pretazzo

Haha "You are..." I see you were worse off than me with words, you were so excited! ;-) No, really, if I had known he was that available, I would have prepared about thirty questions: "So, Steve, let's start with the first EP of Big Black from 1983: can you tell me how that record came about? Is it true that he recorded it a week after buying his first guitar?" :-)

Damn Darkeve, I'm sorry we didn't meet... unfortunately, on Sunday I couldn't check the updates from the de-meeting and then I was unsure until the last minute... well, let's leave it for the next occasion: when will the Jesus Lizard come to Bloom, let's have a great de-gathering :-) By the way, I was the one with the Homer Simpson t-shirt, maybe we crossed paths...

aha more than alive, I would say resurrected! :-)

yeaaaaaah!!! fabulous album (almost all the songs are great, it feels like a Greatest Hits) and Pablo is the best de-reviewer at the moment! :-)

Okay, SDRE also made some nice music videos (great in its naive simplicity is the one for Seven), they were very melodic... they definitely had their following... but the leading bands of Sub Pop were others, come on... in short: if I ask a metalhead or a rapper or even a punk if they know who Pearl Jam or Smashing Pumpkins are, they will say yes (or even Alice in Chains); if I ask them about SDRE or Texas is the Reason (another example of very catchy emo), they respond like the late Maurizio Mosca used to: "Sunny Day?!?! CHIIIIII???!!!" :-D Good times when there was Mosca... This is what I meant; on the other hand, in the early '90s there was a whole series of bands that were neither fully commercial nor niche, because there had been the so-called "alternative boom"... ah, one more thing: Corgan still had hair until '94! :-)

ok Kaczynski, got it...

Well, I think that in the 90s grunge made a lot of sense… and also my "Pumpkins"... not to mention the alternative scene, which was more visible compared to that of the older brothers active in the 80s, but still little considered by the media: Sunny Day and Texas for emo, Afghan Wigs for indie, etc... In short, I’m the first to say that when it comes to alt-rock, nobody beats the 80s, but there were definitely some rock bands (bass-guitar-drums) that had something to say in the 90s as well...

Yes... then another "cultural exchange" between the USA and the UK in the late 80s, this time in the opposite direction, can be represented by the success that the Pixies had in the UK, much more than in the USA (by the way, Dig It For Fire reminds me a lot of the Smiths!)... so surely the late 80s was a period of fertile crossover, not only between genres but also between national scenes...

Oh, the Swell Maps, I adore them! The most ragtag triad in England: Fall / Swell Maps / Mekons (the latter responsible for some amazing tracks). It must be said that The Fall, beyond the eccentric personality of M.E. Smith, were real experimenters: their albums were indeed noisy, but packed with ideas and bizarre inventions... so to label them merely as precursors of lo-fi pop is limiting (especially since, in fact, their records were anything but lo-fi, boasting crystal-clear recordings)... On the other hand, it seems that some representatives of American lo-fi pop from the early '90s have cited The Fall as a source of inspiration (I don’t remember which band and in which interview, though)... Regarding the Smiths... well, I’ve always found them too "English" to have any influence on the anarchists across the ocean... but I wouldn’t know: I haven’t listened to all the Smiths albums, nor all the ones by the BH, so I speak from partial knowledge…

With the good Calvin Johnson, I stopped at the first two albums and didn’t continue because, apart from the splendid Indian Summer, they didn’t do much for me... that they are a seminal band for the "post-1991 generation" is undoubted, although for lo-fi pop, let’s not forget the Californian Urinals, active since the late '70s, and the various New Zealanders (the Bats, for example, whom we were talking about the other day)... unfortunately, I didn’t like the early songs of BH at all: let’s see if this nice and concise review will allow me to give the Seattle-ites the classic "second chance" :-)