LA JOLLA MY ARMPIT

Seam/Bastro/Bitch Magnet

I took a break while I agonized over finding work in the actual world. Now that I’ve gainfully employed self, I can return to frittering away the hours guilt-free with things like a blog.  These three albums belong together in a way, like rum, and soda, and ginger ale (and lime).  

I got into Seam because Mac from Superchunk played drums on this, their debut album. In 1992 I was buying everything that had a Merge label on it, and going deep geek for anything Superchunk-related.  I was overwhelmed with envy when my friend Drew moved to Chapel Hill after high school to play in a ska band and walk among gods.  Years later he opened a restaurant in the area.  Beyond the popular success it met with in the community, I knew that one of the things that secretly made him proud was Mac coming in and bringing his out of town friends there to eat.  I didn’t open a restaurant, but once I got an iced Americano for Mac before Superchunk played at the store I used to work at.

Bitch Magnet was Soo Young Park’s band before he started Seam.  David Grubbs played on this Bitch Magnet record and was also in Bastro, his main band at the time. Sonically, Bitch Magnet almost splits the difference between the two, tempering the mathy, post-hardcore tension of Bastro with a brooding melodicism that would form the core of Seam’s MO.  In spite of, and because of how different they are on the surface, these records were equally important in shaping my understanding of what a “rock” band could be beyond classic rock, metal, and punk/hardcore.  

Seam “Headsparks” 1992

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Bitch Magnet “Ben Hur” 1990

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Bastro “Sing The Troubled Beast” 1990

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Come to this tonight.

My band is playing.  Two other great bands are playing.  Sunset Tavern, 9pm. Wednesday and proud.  

I peeled myself out from behind the merch table and cupped my head in my hands, perched behind an amp. I was transfixed. It felt good. Everything about Milk Music made me feel really good. So good in fact that I was too chicken to tell them how good I thought they really were. As we drove to Canada that night I couldn’t get their songs out of my head. - Hearty Magazine

 Mag

Joel RL Phelps & The Downer Trio “Blackbird”

Before “Blackbird” came out, Joel Phelps was in the band Silkworm.  I never much cared for those early albums.  After he left Silkworm, he formed The Downer Trio and released some good, pensive, but secretly boring solo records.  I went to the shows when I first moved to Seattle in the late-90’s, and wanted to like it - it sounded like Neil Young in most of the right ways - but never quite did.  Then he put out “Blackbird” and I realized why I hadn’t ever fully gotten on board.  Phelps had the emotional quality and loose delivery of Neil, but he didn’t know how to rock!  But on Blackbird, he did it.  He turned the “downer” into “power” and kicked out the jams.  I saw him play a third of a set of this stuff in full power-mode once before he gave up and slunk off stage because he “had a cold” or something.  That was the first and last time I ever saw him attempt to replicate the power of these songs on record live.  What a wimp.  

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Alec Bathgate “Gold Lame” 1996

The other half of New Zealand’s Tall Dwarfs.  Bathgate doesn’t get talked about like Chris Knox, probably due the comparably lower, less prolific profile he’s maintained. To give some perspective, in the 30+ years since he and Knox have been collaborating, (beginning in the pre-TDs punk band, Toy Love) he’s released only two solo albums.  Although Knox has been way more prolific, and vocal in the international underground pop community, I would probably take these two Bathgate records over the whole of Knox’s solo catalog.  There is some (a lot of) undeniably great work that Knox has been responsible for, but without the grounding presence of Bathgate, his solo albums can go off the deep end.  The interplay of the two distinct personalities is clearly what made Tall Dwarfs what it was - Knox’s manic freakouts balanced Bathgate’s more meditative pop tendencies perfectly.  

To me, the two solo Bathgate records are akin to George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass in the way they quietly blow their peers efforts of the stage.  They are simple, timeless pop capsules that sound like they could have been recorded anytime between the early-‘90’s and an hour ago.  These are two of the best records to come out of the NZ/Flying Nun/kiwipop scene, and “Slow Parade” is one of the most beautiful, catchiest songs ever.  Gold Lame (Lam-ay, not Lame) contains said cut, so it still sticks in my mind most, but I will get to the later one on here eventually.  Flying Nun has entered the initial push in what looks to be a pretty massive and comprehensive reissue campaign.  Hopefully this will be included in the deluge, because it deserves to be heard just as much as any of the Tall Dwarfs, Clean, and Bats records that regularly hog the spotlight.  Anyway - buy a suit of gold lame.  

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Lilys “A Brief History Of Amazing Letdowns” -1993

Lilys were a hard band to fully embrace - an ever-revolving cast of members at the whim of leader Kurt Heasley’s shape-shifting inclinations.  They never maintained the same sound from one release to the next.   While this made for some nice surprises, it makes it difficult to say what The Lilys were really all about in retrospect.  

This EP/mini-album from ‘94 fell somewhere between their shoegaze phase and their modish Kinks-cloning interval. A couple of the songs still have a washed-out MBV vibe, but overall the record is a straight-up guitar pop banger, getting straight down to biz with “Ginger,” one of the best opening cuts ever.  Up until this point I thought the coolest thing in the world was a white Lamborghini (convertible).  This song is cooler.  Ride cymbal tapping out the beat, alone in a room - until the rest of the drums come in - pounding out a relentless apache beat worthy of Neu!.  The beats, the fills - the drumming on this song just rules, making it the strongest thing on the record.  Some of the other stuff sounds like old Teenage Fanclub or The Swirlies - but it’s all great.  An artful buccaneer at the peak of his powers.  

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