Juliana Hatfield: Miss Quoted (1993)

(As published in B-Side ... )

By celebrity standards, Juliana Hatfield’s inclusion of her mailing address on the sleeve of her 1992 Hey Babe album seemed like an uncommonly openhearted gesture. And for lots of the people who bought the album--teenaged guys especially--it was an invitation too openhearted to pass up.

So they’ve written her--and written her and written her. Not that Hatfield doesn’t appreciate their interest, but she has begun to wonder whether maybe their interest stems from something other than the Real Her.

“People think that my personality can be reduced to what’s in the songs on Hey Babe,” she says. “It’s not true. But people don’t realize that.”

Neither, apparently, do most music journalists, who, Hatfield maintains, consistently misrepresent her. And when they do so in such diverse and high-profile publications as GQ, Details, Interview, Sassy, and the Village Voice, the misrepresentations can become downright burdensome.

“My personality doesn’t come across in any of those stories,” insists the ex-Blake Baby of the many Hey Babe-centric articles that ran last year. “And I get misquoted all the time. It’s really crazy.”

She has two specific examples at the ready.

“There’s one example recently where I was talking about eating disorders, and I was talking about how I used to like to starve myself sometimes. And then I said, ‘But I never lost huge amounts of weight.’ You know, it wasn’t bad. And then in the article it says I lost huge amounts of weight.”

Her other example appeared in Interview and went like this:

(Interview) “When you’ve been obsessed about guys, has it been really painful?”
(Hatfield) “Yeah. That’s why I like telling the bastards so with my songs.”

“I never said anything like that,” says Hatfield. “Maybe their tape recorders didn’t pick up what I did say. Maybe their editors told them that they had to paint a certain picture of me. I don’t know.

“It used to upset me a lot, but now I take the attitude that it’s fine because you can’t describe a person or music in words anyway.”

Performers, of course, often find themselves puzzled by their public images, but Hatfield’s case of mistaken identity seems more extreme. Her music, for instance, while promoted as “alternative,” defies easy categorization. And when you get down to a close examination of what she’s actually singing, the task of figuring her out becomes downright labyrinthine.

A case in point is her new album, Become What You Are (Mammoth/Atlantic), which has just hit the stores (and which, incidentally, does not include her mailing address). Credited officially to the Juliana Hatfield Three (Hatfield on guitar; Dean Fisher, bass; Todd Philips, drums), the album is a distillation of punk, sixties pop, and metal as heard from across an emotionally turbulent ocean by someone to whom it had never occurred that they might be separate.
Then there’s Hatfield’s distinctively crystalline voice. Whether cutting through power chords or hovering above them, it possesses a childlike quality that only enhances the complexity of her often structurally centrifugal lyrics.

The song “My Sister,” for example--in just three minutes and twenty-two seconds--develops from a gripe (“I hate my sister / She’s such a bitch”) into a plaintive admission of loss (“I miss my sister / Why’d she go?”), all within the context of Hatfield’s mysterious admission that she has never had a sister at all.

She does, however, have a brother.

“He says that the first time he heard me play it live it brought tears to his eyes,” she recalls with the satisfaction of someone who once listed moving people to tears as one of her goals. “It has the same effect on me, and I don’t even know what I was writing about. I made up the character in it.”

She credits such indirection in part to the intense interest in her private life generated by the explicitly confessional songs on Hey Babe, songs that many heard as pages from her diary whether they were autobiographically accurate or not.

“It made me write differently,” she explains. “It made me not want to write any kinds of love songs.”

But not writing love songs has posed challenges of its own. Take Become What You Are’s opening track, “Supermodel,” for instance, a song that sounds unusually superficial coming from Hatfield in that it trots out anti-glamour clichés to portray models as objectified victims instead of self-determining agents in the power game.

“I’m worried about the reaction I’m going to get to that song,” she says, “because I don’t think I articulated what I really wanted to say. It’s supposed to be a song about the public’s perception of models. I’m questioning that and trying to empathize with the model and know how she really feels.”
And Hatfield has a right: She has done some modeling herself.

