Another Sunny Day. You Should All Be Murdered.

Sarah 22
Released: November 1989
Tracks:
01: You Should All Be Murdered
02: Horseriding
03: Green

Murdered

The Wake. Crush the Flowers.

Sarah 21
Released: October 1989
Tracks:
01: Crush The Flowers
02: Carbrain

Crush the Flowers

Henry's Dress. Bust 'Em Green.

One of Slumberland’s best noisepop releases. The band has swept up the shrapnel from their debut into bristling piles of jagged, brightly colored confetti. Their shoegaze excesses have been condensed into blasts of garage punk mauling 60’s mod rock. You can see the genesis of the Aisler’s Set, but it’s a much, much louder, fuzzed-out version of what’s to come. When they’re going full tilt, they have a way of pummeling through a song with delirious abandon, which just digs the hooks in deeper. You may not notice them the first time, but soon you won’t be able to get Hey Allison, All This Time for Nothing, and Self Starter out of your head. It hurtles by in just under half an hour, so I’ve appended the songs from their 1620 single as a bonus.



Green

Schatzi and Hazeltine. Happy Birthday Baby / When Yr Alone.

The first couple of times I listened to this, I was sure some part of it had been recorded on the wrong speed. The vocals are so damnably cute and coy—a winking come-on from a couple of Ronettes obsessed teenage garage punks hiding switchblades in the pockets of their leather jackets. But now it all falls together. All the great 60's girl-group pop was about love and obsession, so it makes sense that Schatzi and Hazeltine have built their own musical shrine to the sultry sound of tuff-girls and the menacing vulnerability of teen love. You can feel the sway of her hips in the swagger of her voice. They're lipstick killers—gang debs demanding kisses in exchange for the pleasure of their songs.

The hand-made, low-budget wall of sound is exceptionally well crafted and layered, much more so than you'd expect for a couple of songs that were probably dreamed up and tossed off in one exuberant afternoon. It's a total blast. Plus hand-claps! Glockenspiel! That moist, swollen-lipped, tiger-kitteny growl they stole from Ronnie Specter for the "oh-oh bay-a-buh's"! Crush worthy.

Video for When Yr Alone


Happy Birthday Baby

Buy it from Insound (US) or Bachelor (Europe)

Brighter. Around the World in Eighty Days.

Sarah 19
Released: August 1989
Tracks:
01: Inside Out
02: Tinsel Heart
03: Around The World In Eighty Days
04: Things Will Get Better

Around the World

Seefeel. Quique (Redux).

In 1916, Russian Futurist painter Vladimir Rossiné invented the Optophonic Piano, an electronic instrument that created sounds and projected colors and patterns through a series of painted glass discs. Most likely, it sounded like shit. But if you could do such a thing correctly, and had someone like, say, Helen Frankenthaler or Agnes Martin or Bryce Marden been responsible for the layers of plates, then you might have gotten something quite beautiful. Something like Seefeel.

Formed in the early 90’s as dream pop was just beginning to discover electronics and samples, Seefeel melded My Bloody Valentine’s lush fuzz with Aphex Twin’s serenity into a mesmerizing pulsar of languidly revolving beats, rubbery bass lines, and looped guitars. Approaching the idea of techno from the standpoint of a rock band, and using its instruments to replicate and interpret that sound, they stretched dream pop out like ribbons of taffy, endlessly folding it over and over on itself until it became a moebius strip of glassy-skinned candy.

Like looking through a glass clockworks, their compositions reveal themselves by adding and subtracting layers of sound, with different elements rising to the surface or slinking off into darker depths, with only the slightest of glows to remind you of their presence. Chord and tempo changes are kept to a minimum, so the songs float along as the textural, ambient equivalents of Op Art. It’s better than sonic wallpaper though—it’s more like the dizzy buzz of butterflies in your stomach, or the blissful space between orgasms and sleep.

