Rein Sanction
Mariposa

Fundamental premise: Rein Sanction, despite being active in the early nineties, despite having long hair and flannel shirts, despite recording for Sub Pop, have absolutely nothing to do with "Grunge", if it even exists.

First point: they are from Jacksonville. Aside from Hawaii and Alaska, there’s nowhere further from Seattle than Florida. Second point: do you remember those shabby distortions from the "Grunge Period"? Well, forget them. Here we're talking about fat, maximally saturated guitars that spill into the lower ranges from all sides, almost tearing your jeans. Tubes that burn with a splash of wah wah that grabs you and takes you away.

Rather than a mishmash of borrowed stuff from the eighties, this "Mariposa", produced by Jack Endino in '92, is a mixed fry cooked not with oil, but with the acid produced at the end of the sixties. It’s easy to imagine the Rain Sanction taking their lumberjack van from Florida and heading to Jimi Hendrix’s house, waiting for the right moment to kidnap him (as their cover of "Ain’t No Telling" attests); it's even easier to imagine them whisking away Neil Young and all the Crazy Horse from their loved ones. And then what do they do? Nothing, they close them in a lute sack and beat them until they become a single entity. An entity that, for the record, saturates everything in a blaze of wah wah that comes and goes.

Discredited from the start, they were considered merely the latest epigones of the Lesser Dinosaur (certainly influential in the creation of their music), they achieved no commercial success and left just as they came... oh, not once did that happen to a "circus act" (replace the term "circus act" with any random name of an ultra-commercial band that in the early nineties made money off the backs of "minor" bands).

To the memory of Hippies with their tanned lazybones.