She did not, however, enjoy it.

“I just felt really dirty,” she says. “I hated it. I wanted to cry at the end of the day.”

Why?

“People putting their hands all over you and pushing your body around and treating you like a piece of meat and just having to stand in one place for a long time,” she answers. “It’s uncomfortable.”

It's also, according to Hatfield, at least a little twisted. “It’s the public who exalts women for looking beautiful. And that’s fine. I mean, I love looking at beautiful girls and beautiful men. I’m just saying it’s such a weird nineties thing how people know all the models’ names when all they do is--be beautiful.”

“Supermodel,” she says, is “just talking about how fucked up that is that that’s one of the highest-paying jobs that a woman can aspire to.”

Still, her previous bad modeling experiences notwithstanding, she admits she might find a way to enjoy the job herself if she had to.

“I think I would,” she says. “I mean, to get paid so much money for doing nothing--with your brain.”

But only for awhile.

“I can imagine that after a few years of getting paid for being beautiful I’d be fucked up in the head,” she says. “What happens when you start getting wrinkles? Up until then you’ve been basing your worth on your looks. I think that’s all screwed up. Nobody cares about an over-the-hill model.”

The same, she says, does not go for over-the-hill rockers. “Neil Young’s still making great music, and it’s got nothing to do with the way he looks.”

She can say that again. But she doesn't. Instead, Hatfield lists Young at the top of her list of the performers whose songs she’d cover if she were ever to record an all-covers album. “I’d do a Neil Young song or two--or three,” she laughs. “And I want to maybe record that Leslie Gore song, ‘You Don’t Own Me,’ someday.”

And maybe something by Wilson Phillips, a group whom Hatfield confessed to liking last year and in so doing alarmed rock’s Hip Police.

“People think I’m a freak when I say that,” she says, “but it’s totally sincere. I like their music. They’re better singers than I am. I love the lush harmonies--all those different parts--and some of the songs are really good."

She has no desire, however, to meet the trio. “I’ve read interviews with them, and they sound like--weirdos.”

Some people think Hatfield is a weirdo because, at twenty-five, she’s still a virgin and doesn’t mind saying so. She’ll even say, “Yeah, me too,” if you tell her that you think the death of virginity has been greatly exaggerated.

But she denies that “I Got No Idols” from Become What You Are addresses the issue, even though it goes, “I don’t like to be touched / You might think we all need that stuff / But I don’t think about it much.” That song, according to Hatfield, is really “about how you should separate the art from the artist and leave the artist alone and not hold her responsible for everything because a lot of times the art is better than the artist.”

Her fans might be surprised to learn that she would also like to separate herself from Hey Babe..”

“It makes me want to cringe,” she said recently. “It just sounds sappy.” It doesn’t, but her attitude toward helps explain why its romantic brightness has been replaced on Become What You Are with a sound that’s darker and more ominous--sometimes subtly (as in the gently claustrophobic “Feelin’ Massachusetts”) and sometimes not so subtly (as in the Gena Rowlands-inspired “Mabel,” the rape-revenge fantasy “A Dame with a Rod,” and the self-explanatory “Addicted”).

Do not assume, however, that the album will cast a shadow over the Hatfield Three’s next project because it might not.

“I’m not letting myself write any songs for awhile,” she says. “I want the next record to have a distinctly different feeling, so I’m not going to write songs until I’m closer to recording it.

“I hope there’ll be a big change.”

Bruce Carroll: Walk On (1993)

(As published in Rejoice! ... )

Bruce Carroll
Walk On
(Word)

Bruce Carroll's latest offering of gentle, acoustic homilies makes it clear why fans of mainstream Christian music like him so much: In addition to coming on gentle and acoustic, he depicts painful, middle-class dilemmas as readily curable by Jesus. Those who find this too neat have a point--Carroll's songs often seem to reflect life as it should be instead of life as it is. But those who draw hope from a song like “Sometimes When We Love,” in which a pregnant and unwed teenage girl decides against an abortion, have a point too, namely, that only when people insist on life as it should be does life as it is get any better.