I seem to remember referencing the Cocteau Twins ambient experiments before and I was planning on doing so again here, when I noticed that Seefeel member Mark Clifford produced those remixes (on the Otherness ep), which is probably why this album feels so familiar. The second disc includes remixes and alternate takes that push the songs further into pillowy, endorphin-flushed, Terry Riley territory.

CD 1
CD 2

Elf Power. Treasures From the Trash Heap.

I quite often describe bands as being the equivalent of some hypothetical cross-breeding of their influences. It’s rarely true and can unfairly diminish the singularly unique elements they’ve created. So without discounting the fact that Elf Power really are something wholly more and better than the sum of their antecedents, I think it’s fairly possible to draw an accurate, if inverted, phylogenetic map of their sound.

Really, it’s only because of how secure they are in their own identity that they can be so successful when revisiting the songs of their heroes. It’s why Nothing’s Going to Happen¹ is one of their best albums, and possibly the best representation of what they do, despite being made up entirely of covers. The Flaming Lips, Brian Eno, R.E.M., T. Rex, Wire, Sonic Youth, Jesus and Mary Chain, Roky Erickson, Robyn Hitchcock, The Buzzcocks, The Byrds, Hüsker Dü, and The Misfits all find some expression in Elf Power’s perfectly balanced mixture. Maybe it’s because their own songs—filtered and soaked in so many different elements—can function like a simultaneous mixtape that it’s so easy to like the band. They’re clueing you in to where they’ve come from and what they’ve loved along the way like your older sister sending you back all the cool bands she discovered in college.

This album was only available at their Back to the Web tour, and collects pretty much everything they’d done that never made it onto an album, or was only available as part of some other compilation you didn’t have. As an obsessive collector, I have to commend and thank them for really doing this type of album right. I want it all, and they’ve put it on here. Demos, more covers, a few live tracks, a remix, and a number of songs that just never saw the light of day. And they’re all really, really good. Historical Ant Wars rules. Back to the Web was a bit of a return to their old sound after a few albums that had found them stepping away from their early dive-bombing buzz, but Treasures From the Trash Heap is an even better encapsulation of the early days (although it covers every period). Like R.E.M.’s similar Dead Letter Office, it’s like getting to rummage around in your favorite band’s junk drawer. Without the pressure to create a coherent album, everything just reverts to being its own weird type of fun.

1. Temporary Arm (country version)
2. Face in the Sand (demo)
3. Feel a Whole Lot Better (Byrds cover)
4. Dandy in the Underworld (T.Rex cover)
5. Another Face (demo)
6. Hole in My Shoe (demo)
7. All the Same
8. Rise High Giant Fly
9. Historical Ant Wars
10. Empty Pictures (demo)
11. Princess Knows (Olivia Tremor Control cover)
12. Invisible Men (demo)
13. Dark Circles
14. Underneath the Bunker (R.E.M. cover)
15. Arrow Flies Close (live at Horseshoe Tavern, Toronto)
16. Blackbirds
17. Invisible Men (techno version)
18. Run Through the Forest
19. I Know I
20. Spiders
21. It's Not Cold
22. Reuters (Wire cover, live at Horseshoe Tavern, Toronto)
23. Honey (Spacemen 3 cover, live at the Landfill, Athens, GA)
24. The Slider (T.Rex cover)


1. Actually, A Dream In Sound and Creatures are the pinnacle of their work, but Nothing’s Going To Happen seems to hit right in the middle of what they’re usually aiming for.

Treasures

Secret Shine. After Years.

Secret Shine devoured When You Sleep like an overripe orange, and now its viscous juice and glistening pulp sweetens their lips and sticks to their fingers. It’s gone viral in their DNA, and they’re pushing it back out through their pores. Loveblind (sample it below) is simply unfuckwithable. It doesn’t matter if they’re simply MBV devotes. All the shoegaze bands were (to the point where a MBV comparison is meaningless in telling you what they sound like. To expand, Secret Shine sound a bit like a warmer Lush with elements of the Cure’s Disintegration and a bit of the Pixies or the Jesus & Mary Chain’s spikiness). All that matters is how universally awesome they were at it.

