Love Battery
Dayglo

Once upon a time, there were the Green River (no Den, you already did that!).

Alright, once upon a time, there were Nirvana (no Den, please don't make yet another duplicate so that when you search for "Nirvana" on DeBaser you get Nirvana with 8745 reviews even though they only produced six albums, one of which posthumous).

You asked for it then! Once upon a time, there were Love Battery!

One day I walked into my dear trusty store just around the corner. I had received the news a few days earlier; the store was about to close soon, and like in many other places, a mythical DJ point was about to be born (who wants the DJ point anyway? Stay at home, I say!); however, given the imminent closure, the guy at the store pulled out all sorts of stock remnants (I thought that day that if I had found a box of sardines from '33, I wouldn't have been too surprised, anyway, there were things like the soundtrack of Selvaggi or the tribute to Albano by some Italian artists from the '80s). Among them was also this Love Battery record, which I had heard of somewhere but couldn't even remember what they played at the moment, but the cover came to my aid because at the bottom left was a nice little writing: Sub Pop. When I turned the record to check the date, everything came back to me: 1992.

Love Battery was a group from the Seattle area (no kidding?) that had their biggest moment of fame when Bruce Fairweather joined the group, the Mother Love Bone member who didn't join Pearl Jam (practically a lucky man given that he could have been a multimillionaire at that point). At that point, they were even cited as more authoritative contenders to Nirvana's succession (like another ten bands, I think!), but all of that happened in 1993, a year after the release of this album.

And so we move on to the album, what do these Love Battery even play? The idea of Love Battery was to blend punk and metal together (the basis of what was defined as grunge, and please don't kill me for using that term) with a certain '60s psychedelia as a foundation. But wait a moment... Doesn't all this remind you of something? No? Well, let me refresh your memory! There was someone many years before who had already done all of this, and that group was Screaming Trees, with Mark Lanegan on vocals, whom I avoid comparing to Ron Nine, the singer of Love Battery. But then why review an album like this? Surely because it's an album superior to at least a good 60% of the bands that came afterward in this field (Silverchair, just to name one that was also labeled as the successor of Nirvana) and then because there is a particularity after all, and that is Kevin Whitworth's guitar. A guitar capable of delivering scratchy riffs that define the entire song, listen for example to "Out Of Focus" in the final over a minute and a half detour where it feels like being sucked into a tornado whose fury hints at decreasing twice before resuming.

Another example of their sound can be "Foot" which showcases the full and rich sound opposed to other songs like "Damaged" where Whitworth's guitar stands out once again, this time very distorted and left completely free with solos, dissonances, and anything more crooked! Finally, also to remember "Side (With You)", with an even sicker and more depressed sound.

So I hope you've understood, a good album, that doesn't excel in originality but offers some good moments. The last thing I feel like telling you is that the Sub Pop written on the cover in plain sight on the pink cover smells a bit to me, it feels like the first symptom of the sound's homogenization of those years, something like: "Hey, this is a Sub Pop album! And Sub Pop is the grunge label! So this is a grunge record you have to buy me! Grunge grunge grunge...". But maybe I'm wrong, I like to think I'm wrong in cases like this!

That day when I got home, I was glad I purchased this album and not the tribute to Albano. As for the '33 sardines, I hope my shopkeeper left them at the DJ point, and that they choke on them!