Touch of Oliver: There Once Was a Fellow Named Diarmuid ... (1993)

(As published in B-Side ... )

You’d never know it from his breathily yearning singing on Touch of Oliver, the Bar/None debut by his band of the same name, but Diarmuid O'Sullivan has one of the most explosive laughs in indie rock.

And he laughs at almost anything.

Like when I begin my trans-Atlantic phone conversation with him by asking, "Is this Mr. O'Sullivan?" and he answers, "Yeah. A-ha-ha-ha-ha!"

Must be an Irish thing.

Touch of Oliver hails from the same town in southwest Ireland--Limerick--as the Cranberries, whose coattails O’Sullivan’s band might yet ride into some semblance of fame and fortune, what with Dolores O’Riordan’s singing backup vocals on Touch of Oliver’s “Carousel” and all.

But, “Carousel,” brogues, and a propensity for creating songs with subtly surging hooks aside, the two bands have little in common. For one thing, O’Sullivan sings nothing like Dolores O'Riordan--not even when, as on “Why” and “Burn,” he ratchets the intensity up a notch. For another, Touch of Oliver hates to tour.

"I don't reckon," O’Sullivan reckons when asked whether Touch of Oliver will support its album by performing in the U.S.--the only country, as of this writing, where trackers of the Limerick muse can buy it. "The earliest we could get over anyway is September, I think. So I doubt if we will, to be honest with ya."

O’Sullivan says that a lot: "to be honest with ya." He says "Do you know what I mean?," "I dunno," and "like" a lot too--such as when he's asked how it is that he and the three other lads in Touch of Oliver can be burned out from playing live when they’re only twenty-one.

"I dunno. I just didn't really like doing it, like, and neither did the lads really, like. You just get socked around too much, like. It's too much trouble unless it's well put together. Like, we never put together a proper tour. Do you know what I mean? Like, they never ran properly, like. Like, you'd be socked over in most of the venues. Do you know what I mean?"

What he means is that if you live in the U.S. and like the thirteen tracks on Touch of Oliver--as you should since seldom has the ever-popular guitar-jangle ethic been subjected to such a fetchingly rough-around-the-edges stripping down--you're going to have to wait a long time to hear the music live.

And that goes for residents of Limerick as well.

"For a couple of years, we were very popular in Limerick," says O’Sullivan in reference to the esteem in which the locals held his band. "But then we started getting pissed off, like. I don’t know. It's terrible to be on a circuit and not getting out of it. And that's the way it got, like. It was really bad.

"It started off really well. Like, it was getting higher and higher. Then it started getting lower and lower again. A-ha-ha-ha!"

O’Sullivan, Brian Corr (bass, keyboards), Hugh Mulqueen (lead guitar), and Willie Banks (drums) met in secondary school around the age of twelve. By fifteen they'd begun performing cover versions of popular hits of the day.

"Ridiculous covers," O’Sullivan confesses.

Like, how ridiculous?

"A-ha-ha-ha! Oh, I couldn't--I wouldn't even say it. Like, I couldn't, like. A-ha-ha-ha! I couldn't bring myself to tell you, like. They're that bad, like. A-ha-ha-ha!"

Golly. Are we talking Debby Boone? Scandal featuring Patty Smyth? Scandal Not featuring Patty Smyth?

"Like, things like U2, stuff like that. A-ha-ha-ha!"

And for once O’Sullivan’s laughter makes sense: Bono can be pretty funny--and ridiculous--when you think about it.

Not surprisingly, Touch of Oliver doesn’t sound like U2 either.

"The lads just loved it, but I hated them, like, to be honest with ya. I never really liked them. Actually, don't say--God, I don't want to be bitching in any kind of form, like, kind of--you know what I mean?"

What O’Sullivan means is that he has little room to criticize other bands because, as fifteen-year-olds, he and the other Touch of Oliver lads weren't exactly paragons of musical excellence themselves.

