Thinking Fellers Union Local 282
Lovelyville

There must have been a moment between the sunset of the Eighties and the dawn of the Nineties when acid wasn't just taken by the Flaming Lips but permeated an entire legion of freaks from an independent and widespread background.

With the decline of major independents, punk breaking apart, labels investing in the underground (so much that it was no longer underground), and the year of the spider looming, 1991 seemed like the year of Christ descending on earth. To the point where everyone forgot the Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, a wandering and derailing freak commune more than a band. Polyform and band-like compositional approach, rhythmic frays filled with the most monotone Fall, slacker and bored states (a constant of early Matador) smoothly slipped into a continuously evolving context that brings to mind the Sun City Girls, another band that makes disarray and lack of compositional staticity a mainstay. You can hear the desert of the Meat Puppets and it's no mistake ("Nail In The Head"), you can hear the single that Sonic Youth should have released the previous year ("2x4"), and you can even find Touch & Go-style distortions ("Sinking Boats"). All references disambiguated by a very personal construction with few contemporaries in terms of lack of clarity (the already mentioned Sun City Girls come to mind, the more canonical Dogbowl, and in more extreme fields, Trumans Water).

I even forgive them for ten minutes of off-key footage, that's the beauty of being artist but not arty, and someone forgive those who lost them in the vast sea of those fiery and flaming years.