After Years collects the Ephemeral and Loveblind singles, the Untouched album, and the Greater Than God EP, and places them all in chronological order so you can hear them progress with each song. Born as indie popsters in the classic Sarah Records mold, Secret Shine always wrote the songs first before worrying about the atmospherics. That they ended up being quite good at it didn’t overshadow the fact that you could have loved them in any genre.

After Years

My Bloody Valentine. Loom. Vancouver. 7/1/92.

Amazing facts about My Bloody Valentine:

• Since its release in 1991, Loveless has been played on a continuous loop through underwater speakers, inspiring certain erotic feelings in cetaceans, and is single-handedly responsible for the resurgence of the Humpback Whale population
• Before being mastered, the original tracks were beamed into space, bounced off the rings of Saturn, and then filtered through a device that mimics the sound of dragonflies on absinthe.
• Loveless sounds the same in every known alternate universe.
• Early copies of the album came with packets of Dramamine to counteract wooziness.
• Not that I would know, but under certain influences you can actually listen to the album just by looking at the cover.
• The band was named after an unsuccessful Bing Crosby Christmas special.
• At least one track was created by dropping magnetic recording tape through the Aurora Borealis.
• Vinyl copies of Loveless actually contain minute trace amounts of love, Pixie Stix, and Kevin Shields’ pocket lint.

Loom

Sway. The Millia Pink and Green.

Information on the band is almost nonexistent. The website listed on the album has disappeared, and the band itself abruptly and inexplicably changed names a number of times. As far as anyone knows, they’ve broken up, which is too bad as this seems to be regarded by those who like their pop dreamy as one of the best shoegaze albums of the decade (admittedly, there probably aren’t a lot of bands still working in this category).

Instead of following MBV’s swarming, electron-honeybee buzz, Sway tend more towards the blissful, liquid pigmentation of Slowdive, Chapterhouse, and Lush. Their waterfall guitars are blurred and melted like those super-saturated polaroids of flowers that used to show up all the time on fffound.

Short and sweet.

Pink and Green

14 Iced Bears. Come Get Me.

Sarah 005
Released: April 1988
Tracks:
01: Come Get Me
02: Sure To See
03: Unhappy Days

Come Get Me

14 Iced Bears on myspace

Candy Claws. Two Airships/Exploder Falls.

Candy Claws released one of the loveliest albums ever with In the Dream of the Sea Life—a sun-drenched hymn of musical eddies and tide pools that wooshed and sighed like ribbon waves drawing a sheet back and forth over glistening sand. Two Airships lives more in the foam. It’s a Main Street Electrical Parade of whimsy; a circuit board frottage—like a dream-pop version of Lucky Dragons.

Two Airships

Candy Claws on myspace

Candy Claws website

The Primitives. Lovely.

Crash, I'll Stick With You, and Way Behind Me give me the oddest feeling of déjà vu. I'm sure I've heard them in some distant past by some other band. Surely these are indie pop updates of some long-lost, 60's girl group, or at least the work of a Flatmates cover band? That feeling can either mean that The Primitives tapped into a truly incandescent vein of musical history, or that they're hopelessly derivative. Aside from a few people slagging them off as sub-par Blondie clones, most listeners think it's the former.

Lead singer Tracy Tracy has a voice as quintessentially sweet and dreamy as a sundress, and reportedly kicked their original drummer out of the band for mistreating her cats (twee as fuck, baby!). The only thing revolutionary about them is that they might have started the whole "female-fronted-dream-pop-band" phenomenon that was to become the standard template up through the pre-Nirvana 90s. Outside of the infinitely superior Black Tambourine, Lovely may be the genre's best moment (if you can call a particular gender ratio a genre...which you can't). Stop Killing Me, for example, is the type of song that makes you think of the rush of teenage sexual joyrides (Morrissey was a fan), but is clearly made by people who thought that what the Jesus & Mary Chain needed was to huff Pixie Sticks instead of motorcycle exhaust. Elsewhere, they bring to mind the confident power-pop of The Siddeleys.

