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CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN
Telephone Free Landslide Victory (1985, Independent Project/
Rough Trade)
Camper Van Beethoven was an anomaly of ’80s collegiate rock: an as-yet-unheard intersection of quirkiness (so prized by that scene); underground/post-hardcore sensibility and integrity (minus the unfriendly po-faced stylistic trappings or harsh music), parodic humor, virtuosic instrumental ability, head-spinning diversity, and encyclopedic knowledge and understanding of musical styles far beyond the boundaries imposed by its genre of origin. But the combination of all this in one band is not what made Camper Van Beethoven anomalous; it’s that they pulled off this eclecticism with class, heart, and consistency, and were completely free of the ever common “Hey, look what we can do” trying-too-hard trappings that ruin the work of so many genre- jumpers in underground music. This album features the college- radio smash “Take the Skinheads Bowling” and a cover of Black Flag’s Wasted done in counter-style mellowness. The all-over-the- map stylistic shifts on Telephone Free Landslide Victory are drastic, but the album feels natural as a whole.
CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN
Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart (1988, Virgin)
Camper Van Beethoven’s move to Virgin Records and first use of an outside producer (Dennis Herring) did smooth out a lot of the band’s rougher edges, but the variety of extraneous musical styles explored on previous albums remains, and the songwriting and playing on this album and follow-up Key Lime Pie progressed enough for each to stand on its own merits. Aside from containing the minor MTV hit “Eye of Fatima,” this album features the band’s most moving song, “She Divines Water,” as well as other strong efforts like “My Path Belated” and “One of These Days.”
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CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN
Key Lime Pie (1989, Virgin)
This album’s cover of the Status Quo’s “Pictures of Matchstick Men” became an alternative college-rock hit on radio and MTV, making Key Lime Pie the most successful Camper Van Beethoven title. But the record is the band’s darkest lyrically and thematically, with much of the previous albums’ playfulness gone. Regardless,
Key Lime Pie has some of CVB’s best moments, like “Jack Ruby,”
“June,” “All Her Favorite Fruit,” “(I Was Born in a) Laundromat,” “Flowers,” and “When I Win the Lottery.” Forays into World Music styles are less frequent than in the past; the album’s increased Americana feel predated the alt-country movement of the ’90s. The band broke up in 1990, with founder David Lowery forming the much more successful Cracker, and other members focusing on side project Monks of Doom. Camper Van Beethoven began sporadically reuniting and recording in 1999.
CAP’N JAZZ
Burritos, Inspiration Point, Fork Balloon Sports, Cards in the Spokes, Automatic Biographies, Kites, Kung Fu, Trophies, Banana Peels We’ve Slipped On and Egg Shells We’ve Tippy Toed Over a.k.a. Shmap ’n Shmazz (1995, Man With Gun)
This twelve-track album with the mouthful of a title is the sole full-length by Cap’n Jazz, the band that served as the starting place for, among other musicians, Promise Ring’s Davey von Bolhen and Kinsella brothers Tim (Joan of Arc, The Sky Corvair, Friend/Enemy, Owls, etc.) and Mike (Joan of Arc, American Football, Owen, etc.). Burritos was recorded during the final five days of 1994 by noted Chicago producer Casey Rice at Idful Studios. It followed two 7-inches and numerous compilation tracks released since Tim formed the band in 1989. (Mike joined at age twelve.) Cap’n Jazz releases are among the fieriest of the ’90s post-hardcore movement that would soon evolve into that decade’s proper emo subgenre. Due to the band’s explosive and charismatic live shows and the scarcity of Cap’n Jazz records (even while the band was together), the quartet became legendary during its six years of activity—exponentially so after the group dissolved almost immediately following the release of Burritos, assuredly a ’90s emo/screamo holy grail album if ever there was one.
CAT POWER
What Would the Community Think? (1995, Matador)
The mid-decade talent scouting work of Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley not only brought Blonde Redhead into the indie rock fold but was responsible for the discovery of Chan Marshall (when she was opening a Liz Phair show), better known as Cat Power. Marshall recorded twenty songs in one session, backed by Shelley and Tim Folijahn (who together also performed as Two Dollar Guitar). The tracks were split into Cat Power’s first two albums, Dear Sir (1995) and Myra Lee (1996). Though those albums are certainly recommended, it was her growth as a songwriter and the variety of styles on Matador debut What
Would the Community Think? that attracted critical acclaim and
justified the universal consideration of this album as the first Cat Power masterpiece.