"Terrible," he says. "A-ha-ha-ha! Our first gig, our drummer played a dustbin. A-ha-ha-ha-ha! I'm pretty sure he did. Like, I can't remember if he had two dustbins, but he definitely had one. A-ha-ha-ha!"

By 1991 or so, after splitting up and getting back together in various configurations for a few years, O’Sullivan, Corr, Mulqueen, and Banks reformed for a go at, if not the big time, at least something bigger than the local cabaret and pay-to-play circuits they'd grown weary of. This meant, among other things, shopping a demo around.

"We did a demo about six months after getting back together again. And it was pretty good, like. I mean, the playing was diabolical, now that I think back to it, but at the time I thought it was pretty good."

Eventually a tape landed in the hands of Tom Prendergast, the head of Hoboken, New Jersey's Bar/None Records--and, as the luck of the Irish would have it, a native of Limerick himself. According to legend, he cried when he heard it.

O’Sullivan suspects it was the “desperation” in the songs that got to Prendergast, and certainly an urgency of sorts propels Touch of Oliver’s songs, from the very mellow “Click” to the aforementioned and slightly less mellow “Carousel.” “I dig a hole, I dig a well,” he sings in the latter. “I try to save me from myself.” And the refrain of “Mind Bomb Blind” is the acutely discomfiting “She burned my skin!”

Sounds pretty desperate to me.

"They're probably mostly desperate, like. A-ha-ha-ha! Desperate feelings, like. That's the only word I like to describe most of the songs. Not all of the songs or anything like that. I don't think they're that--I dunno. I wouldn't want to get into describing them, to be honest with ya."

Which means folks will have to figure out Touch of Oliver the old-fashioned way--by listening for themselves. And if they like what they hear, there’s good news.

"I reckon we've already written another album," says O’Sullivan. "I think we have another two albums. A-ha-ha-ha!

“Like, we have a load of material ready to go."

Hothouse Flowers: Songs from the Rain (1993)

(As published in Brian Q. Newcomb's Syndicate ... )

Hothouse Flowers
Songs from the Rain (London)

One would presume too much in interpreting the Celtic mysticism of the Hothouse Flowers as Christian per se, but one would likewise presume too little in passing t all off as just so much psychobabble from the land of leprechauns. The lyrics on this, their third album, read like broadly ecumenical homiles, extolling the raw spiritual force of everything from God and "Amazing race" to "The Spirit of the Land" and the freedom of gypsies. It's an over-romanticized and slightly blurry view of things, but two elements keep it more or less in line: the rigorously elegant simplicity of the lyrics and the joyously soulful folk-rocking melodies and singing. It's a sound, as many have noted, that comes from somewhere between Van Morrison and U2 and one whose gracefulness and power lend credence to the suspicion that these guys are on to something.

Wendy James: Now Ain't the Time for Tears (1993)

(As published in Brian Q. Newcomb's Syndicate ... )

Wendy James
Now Ain't the Time for Tears (DGC)

Two years after recording the amazing Velveteen with her trash-glam band Transvision Vamp, Wendy James realized she was sick of her sleazy image as a punk Madonna Ciccone and wrote Elvis Costello, whom she'd never met, an SOS letter. A few months later, she learned that E.C. had written her an entire album that, if she wanted, she could record as was. She did, and this is it. The short, fast songs make the most of James' smoky, pouty voice, and the ease with which she makes Costello's barbed wordplay her own suggests a future in acting. But the long, slow ones, with their formal challenges and grand statements of self-realization, make demands that no ex-punk Madonna can easily live up to. Maybe that's the risk an independence-seeking woman runs when relying a hundred percent on a man to tell her story for her. And maybe the lone short slow one, "Basement Kiss" (as fine a performance as anything James recorded with Transvision Vamp) suggests such risks can nevertheless pay off.