Despite some excellent songwriting, instantly accessible tunes (I defy you not to love Crash), and a whole bunch of catchy bah-bah-bah choruses, The Primitives never quite captured this feeling again. They broke up after two more (less than well received) albums.

Download Got a DMCA complaint about this. Sorry. Thought it was out of print.

The Primitives on myspace

V/A. One Last Kiss.

It's not the Courtney Love you're thinking of.

1. Swirlies - Chris R
2. Suddenly, Tammy! - Lamp
3. Lorelei - Mimesis
4. Veronica Lake - Daisy Kiss
5. The Magnetic Fields - 100,000 Fireflies
6. White Town - Hair Like Alain Delon
7. Honeybunch - Arm in Arm
8. Swirl - Helicopter
9. Our American Cousin - One Wish Too Many
10. Tree Fort Angst - You Should've Seen the One That Got Away
11. Crayon - All the Stars
12. Jane Pow - Shutdown
13. Whorl - I Love Her All the Time
14. Small Factory - Hey Lucille
15. Velocity Girl - My Forgotten Favorite
16. Courtney Love - Baseball Bat
17. Lilys - Any Several Sundays
18. Black Tambourine - We Can't Be Friends
19. Wimp Factor 14 - Change of Address Kit

Kiss

V/A. Take 5.

A mixture of "awkward" and indie-pop. Plus Spacemen 3. My favorite part is the way Death By Milkfloat shouts "YOU LOOK WEIRD!".

1. King of the Slums - Spider Psychiatry
2. Cud - Treat Me Bad
3. Yukio Yung - Jean Gabin
4. Dog Faced Hermans - Yellow Girls
5. Death By Milkfloat - Vagrancy
6. Kilgore Trout - Peacock Nose
7. Jackdaw With Crowbar - Lies
8. Bachelor Pad - You'll Be Mine
9. House of Love - Plastic
10. Boy Hairdressers - Assumption as an Elevator
11. Spacemen 3 - Rollercoaster

Take 5

V/A. The Waaaaah! CD.

A fantastic collection of indie and janglepop bands from Bring On Bull Records. The fine folks who ran it have made their entire catalog available for download on their webpage.

1. Kind- The House (A Dream)
2. Dufflecoats- Sunny Tuesday Afternoon
3. Home and Abroad- Wipe Those Tears Away
4. Field Mice- Other Galaxies
5. Strawberry Story- Ashlands Road
6. Fat Tulips- James
7. Dalek Beach Party- Way Out West
8. Haywains- Dusty Springfield
9. They Go Boom- Body
10. Confetti- Warm
11. Confetti- Jenny
12. Bedflowers- My Ex- Lovers Address
13. Cesspit Rebels- Cabbage
14. Cesspit Rebels- Deodorant Face
15. Haywains- Kill Karaoke
16. Music Seen- Friend Of AFriend
17. Red Alarm Clocks- Cobwebs
18. White Town- We'll Always Have Paris
19. Duglasettes- Bellshill's Son
20. Dalek Beach Party- Teddy Boy's Picnic
21. Music Seen- Hairdresser In The Sky
22. Dufflecoats- Uncertain
23. Home And Abroad- Smokey Town
24. Fluff, Fluff, Fluff, Fluff and Cuddleyness- I'm not ashamed
25. Cudgels- Summer Colours

Part 1
Part 2

V/A. Audacious (Lovely Records).

1. Are You Mr. Riley? - I'll Love You Tomorrow
2. Fat Tulips - The Way Things Are
3. Toy Department - Nursery
4. Strawberry Story - Buttercups and Daisies
5. Fat Tulips - Where's Clare Grogan Now (Original Demo)
6. St Christopher - All Of A Tremble (Live)
7. Home And Abroad - Christopher
8. Patrick Skelly And The Prescriptions - Oranges and Lemons
9. The Waiting List - Hide
10. PO - Ever Been Had
11. Those Naughty Corinthians - Butter Mountain
12. The Volunteers - Migraine
13. Jane From Occupied Europe - Little Valley Town
14. The Losers - Bad Day
15. Those Naughty Corinthians - Pie
16. The Keatons - Remain
17. The Moving Jelly Brothers - Girl Moneypleasure Rides Again
18. Megacity Four - Holiday Song
19. Thrilled Skinny - Pop Star Prat
20. Watch You Drown - It's My World
21. Megacity Four - Behind Closed Doors

Audacious

The High Violets. 44 Down.