CAUSTIC RESIN
Fly Me to the Moon (1995, Up)
Caustic Resin (led by Brett Netson, original Built to Spill bassist) came from the same Boise, Idaho, scene as Doug Martsch’s band, Treepeople. Nelson’s outfit also relocated to Seattle as Martsch was there putting together Built to Spill in the early ’90s. Though the Built to Spill leader has cited Caustic Resin as a major influence on his own work, at times the two bands have had little in common, musically. C/Z Records released one full- length in 1993 (Body Love/Body Hate), then Caustic Resin roared from the grunge-burned Pacific Northwest in 1995 with this double album of drugged-out rock that was heavy, psychedelic, and could be rather riff-oriented in a ’70s hard-rock/proto-metal sense. Fly Me to the Moon had some newly minted Built to Spill fans scratching their heads, as it came from the other side of the tracks when compared to the warm and fuzzy direction taken by BTS on its second album, There’s Nothing Wrong with Love (1994). Still, this massive and rewarding piece of indie-sludge rock is an overlooked, individualistic document well worth seeking out.
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CHARLES BROWN SUPERSTAR
Days of Our Drive/Sweet Piece of Ass (1995, WIN)
This band’s brief spurt of activity left behind an EP and this massive double album unlike anything heard in American underground rock/indie rock at the time. Principal member Bobby Hecksher can be heard backing Beck on his Stereopathic
Soul Manure album and went on to form the Warlocks, while
vocalist Bennett Rogers was in Aloha Wednesday and The Choir and had somewhat of a subsequent solo career. Days of Our
Drive/Sweet Piece of Ass succeeds at mixing incomprehensible
bedfellows such as the Melvins, Stereolab, My Bloody Valentine, and the Butthole Surfers. Only 500 copies were made, and because the entire pressing was mailed to college and free- form radio stations, music writers, and zine/magazine editors, the album has built a justified micro-legend of mini-mythical proportions over the years.
RHYS CHATHAM
Factor X (1983, Moers Music)
Though his former collaborator Glenn Branca would have a more prolific release schedule and predate this album with a handful of guitar ensemble albums, Rhys Chatham can be credited for marrying multiple-guitar ensemble playing with the minimalist classical experimentism of his mentors LaMonte Young and Tony Conrad. After years playing with and learning from those composers (and others), it took a live show by the Ramones to give Chatham his directional, life-affirming muse. His ensemble performances and releases (especially “Guitar Trio”), which included Glenn Branca as a player, touched the late-’70s no-wave movement in NYC in a big way. Chatham’s ringing, alternately tuned, clean guitar sculptures are more melodic and pleasant than Branca’s more nihilistic works. The best example of this is the twelve-minute “Guitar Ring,” which appears on this album, Chatham’s 1983 proper full-length debut, Factor X. (Fun fact: members of Band of Susans honed their chops in Chatham’s ’80s ensembles before forming their band.)
Chatham fell into relative obscurity until the three-CD/130- page-book retrospective An Angel Moves Too Fast to See: Selected
Works 1971–1989 was released on the Table of the Elements
label in 2002. Since then, Chatham has remained active with
touring ensembles. (Another fun fact: in 2007, Chatham was commissioned by the city of Paris—his birthplace—to perform a composition for 400 electric guitars titled A Crimson Grail, which was broadcast on national French television and seen by more than 100,000 viewers.)
CHAVEZ
Ride the Fader (1996, Matador)
Following his time in Skunk (which released two albums on Twin/Tone in 1990 and 1991) and a stint in noise-rock band Wider, Matt Sweeney founded Chavez with Wider drummer Matt Lo, Bullet Lavolta’s Clay Tarver, and bassist Scott Marshall. The band released a 7-inch, an EP, and two full-length albums between 1994 and 1996, and though no new material has been released (aside from bonus content on Matador Records’ 2006 comprehensive collection Better Days Will Haunt You), the band has never officially broken up.
Building from pillars of inspiration such as Bitch Magnet, Seam, Rodan, Slint, Treepeople, and Mission of Burma, Chavez’s second album is a gigantic wall of all-encompassing guitar wizardry (riffs, leads, and everything else) constructed over a massive rhythm section and majestic vocals. The result is a highly intelligent and unforgettably catchy form of grown-up post hardcore that smooths out all of the ragged, testosterone edges from noise rock, retains a metallic quality to the towering riff and chord structure, and plops a great big hook onto each of the multiple sections that make up one song.
