Illiterate Beach
No Polyester Please...

LA RECENSIONE

There is a long, thin boundary that flows through the years and acts as a dividing line between reality and myth. The place where time and fortune dispense glory or eternally demote to the most hidden infernos. Many bands, many artists have crossed the margin. Many others have remained enclosed within their perimeters, until the passage of years erased their traces.

1987. America is living a new musical 'golden age'. It's the year of post-psychedelia and garage, erupted out from Californian basements. Of the Electric Peace, the SS-20, the Gravedigger V. The year that presents the Fugazi from Washington and the Galaxie 500 from New York's suburbs. The year of the last, dazzling album by Hüsker Dü, already delivered to history some time before with “Zen Arcade”. The year of the fellow citizens Illiterate Beach. Or rather no, because no one seems to notice "No Polyester Please...". Recorded at Underground Studios in Minneapolis, for Susstones between September-November of the previous year, it is released in the early months of 1987 but goes unnoticed,
like a train along a line of dead stations.

Jeff, Maria, Greg, in the background a house. All uniformed in a shade of blue so unusual it seems to have been born and died in that same year, on that same day. This depicts the artwork of the first and last EP of the career of the three from Minnesota. Hostages of a cover that should have launched them to the attention of the specialized critics rather than confining them forever in the frame of a shot, like fossils trapped in the rocks.

Yet the five tracks of "No Polyester Please..." live with an intrinsic luminosity and walk along the colorful streets of Haight-Ashbury even though they do not take a single step outside the topography of Minneapolis. And you find the violin of Menolasino walking the same groove as her legendary ancestor Ric Sanders (Fairport Convention), the ghost of Slick (Jefferson Airplane) keeping beat on the five tracks, especially in "Never Stops", Roger McGuinn's (Byrds) jingle-jangle in "Until" and even an unexpected Peter Buck (R.E.M.) in the initial "Traces". Billy Edward Wheeler goes without saying, being the author of "High Flying Bird":

"My old man up and died, my daddy up and died. Oh, he had to fly away and the only way to fly was to die".

The sad consideration of a miner who, looking at a bird soaring high in the sky, finds in death the sole, only escape from this ungrateful world... just as ungrateful and mocking has fate been to Illiterate Beach.

25 minutes infused with the most enjoyable West Coast psychedelia that can be woven, a folk-rock suffused with American rural landscapes and ocean cliffs, where to lay the soul on the last strip of rock before the abyss.

A single and an EP.
End of the discography. Goodbye.

Someone said that every human being is a prisoner of their destiny. The Illiterate Beach of a cover and five delightful tracks that few have been able to appreciate.