Babes in Toyland: Painkillers (1993)

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer ... )

Babes in Toyland
Painkillers
(Reprise)

Hissing, scratching, and spitting, these three riot grrrls come up with fifty-one minutes of outtakes (four), alternate versions ("He's My Thing"), and a live set at CBGB's that medleys ten cuts from Fontanelle and defines their aesthetics as follows: tortured guitars, psychotic toilet-stall poetry ("Tralala was a baldhead girl / Your mind's gone greasy it slides right off me"), and a drummer named Lori Barbero who favors Burundi-style bashing over rock-and-roll timekeeping (probably because she can't keep rock-and-roll time).

On paper it looks promising, kind of like a Nancy Spungen tribute act. And no doubt the Babes mean well. But by disc's end the only detail to emerge from the chaos is the lead-singing of Kat Bjelland and only because she hisses, scratches, and spits under the influence of more raw adrenaline than anyone except maybe Iggy Pop has a right to.

Does the crowd at CBGB's applaud, you ask? A little.

Candlebox: Candlebox (1993) / Lucy (1995)

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer ... )

Candlebox
Candlebox
(Maverick)

Candlebox has the dubious distinction of representing both the "Seattle sound" and Madonna's dud-prone Maverick Records at a time when public interest in both appears to have peaked. With this in mind, the quartet's strict adherence to the rudimental formalities of blues metal has an air of nobility, of refusing to jump from a sinking ship. But since nothing weights music down like "nobility" (cf. Sting), its hardly a reason to listen.

Apparently incapable of dreaming up or ripping off an actual melody or hook, these rookies bludgeon the two or three riffs and tempos they do know as if, through sheer force, they could generate the spark that will set their career ablaze. They can't and they don't. Not that they don't bludgeon well, but little here will change the minds of cynics who believe that Ms. Ciccone started her label as a tax write-off first and a fun factory second. 3

Candlebox
Lucy
(Maverick./Warner Bros.)

If someone hadn't decided to include a photo of Candlebox inside Lucy's cover--a photo that proves the foursome's taste in grungewear is as dull as their taste in melodies--you'd swear, on the basis of the "music" contained within, that the lads must be testosterone-crazed pec-flexers of the first order, so mightily do they bash out the only two chords they know, so jugular-burstingly does Kevin Martin shout his anthems of anomie. "You want to scream," he screams in "Simple Lessons," eerily predicting with an accuracy worthy of Nostrdamus the reaction of any sane person to this album.

Those keen on technicalities could argue that not all of these songs have only two chords, and they'd be right: "It's Amazing" has only one. For that matter, the awkwardly titled "Vulgar Before Me" seems to have all of two-and-a-half. Candlebox fans could also argue that a group's knowing only two chords doesn't necessarily preclude its using them creatively. After all, Peter Klett can even play the chords fast on one song ("Best Friend)," slowly on another ("Butterfly"), and then reverse the chords and play them fast ("Bothered") and slowly ("Butterfly Reprise") again. Heck, he'll even play them mid-tempo ("Drowned," the title cut)!

Actually, "Best Friend" is fairly decent as two-and-a-half-chord rave-ups go. But let's cut to the chase: In the two years since it received a score of three from me in these very pages, Candlebox's debut has sold three million copies. Do you think Maverick/Warner Bros. will blame me if Lucy only goes double platinum? 2

Billy Idol: Cyberpunk (1993)

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer ... )

Billy Idol
Cyberpunk
(Chrysalis)

No line in rock-and-roll cuts both ways as incisively as Patti Smith's "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine," and Billy Idol's grafting it into his techno version of Lou Reed's "Heroin" borders on genius. But this album's smarts end there, and, with the exception of the rocking "Shock to the System," so do its high points, making Cyberpunk the least vital Idol ever.

Under the influence of Timothy Leary, Idol has wrought a tediously dense, high-tech concept album dedicated to the thesis that cyberpunk information access and virtual reality will help the human race wriggle out from under religion and government and evolve to the next level. But why anyone should seek insights on religion, government, or evolution from Idol (or Leary) remains a mystery.

Come to think of it, Idol probably doesn't know that much about heroin either. And before it's over, even "Shock to the System," which highlights his enthusiasm over the L.A. riots of '92, ends up rocking the cradle of hate.