Guitarist Clay Tarver went on to direct films (including the fun horror film Joyride), TV shows, and commercials (notably, the “Got Milk?” ad campaign). Matt Sweeney became the most versatile and active journeyman guitarist, producer, and all- around make-shit-happen personality to ever emerge from the ’90s underground (Cat Power’s The Covers Record, Billy Corgan’s extra-Pumpkins project Zwan, Will Oldham/Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Johnny Cash’s American V , Neil Diamond’s 2008 comeback, Home
Before Dark, and the Dixie Chicks’ Taking the Long Way, among
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CHEATER SLICKS
Whiskey (1993, In the Red)
If The Jesus Lizard’s early-to-mid-’90s run of albums constitutes the “Cadillac of noise rock,” then the Boston/Columbus, Ohio, Cheater Slicks’ decade (1993–2003) with In the Red Records does the same for the garage-rock/punk revival scene of the same era. Along with the Oblivians, the Slicks took a bassless approach to making the noisiest, meanest, and most soulful garage-punk in the land, sending patrons of multiband garage festivals out the front door, covering their ears during this band’s ear-bleeding sets. Whiskey is the Cheater Slicks’ third full-length but the first with In the Red Records, the label that emerged mid-decade as a peddler of excellence when it came to all things garage-punk- related. The band’s thick and brutal agenda is in full effect here, as is the Slicks’ affinity for experimentation. Case in point? The covering of a Feelies/Velvet Underground–style riff in hollow- body distortion and stretching it out for almost twenty minutes. CHEATER SLICKS
Don’t Like You (1995, In the Red)
An early Cheater Slicks booster was Jon Spencer, who nabbed the band as openers on many occasions (including a 1995 tour) and produced Don’t Like You, an album that is not only the band’s artistic peak, but could possibly be the best album to come out of the ’90s garage-punk/rock revival movement. Desperation, angst, earth-flattening noise, awesome songs—it’s all here from ceiling to floor; the band never lets up. To quote writer Eric Davidson on the Slicks, from his book We Never Learn: The Gunk Punk
Undergut,1988–2001, “within their ear-immolating burn, their
über-distorted guitar gnash flails like Ghidra the Three-Headed Monster spitting sonic sparks all over the barroom, while lesser souls scurry off like tots on a Toho set. It’s all pretty confounding, sometimes catchy, and intermittently transcendent in ways that such gutter pounding usually isn’t.”
CHERUBS
Heroinman (1994, Trance Syndicate)
This Austin, Texas, quartet seemed to support the surface notion that noise rock was an outlet for post hardcore/indie rock’s degenerate culture. The Cherubs released a debut album (1992’s
Icing, also on Trance) and several 7-inch releases (including splits
with Slug, Steel Pole Bath Tub, and fellow Austinites, Fuckemos) that showed the band to be an especially noisy but better than average player in its chosen genre. Then Heroinman, the band’s second and final proper album, blindsided listeners with an instantly recognizable propensity for pop hooks and better playing and songwriting, while retaining the Cherubs’ familiarly abrasive, beyond-the-red distortion levels and production techniques. This combination elevated the album (and the band behind it) to a sort of semi-legendary status over the years after the Cherubs’ mid-decade breakup. Also recommended is the band’s 1996 collection of odds-and-ends plus 7-inch material,
Short of Popular (Trance).
CHRISTIAN DEATH
Only Theater of Pain (1982, Frontier)
Counting former Adolescents guitarist and founder Rikk Agnew among its ranks, this original incarnation of Christian Death bears no resemblance to the band that, under the same moniker, released a ridiculous, patently overdramatic barrage of albums for many, many years after this band’s only recorded document was released in 1982. Rozz Williams’ one-album-only Christian Death was a byproduct of the L.A. punk and hardcore scene. Like many other blink-and-you’ll-miss-’em albums covered here,
Only Theater of Pain was an unhappy accident that drew from
the best of the darker U.K. post punk of the day (The Pop Group, early Cabaret Voltaire, Killing Joke, early Bauhaus) while taking a healthy dose of The Birthday Party along the way. An out-of-place classic dismissed and overlooked due to what came next, the 1982 album always packs an enjoyable surprise for the uninitiated.
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CIRCLE JERKS
Golden Shower of Hits (1983, Allegiance)
As an original member of Black Flag, Keith Morris was the vocalist on the Nervous Breakdown 12-inch, but swiftly left the band at the end of 1979 and reemerged with his own outfit featuring guitarist Greg Hetson, late of Red Cross. After releasing 1980’s Group
Sex—fourteen songs in under sixteen minutes—and being one of
the bands featured in Penelope Spheeris’ The Decline of Western
Civilization, the Circle Jerks released a second album, Wild in the Streets, in 1982 on the I.R.S. Records–owned Faulty Products.
