A lo-fi slacker rock jam that's probably mostly forgotten these days.
In 1993 before burning cds from your mates became a thing I had One Sock Missing on a TDK D90 blank cassette with Archers Of Loaf's Icky Mettle on the other side. A couple of years later I saw The Grifters support Jeff Buckley at The Palais in St Kilda which I guess is a notable gig because soon Jeff was dead and he became a superstar in the rock history while this excellent tune has just 3436 views on youtube.
Ramshackle Rolling Stones damaged rawk. A messy drunken singalong where the raw lo-fi noise becomes cosmically unhinged.
From the raucous garage-y end of slacker rock comes this ultra scuzzy monster of a tune. A style much closer to ye olde noisey proto-punk groups like The Electric Eels than contemporaneous lo-fi acts such as Pavement.
The greatest group you didn't know in the 90s. It's the dude from top 80s band Great Plains Ron House and with TJSA he put together an even more explosive group to realise his vision of charming yet volatile drunken nihilism.
Bringing you all the underground misses of the 90s!
The guitarist from St✮Johnny Tom Leonard had a solo side project called Luxurious Bags. Their little known cd Frayed Knots was a toppermost lo-fi psychedelic slacker noise pop jam. There's a gorgeous euphoric pop anthem hidden beneath the muffled lo-fi layers of hazy sound here.
The 90s you never heard... it doesn't get any better.
A lot of people missed St✮Johnny at the time. I mean you'd already had Dinosaur Jr for ten years plus Swervedriver, Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, Pavement, Polvo et al. for a while so by the time these guys got signed to Geffen they got overlooked. However Bill Whitten had a way with a downbeat melody and in conjunction with guitarist/Moog-ist Tom Leonard they stacked together cool sometimes surreal layers of thick ecstatic sound. The noisey pop aesthetic on their 1994 cd Speed Is Dreaming was slacker rock in excelsis.
St✮Johnny - I Give Up [1994]
Slacker anthem folks!
Blissed out dejection at its finest.
Daydreamy daze...
St✮Johnny - You Can't Win [1994]
A bewitching tune from the dreamy shoegaze end of slacker rock.
Lovely & wistful with energetic bursts of euphoric noise.
This ain't no glitter litter despite how clichéd it may seem initially, they absolutely nail the genre in an undeniable manner for one of the great hard rockin glam non hits of the 70s.
It's a teenage rebellion stomper.
These guys were called Iron Virgin so... after two singles Scotland's very own answer to The Sweet vanished into obscurity. Yet since 2003 they keep turning up on glam "nuggets" type compilations on a regular basis. The junkshop glam aficionados consider this one of the finest and most beloved lost singles of the glam rock era, who am I to disagree. I'm no British heavy metal expert but Rebels Rule has even been cited as proto-NWOBHM.
Obscure moody and broody garage psych from another one and done group from Michigan
You gotta love the intense mandolin and misanthropic sentiments delivered with tormented desperation by singer Bob Glese and those mournful dirge-y backing vocals... all in a pop song that coulda got played on the radio.
You could imagine them playing this in a dusty saloon in a scene from a south of the border acid western.
In the great British tradition of singles not included on albums. Roxy Music's second single came out a month prior to their second LP For Your Pleasure but was not included on that record.
It's crazy that such sonic weirdness dressed up as pop made the UK top 10 back in 73.
It all begins with an outstanding intro with notable drummage then the tune floats along on a surreal electric marshmallow with an underlying ecstatic aquatic feel. Next is a totally off kilter studio manipulated sax, unconventional arrangement of words for pop ie. no chorus applied with Ferry's unpredictable quivering tones, cool disorientating guitar shenanigans, further toppermost drum action with added maracas and an ace fade out.
Eno said this tune shouldn't have been released as a single but he was so wrong, as he often is, because for many of us Pyjamarama is Roxy's greatest single and one of the best chartbusters of the 70s.
*When I started this blog most songs and albums didn't have their own wikipedia pages but now everything's got an entry which engulfs the efforts of the little bloggers and kinda makes blogs redundant. However wikipedia are still often inaccurate and just don't have the Space Debris touch plus the once neutral wikipedia website is now slimy and ideologically captured with their not so subtle hidden agendas, smear campaigns and biases. For proof just seek out any interview with original cofounder Larry Sanger from the last five or six years.