Primus: Les Is More! (1993)

(This was published in a much different form in B-Side. Unable to get it into the pre-Lollapalooza issue, the editor included it in the post-Lollapalooza issue and added paragraphs of her own take on Lollapalooza's performance [and, obviously, rearranged and-or deleted a good bit of what I'd written]. What follows is the shorter original version.)

As many have observed for some time now, there's not much that's alternative about "alternative" music anymore.

If nothing else, the success of groups like R.E.M., Pearl Jam, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana, 10,000 Maniacs, and New Order should have taught us that often the only difference between an alternative band and a mainstream one is sales.

Nevertheless, Primus, whose 1991 Interscope debut, Sailing the Seas of Cheese, went gold, remains as alternative as they come, from its de-evolutionary name (they began as Primate) to the weirdness that permeates every level of its public image.

Take their new album, Pork Soda. In one song a guy named Mud murders a "fat bastard" with a baseball bat. In another a guy named Bob hangs himself. In another someone goes insane at the Department of Motor Vehicles. And in another someone with a cat named Allowishus gets off on watching Ren and Stimpy in the nude.

Ask Les Claypool, the trio's lead-singing bassist, to explain the widespread appeal of such twisted topics, and he laughs. "Beats the hell out of me," he says. "I really don't know."

Claypool does know, however, that Primus's large fan base has a lot to do with its landing the closing slot on this summer's Lollapalooza tour, a tour that, as of this writing, lists Alice in Chains, Arrested Development, Dinosaur Jr., Fishbone, Front 242, and Rage Against the Machine among its other scheduled acts.

Closing a day-long festival like Lollapalooza is an honor, but it also poses challenges. Claypool's manager, for instance, has just informed him that Primus won't go onstage until ten o'clock each night.

"Pretty damn late," muses Claypool. "Be we wanted to play in the dark, so I guess we'll get to.

"I think it's going to be interesting to see who sticks around. It might be a challenge to keep that many tired people entertained. But we're excited about it, not only from the performance aspect but also because we get to be part of a big, carnival atmosphere and get in for free.

"One of the exiting things about being last," Claypool continues, "is that we're going to be able to drag Fishbone out onstage with us to do some kind of jams. We toured with them before, and it was one of the best tours we ever did."

One Primus song likely to mutate into a Fishbone jam is "Hamburger Train." One of Pork Soda's two instrumentals, it captures Claypool, drummer Tim "Herb" Alexander, and guitarist Larry "Lar" Lalonde in a rare, all-stops-out frenzy. In the process it captures another resolutely alternative aspect about the band: their sound. Unfunky funk, unpunky punk, all odd angles and inverted structures--it stands in stark opposition to whatever passes for conventional rock or pop at the moment.

Claypool's bass, for example, and not Lalonde's guitar, is the foremost instrument of the band's sonic palette.

"I've always been a big fan of bands that sound that way," says Claypool, quite possibly referring to Peter Gabriel, XTC, the Residents, the Meters, and Pink Floyd, acts Primus covered on their 1992 EP, Miscellaneous Debris. "But I think we may have surpassed some of them as far as bass volume goes."

Primus's most alternative characteristic, however, is Claypool himself. His loony, cartoonier-than-life personality defines the band at every level.

"People that know me definitely know that I'm a pretty sarcastic person," he cackles. "And among our group and our friends, our humor tends to be an abusive type of humor. It's all in good fun, but I would imagine a lot of that does come through in the lyrics."

I remind Claypool that Lalonde has said the band knows a lyric has hit the mark if it makes them laugh hysterically. Claypool agrees.

"When we're on the road, I'll call Lar's room and say, 'Hey, listen to these lyrics!' And if I can get him to crack up, then I know I've done something good. He's a good cheese meter."

And which musicians, besides themselves, make Primus laugh?

"I'd say Hank Williams, Jr.," says Claypool. "Whether or not we listen to any of his music, it's always good to see him stomping around before Monday Night Football."