But the best place to start the band—and to the populist side of hardcore (the Circle Jerks were one of a handful of American hardcore bands to take hardcore beyond its “high school loser/ outsider/loner” realm of fans in the ’80s)—is Golden Shower of
Hits. The album is not a covers album, but the closing title track
is a five-minute medley of Burt Bacharach, Paul Anka, and Neil Sedaka numbers, plus the songs “Afternoon Delight,” “Along Comes Mary,” and “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” arranged so that the amalgam tells a story of love, shotgun marriage, and divorce. This band’s secret weapon—a classically jazz-trained rhythm section of Roger Rogerson on bass and Lucky Lehrer on drums—would be gone after this album. Two of the songs here, “Coup d’Etat” and “When the Shit Hits the Fan” would show up in Alex Cox’s Repo Man the following year, as would the band (its next lineup) in a cameo as a nightclub act.
CODEINE
Frigid Stars (1991, Sub Pop)
The years 1986 to 1996 frame the first great explosion of stylistic fragmentation within the parent genres of underground metal and indie rock. Overlap happened and gray areas grew out of rapidly increasing complexity spreading on both sides of the fence. Nothing resembling metal can be heard in the brazen change Codeine made to the indie rock template, but it was right around the same time the Melvins gave underground metal the equivalent innovation: a deceleration in tempo so drastic that structural thresholds are compromised, seconds pass between every instrument’s contribution to the song, and aural processing of the composition’s “rhythm” requires serious concentration and patience.
Drummer Chris Brokaw, bassist and vocalist Steven Immerwahr, and guitarist John Engle formed Codeine after Brokaw and Immerwahr finished their studies at Oberlin College in 1989. Their debut, Frigid Stars, was finished a year later and released by Sub Pop in 1991. The album makes it clear that the Codeine’s overall musical intent was probably in place from the start. The band built off of the aforementioned slowness to stretch out the kind of densely distorted guitar stylings favored by its contemporaries so that the sound no longer buried vocals but instead made the listener face the shattered melancholy of Immerwahr’s reedy singing. Brokaw took advantage of the very low beats-per-minute count to land particularly hard and heavy hits, and Engle’s Telecaster rung out on one down-stroke for what seemed like an eternity. The band stuck to this genuinely sad formula for the entire album, and the results were devastatingly pretty and very, very heavy all at once.
CODEINE
The White Birch (1994, Sub Pop)
Bearing refinements heard on the six-song Barely Real EP released in 1993 on Sub Pop, Codeine’s second and final full-length kept the slowest-of-the-slow tempos but tightened up song structure and trimmed some of the distortion that tended to spill into the open spaces on the band’s 1991 debut, Frigid Stars. The
White Birch is one of the most depressing albums ever released
during indie rock’s heyday, but its prettiness keeps the vibe from reaching oppressiveness. By cleaning up Codeine’s approach without sacrificing any heaviness or volume, this album further cemented the band’s effect on the “slowcore” or “sadcore” movement that had begun to gently grow in the underground. More so, it became the touchstone of Codeine’s eventual and justified status as not only a groundbreaking band but a great band.
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COME
Eleven:Eleven (1992, Matador)
Boston’s Come was formed in 1990 by Codeine drummer Chris Brokaw (on guitar here) and former Live Skull/Uzi vocalist/ guitarist Thalia Zedek. The pair, along with a bassist and a drummer, added a bluesy detail to noisy indie rock that had little in common with how the extraneous style was approached elsewhere by trash/garage-rock revivalists. Zedek’s smoky snarl, the two guitarists’ slide and lead guitar fireworks, and an attractive angst to the band’s downbeat (but not wholly down- tempo) gloom are just a few of the attributes that garnered an instant (mostly U.K.) following and critical acclaim for the band and album. Now recognized as a sleeper classic among Matador’s early-’90s releases, Eleven:Eleven is the first of Come’s three essential showpieces of brooding guitar mastery and mood. CORAL
Pillowtalk (1994, Fistpuppet)
Coral formed in 1990 as the post–Honor Role band of vocalist Bob Schick and released an exceptionally strong but small body of work: three 7-inches on Merge and Cargo Records, plus two albums on Fistpuppet/Headhunter (this is the debut) before breaking up in 1996. Coral releases, including Pillowtalk, its first LP, give an excellent personal and heartfelt alternative to the rigid, less humanistic feel that the Dischord and Touch and Go camp of post hardcore could get carried away with at the time. The band is more melodic and a degree more experimental than Honor Role, thanks in part to guitarist John Kovalcik’s forward- looking and progressive post-hardcore style, which is much