I was pretty sure these guys were British (probably as a result of discovering them in a record store during my one trip overseas), but it turns out they're from Portland. They could easily have been some lost band from the early 90s prime dream-pop/shoegaze period, sounding as they do like an otherworldly mix of The Field Mice, The Cocteau Twins, MBV, Lush, Spaceman 3, Galaxie 500, and Julee Cruise. Cool angelic vocals, waves of white light climaxes, and spooling gossamer guitar chaos make this perfect dorm-room make-out music. It's like mirrorballs as satellites.

44 Down

High Violets on myspace

V/A. Something's Burning In Paradise Again.

The volume drops off a bit between the Field Mice and the Volunteers, though not to unlistenable levels. It's just a shame because the Field Mice's cover of the Feelies' Loveless Love is wonderful, and I don't think I've ever seen it anywhere else. I looked around, and everybody's copy seems to have this fault. Apparently it was original to the tape.

1. Poke It With A Stick - He's Bloody Happy
2. Throw That Beat In the Garbagecan - Just 16
3. The Wildhouse - Everything I Hate
4. Shrug - Fear & Violence On the Last Bus Home
5. Thrilled Skinny - Pop Star Prat
6. The Locations - I Keep Wondering Why
7. The Vinegar Blossoms - Quality Seems Totally Foreign to Me!
8. Those Naughty Corinthians - Butter Mountain
9. The Keatons - French Bench
10. The Field Mice - Loveless Love
11. Bobby Scarlet - Steppenwolf
12. The Windmills - 360 °
13. Charlotte's Web - The Train for June
14. Apple Moths - Everything
15. The Volunteers - Long Wavy Random Arm (Do It)
16. The Losers - Down at the Bottom Where You Belong
17. The Harbour Pilots - Orchid Sunrise
18. Debonaire - The Distance
19. This Poison! - Driving Skills
20. St. Christopher - Our Secret

Again

V/A. Something's Burning In Paradise.

There's a thesis in here somewhere for anyone who wants to analyze the fetish/artifact nature of releases like these. I have no idea if the sound quality was better in first generation tapes, but something about the xeroxed quality of the (already lo-fi) music makes it seem more authentic and valuable. It's like listening to ancient field recordings of blues musicians on 78s; if you could travel back in time and make fresh, digital copies, it would suck all the life and soul out of it. It's the found quality that makes it feel so special (doubly so, since most of these bands never went on to anything else). I half wonder if any of these tapes were made in the first place. It seems much more likely that each and every one appeared ahistorically in a dusty shoebox underneath a bed in an abandoned flat.

1. The Pilgrims - Chemically Yours
2. Emil - Raining In My Heart
3. Another Sunny Day - I Want You
4. Thrilled Skinny - Love Rut/Knee On Sea
5. Slob - Mister Ugly
6. Mousefolk - Grannies Cake Crisis
7. The Ruth Ellis Swing Band - I Would Have Saved You
8. Remember Fun - Cold Inside
9. The Candy Darlings - Southern Line
10. The Paper Tulips - Not Fair
11. The McTells - This Afternoon (Version)
12. James Dean Driving Experience - Drop Dead Darling
13. The Wilderness Children - 15 Minutes Fame
14. Emily - Really Mad Dogs (Dance Mix I)
15. The Librarians - Irene Handl Knew My Postman
16. The Benjamins - The Way Things Are
17. Buy Off the Bar - There's No Fridge On The Bristol Bridge (Live)
18. Girl of My Best Friend - Throwaway Girl
19. The Driscolls - Groovy Little Town (Acoustic)
20. The Mayfields - Season's Pass
21. St. Christopher - To The Mountain

Paradise