity of noise on the radio. For instance, there’s plenty of music that has noise-based elements or veers toward the more pleasant-sounding ambient spectrum that would be radio friendly, it’s just this extreme shit I’ve gotta beef with. That said, I don’t hate this 7”. “Mortuary Servants” is a violent electronic mash and I appreciate the band’s attempt to push their sound to the outer rings of the musical spectrum. The b-side “Rare Animals” is either designed to fuck with you via infinite locked grooves or my copy of the record is messed up. It’s probably the latter, although in this wild, weird world of noise music I wouldn’t put it past a band to fuck with me in such a way.

Guided by Voices - "Bulldog Skin" 7"

Guided by Voices – “Bulldog Skin” 7”

Matador, 1997

Acquired: Love Garden, Used, 2010

Price: $3

 

Mag Earwhig! tends to be an album that gets overlooked in GBV’s discography. It’s the first album to feature Cobra Verde as the backing band. Classic Line-Up bros Tobin Sprout and Greg Demos were there too, but in a reduced role (Sprout’s “Jane of the Waking Universe” is one of the album’s highlights). Yet while it clearly depicts a sea change in GBV’s direction, it sounds more like its precursor Under the Bushes Under the Stars than its follow-up: the overblown black sheep of the discography Do the Collapse. While Pollard’s songwriting is as sharp as ever, the songs are glossier, moving closer to the rock star ideal Pollard always wanted. “Bulldog Skin” is a classic GBV earwormer that is about a hundred times better than the atrocious “I Am a Tree” which served as the album’s big single. The b-side hosts a deserving castoff, “The Singing Razorblade,” and a terrific electric version of the album’s “Now to War,” which is right up there in terms of quality with “Sad if I Lost it,” “Learning to Hunt,” “Little Lines,” and “Choking Tara.” It’s a simple, catchy little tune, and the sort of thing GBV does best: No frills indie rock with maximum rewards.

"Bulldog Skin"

"Now to War (Electric Version)"

Guided By Voices - Tigerbomb EP

Guided by Voices – Tigerbomb EP

Matador, 1995

Acquired: Love Garden, Used, 2009

Price: $4

 

The Tigerbomb EP feels like a convenient way for Bob Pollard to play revisionist with the two best tracks from Alien Lanes. The studio versions of “Game of Pricks” and “My Valuable Hunting Knife” are the first real step towards the clean, professionally recorded sound GBV adopted for the rest of its career (until last year’s classic line-up reunion). I don’t think it’s fair to be the sort of purist who wish GBV had just stayed in the garage recording pop gem after pop gem into a shitty four track, so I sort of love these re-recorded versions. Both versions of “Game of Pricks” offer something different. On Alien Lanes it crashes into the room and you just stand there like an idiot with your jaw dropped and hit repeat until your ears fall off. Still, Pollard knows it’s the best song he’s ever written, and the studio version amps everything up so that the song just fucking sparkles. You could play “Game of Pricks” on a child’s toy piano and it would still be a great song, because that’s how great songs work: no matter how you dress them down or doll them up, they always have that core of greatness that makes them shine.

I particularly enjoy the rerecorded version of “My Valuable Hunting Knife,” even though I think it works better in its stripped down version. The studio version brings some extra swagger to the table though. There’s a kind of reeling, drunken stumble to the track despite the crisp studio production. It’s borderline danceable! The middle chunk of this album is a strange tour through the weirder parts of Bob Pollard’s 1,000+ BMI registered songs. The title of “Mice Feel Nice (in my Room)” is better than the song itself which features future GBV guitarist Doug Gillard on guitar and is one of those Pollard tracks that sounds like he’s singing from the bottom of an empty can of Spaghetti-Os. “Not Good For the Mechanism” is a throwaway little shouter, but “Kiss Only the Important Ones” is a dusty gem. It sounds like a poorly recorded demo traced during some downtime at the studio, but it’s one of those quiet little heartstring-tuggers that Pollard hides in his discography like buried treasure.

Tigerbomb's highlight is Tobin Sprout’s lone contribution: “Dodging Invisible Rays.” When I first started listening to GBV, Tobin Sprout’s songs were always my favorites. They were the ones that made me stick around. Sprout sort of acts like the buddy who vouches for the drunken Pollard. “No, just give him a chance, I swear the guy’s a genius!” Sprout says with his psychedelic-pop tinged songs and their supreme, brain-melting melodies. I’ve always liked the idea that Pollard was the erratic genius, recording every single song that popped into his head and Sprout was the bespectacled nerd behind the desk weeding out all the crap and mining for gold. I barely even need to say that their dynamic is my favorite in the history of rock n’ roll. Fuck Lennon/McCartney. Pollard/Sprout forever. Anyway, “Dodging Invisible Rays” is the best song Tobin Sprout ever contributed to GBV. It’s just so loose and brilliant. I remember the first time I heard it, which was the day I bought this EP. I sat there on my floor in front of my record player at the Pink House and let it wash over me. And played the song five more times. When I joined a band, I made my band mates learn this so we could play it. Playing this track live to practically no one at the Replay Lounge was one of the most satisfying moments of my life.