Poor Old Lu (1993)

(As published in CCM magazine ... )

Astute readers of C.S. Lewis may notice something familiar in the name of Seattle's latest quartet of alternative-Christian rockers, Poor Old Lu.

"It comes from a quote in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe," explains Aaron Sprinkle, the band's nineteen-year-old guitarist, keyboardist, and spokesman. "I think it's in Chapter Three. Lucy has just come back from Narnia for the first time, and no one believes she was there. So they say, 'Poor old Lu. Been gone so long, and no one noticed."

The story of the band is also similar in another way to the magical adventures of Lucy and her friends: With seemingly no more effort than it would take to walk into a wardrobe, Poor Old Lu has gone from a group of woodshedding Christian kids on Washington's Vashon Island to a nationally signed band whose new Frontline album, Mindsize, exceeds the alreday-high expectations of their growing, underground following.

"God really laid this deal in our laps," says a bemused Sprinkle. "We weren't even pursuing Frontline. They'd heard of us from our first demo, but they were one of the last labels we'd considered because we were more into the Blonde Vinyl kind of thing."

Enter Sprinkle's father, an associate pastor at Seattle's Calvary Fellowship and, as it happens, a friend of Randy Stonehill.

"About a year ago, my dad gave Randy our demo, but we never heard from him. Then finally he gave my dad a call and apologized. He'd never listened to it, but his wife had and made him listen to it. And he really liked it. The next time he came up, he said, 'I'm having lunch with Terry Taylor tomorrow, and I'm going to make him listen to it."

Equally impressed with the foursome, Taylor and then-Frontline head of radio promotion for alternative music and metal Brandon Ebel pitched the band to the label. One live showcase later, Poor Old Lu found itself with a contract.

Shortly thereafter, they found themselves with Taylor in the studio. Having grown up in awe of Daniel Amos, Sprinkle, his younger brother Jesse (drums), Nick arber (bass), and Scott Hunter (lyrics and lead vocals) couldn't have asked for a better hand at their controls. It comes as no surprise then that Mindsize boasts a sonic clarity and depth that belies the quartet's rookie status. Each of the twelve tracks works a haunting variation on indie rock's obsession with minor chords, abruptly shifting tempos, and oblique lyrics sung in cool, detached tones.

"Terry taught us a lot," admits the elder Sprinkle. "He would help us take out parts of songs that were redundant and that made the songs boring. But the memories I have of recording with him aren't of doing a guitar track or working on music. They're of hanging out and having fun. We got to see sides of him we didn't know about. We got to hang out with him as a friend and a brother in Christ."

According to Sprinkle, Poor Old Lu is only one of Seattle's several first-rate alternative Christian bands, meaning that, like the secular scene spearheaded by Nirvana, a similar Christian scene has sprung up in the Northwest.

"When Frontline was up here the first time, I was shopping all these bands that were my friends to them. And they looked at me and said, 'What are you doing? We've never seen a band--especially one that we're coming to sign--shop other bands!' But I thought, 'Why wouldn't I want them to have the chance to reach more people?

"There's a band called Soulfood, a rap band called 3NP, a hardcore band called Blenderhead, and a funk band called Don't Know. We have parties where we play and pack the house with hundreds of people. And tons of unsaved people come. There's almost a revival thing happening."

Poor Old Lu, says Sprinkle, plans to tour next spring with Adam Again and Mortal, at which time other regions of the country will have the chance to experience Sealttle's almost-revival-thing for themselves.

The Candyskins: Fun? Fun? Fun? (1993)

(As published in B-Side ... )

There exist two basic kinds of British pop acts: those who sing with British accents and those who don't.

In the old days, that distinction had little effect on a band's ability to score big in the United States. Lately, however, the Pet Shop Boys notwithstanding, a British accent has meant commercial death for many acts intent on getting mentioned by Casey Kasem.

So what do Oxford, England's Candyskins go and do on their new DGC album, Fun? The same thing they did on their fitst DGC album, Space I'm In--sing with British accents.

