For those of us who were a little late in discovering that music existed outside the Billboard and Gallup Charts, Lou Barlow might best be remembered as the man who wasn’t in Dinosaur Jnr when they had their first big commercial hit with grizzled, slack-jawed stoner anthem, ‘Feel The Pain’. Lou Barlow was the guy who started the band and then got kicked out for one reason or another before doing weirder and even slacker stoner work with lo-fi pioneers like Sebodoh and Folk Implosion (the name a typically witty parody of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion – if one popular online encyclopaedia is to believed). In fact it was Lou who is down as having started the whole low-quality recording thing in the first place. Prior to bands like Sebodoh, it was custom for albums not to sound like conceived and recorded in the commercial breaks between soaps by people too often drunk or stoned to tune their instruments properly or enough foresight to wash their socks. So what you got was a celebration of all that was cheap and shitty. If MTV made you want to smoke crack, then listening to Sebadoh was enough to make any self-respecting crack-addict tune into MTV on a more regular basis. But one of the few really great perks of low-fidelity recordings was that you generally got shitloads of tracks for your money. They weren’t all finished, of course, but that was the beauty. Because they were never truly ‘nailed’ or ‘finished’ as such they enjoyed all the glorious perpetuity of a young dead TV stars – and that’s what you have here: all manner of skewed and vaguely psychedelic psycho-babble, strung-out, distressed, distorted and rattling as loud as a bottle of anti-depressant tablets in an empty (and probably haunted) pharmacy. It’s there in the trashcan lunacy of ‘Goodnight Unknown’ (a bit like Status Quo on acid) and the clanking corpse (and generally unresolved) romance of ‘Praise’. And as is now the custom with records of great inner beauty but shocking grooming habits, it has songs as pretty and as uncommonly tender as ‘Take Advantage’ and ‘Two Much Freedom’ which could really be anyone from lachrymose folk charmer, Iain Archer to Crosby, Stills and Nash – so scruffily gorgeous they is. But it’s not all hearts and prozac by any means: storming album opener, ‘Sharing’ rattles along with the same blistering sweet belligerence of Sugar’s ‘If I Can’t Change Your Mind’ and ‘One Machine, One Long Fight’ scores more industrial damage than a gang of angry luddites in a hardware store.
Marvellously oft-kilter music for marvellously off-kilter souls and making no more sense now than at the peak of his lo-fi madness.
Lovely here in limbo, indeed.