I love Guided by Voices because there is so much wrapped up in these unassuming, often poorly recorded songs. In the band’s sprawling discography you can find everything you could ever possibly want to feel. There is quite literally a song for every occasion. Graduation? “Echoes Myron.” Summer Barbecue? “Dayton Ohio Nineteen-Something-And-Five.” Ok, I’m biased. But that’s ok. I tend to not trust people who won’t tell me their favorite band straight-up. The common tendency when asked this question is to say “I like a lot of music” and while that’s totally true, come on. Deep down, what is the song of your soul? If you put a stethoscope up to my heart it would probably thump out the beat to “Smothered in Hugs.” While it’s important to listen to a lot of music and love a lot of bands, I think it’s equally important to be obsessive about one. That was what was so great about working at a college radio station. I met people with these great obsessions who weren’t ashamed to say they worshipped Pavement or the Pixies or Wu-Tang Clan. Never be ashamed! God, I sound like an evangelist. I feel like an evangelist when I talk about Guided by Voices to the uninitiated. Just the other day at work some GBV CDs came in and one of my coworkers said they’d never listened to them but heard good things and I went off. It’s hard to contain, it’s weird and I get this crazy gleam in my eye whenever I get a chance to wax rhapsodic about GBV, and I don’t think that will ever change. And I don’t want it to change. For our anniversary my wife got me a signed, screen printed Bob Pollard poster purchased online directly from Pollard’s wife. It was basically the best gift anyone could ever give me. Like ever. For some people, reading the Bible and developing a personal relationship with Jesus gives their life meaning. For me, listening to Bee Thousand and developing a personal (I FEEL LIKE I REALLY KNOW HIM OK!) relationship with Bob Pollard gives my life meaning. And that’s alright with me. 

"Dodging Invisible Rays"

"My Valuable Hunting Knife" 

"Game of Pricks" 

Greenhorn - "Liars' Song"/ "Lovers' Song" 7"

Greenhorn – “Liars’ Song”/ “Lovers’ Song” 7”

3 Beads of Sweat, 1993

Acquired: Love Garden Shotgun Room, Used, 2008

Price: $.25

 

Greenhorn illustrated that the long-reaching tentacles of grunge got as far inland as Columbus, Ohio. I shouldn’t be surprised, as I’ve previously noted that the last house we occupied in Lawrence housed at least two different grunge bands/bands capitalizing on the post-grunge boom in the early 90s (fun fact: Behind the house there was a shed that served as a carport and the always open door to the shed bore the logos of Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys in spray paint, thus leaving behind the legacy of the punk bands that lived in the house before the grunge bands moved in). The grunge comes through in full-force on the A-side “Liars’ Song,” but B-side “Lovers’ Song” is more of a tender, jangly pop number that redeems the 7” even if the bass is mixed way too high and goes on about a minute and a half too long.

The Godrays - Songs for TV Stars 7"

The Godrays – Songs for TV Stars 7”

Vernon Yard, 1996

Acquired: Love Garden Shotgun Room, Used, 2008

Price: $.25

 

The title track from this double 7” is probably the most impressive song in the Godrays’ tiny catalog. I can’t guarantee this, as I haven’t heard their full length—also titled Songs for TV Stars—which amazingly only features two tracks from this 7”. I totally expected this to be a selection from the forthcoming album but nope! The Godrays know how to do an album proper! Strangely, the real overlap comes with “Crummy,” which appeared in a different form of the other Godrays’ 7” I own. This version of “Crummy” was recorded into a four-track, features only front man Alex Kemp, and isn’t nearly as good as the version on the “Crummy” single. Partly because the pretty little synth line gets way distorted into obscurity, but mostly because Phoebe Summersquash’s backing vocals make that song. It’s not bad, it just pales in comparison. I wonder which version shows up on the album? Oh yeah, I was talking about the impressiveness of “Songs for TV Stars.” Kemp suckers you in by laying out a serpentine bass line at the outset and littering the track’s empty space with spare little guitar notes. And then he just hammers you with the chorus and its big wall of guitars, Summersquash backing vocals poking through, and a mightily satisfying melody. “No Arms are Good for Holding” and the brooding instrumental “Film Music 2” stray from the pop-tinted glow of their first 7” and Small Factory’s entirely blissful output, but Kemp and Summersquash handle this newfound heavy indie rock with aplomb.

Willfuly Obscure is once again the only place that has the Jams.

The Godrays - Bed Spins 7"

The Godrays – The Bed Spins 7”

Vernon Yard, 1996

Acquired: Love Garden Shotgun Room, Used, 2008

Price: $.25

 

The Godrays rose from the ashes of the excellent little Rhode Island based indie pop band Small Factory. Following the departure of guitarist Dave Auchenbach in 1995, bassist Alex Kemp and drummer Phoebe Summersquash formed the Godrays and continued paying tribute to the rich tradition New English alternative rock. Considering that Small Factory’s “The Last Time That We Spoke” is one of my favorite, most criminally unsung alt-pop songs of the mid 90s (a song I should note I only heard after acquiring the 7” in the Love Garden Shotgun Room) I was absolutely game to finally listen to the Godrays. Of course they’re great. Kemp and Summersquash harmonize in that way that really great indie-pop bands harmonize, which is to say that while they aren’t Singers with a big capital S, when they harmonize they create that perfect human sweetness you love. A-Side “Crummy” capitalizes on those harmonies, and threads an airy little unobtrusive synthesizer riff throughout. Though Kemp has an average-dude voice, it is more than capable enough to deliver the melodic goods on the track’s catchy chorus. The B-Side, “Northless,” provides a nice counterpoint to the upbeat niceness of “Crummy” by setting the mopefactor to 11. It’s a short, downtrodden little tune that bursts into a cathartic guitar solo at the very end. This is one of those perfect little 7”s where a band you’ve never heard manages to blow you away and you realize that there are hundreds of bands you’ve never heard of and will probably never hear that have songs that would knock your socks off if only you stumbled across them in the bargain basement section of a record store.   

"Crummy"