"It's what you grow up listening to," explains Nick Burton, the Candyskins' lead guitarist and frequent background singer. "If you grow up listening to Kiss and you've got a band, you're going to sing like that."

The Candyskins did not grow up listening to Kiss. They grew up listening to the Clash and the Buzzcocks. Punk was exploding just fifty miles down the road in London, and they made the trip often. "We were all twelve or thirteen when it happened," bassist Karl Shale recalls. "So that influences you. We'd never heard anything like it before. My brother used to like Genesis, Rick Wakeman, and Elton John, but I found that boring. I liked football."

And by "football," of course, Shale means soccer, a sport, incidentally, that figures indirectly in Fun?'s first single, the energetic power-of-romance tribute "Wembley." The British, it seems, won the World Cup at Wembley Stadium in 1966, and since then that victory has come to hold a place in British memory analogous to the place that the Pirates' 1960 World Series win has come to hold in Pittsburgh lore. Hence, when Nick Cope, the lead-singing Candyskin, sings, "It's 1966 again, / a love as big as Wembley," a crowd can be heard erupting into a stadium-sized cheer.

But, Cope's British accent aside, "Wembley" doesn't sound so much like an heir to Clash-Buzzcocks punk as to the edgy, jangly power-pop that evolved out of New Wave in the early '80s and gave birth to college radio--where, not surprisingly, Space I'm In did pretty well a couple of years ago.

"I think that by having a four-guitar-and-drum band," Burton observes, "you're going to fit somewhere in that. It never sounds completely original. But I'm not certain that's a bad thing. It's pretty timeless."

It's also often just plain pretty. Each of Fun?'s dozen songs rides a hummable hook, with "Everybody Loves You" and "All Over Now" registering as downright mellow. Taken together, these traits give rise to the suspicion that someone among the Candyskins spent his wonder years listening to more than punk.

Enter rhythm guitarist Mark Cope, Nick's older brother. What first made him want to form a band? "The first time I saw the Osmonds, I think. I was seven, and it looked as if they were having a lot of fun. They were always smiling."

"Rows and rows of teeth," says Burton.

"They were getting paid," Mark continues, "and they were all brothers having a good time. I haven't got any of their albums, but I always like 'Crazy Horses.' That's one of my favorite songs."

The Candyskins also profess a love of '70s disco--they cover Hot Chocolae's "You Sexy Thing" in concert--because, as the elder Cope puts it, it was "larger than life." "It was larger than life. It wasn't serious. And they were good songs."

"Brilliant songs," adds Burton. "Seventies disco beats anything."

The group's love of fun music helps explain its refusal to surrender melody to the currently omnipresent guitar squall of alternative pop. It also helps explain its consternation over the sudden political clout with which the U.S. has imbued many rock stars.

"We hate bands that take themselves seriously," says Mark, "because it doesn't change anything, being in a group. If you want to change the world, become a politician. It's as if America has given up on politics and religion and looks to pop stars for answers. It's ridiculous, you know?"

"Look at this whole Inaugural thing at the White House," says Burton, by way of recent example.

"What the fuck was Michael Jackson doing there?" drummer John Halliday wants to know. "It just seems too showbiz."

"Politics is a very serious business," says Mark. "And to us it seems very strange to see Bill Clinton playing the saxophone."

"It's like the idea of John Major playing the drums," says Burton, "or when your dad starts dating a younger woman and pretending he likes rock music."

In fact, a younger woman has played a role in the Candyskins' sonic evolution: Nick Cope's five-year-old daughter.

"I sing her to sleep with Beatles songs," he says. And perhaps that intimate connection to the Beatles--more than Brit-punk, the Osmonds, or disco--accounts for the fun quotient in the Candyskins' music. "Tired of Being Happy" even kicks off with the "Ticket to Ride" guitar riff, albeit sped up a little.

But what accounts for the question mark after the word fun in the album title?

"Sometimes being in a band isn't fun," Burton admits. "Sometimes it's hard work. Sometimes you feel unloved, and sometimes you feel as if you're banging your head against the wall.

"But at other times," he says, "it can be the best thing in the world."