Sleepless in Seattle: The Birth of Grunge
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Livewire Recordings
At first glance, Sleepless in Seattle looks suspiciously like a half-assed low-budget cash-in compilation, a collection of obscure Seattle-scene tunes some tiny label scraped together and put out long enough after the fact to drum up a little hip-nostalgia interest. There's the cheesy title (what, they couldn't fit in a Singles reference, too?). There's the even cheesier disc art, which manages to fit flannel, an implied heroin high and the Space Needle into one image. There's the spotty liner-notes history. Then there's the track listing itself, with its glaring omissions of seminal Seattle bands both small (Fastbacks, Mono Men, The Fluid) and large (Soundgarden, Nirvana, Alice in Chains), and its inclusion of bands that either have no connection to grunge whatsoever (Supersuckers?) or were obvious latter-days coattail riders (Gruntruck).
Where this anthology redeems itself, however, is in the music it does manage to present. Sure, we've heard these tunes by The Melvins, Mudhoney, Babes in Toyland, Seaweed, Tad, 7 Year Bitch and others before. But by and large they're great tunes — and most of them are arguably part of the story of the grunge explosion — and here, they're laid cheek-by-jowl with plenty of tracks to which mainstream fans have never been exposed.
There's the fractured Goth Night atmosphere of Blackouts' "Happy Hunting Ground." There's Mudhoney principal Mark Arm's high-school spoken-word experiment Mr. Epp & The Calculations, and his Green River, in which all the elements of various Seattle sounds were heard together for the first time. There's early, super-psychedelic Screaming Trees. There's The Gits and Love Battery and Hammerbox, and Built to Spill genius Doug Martsch's great old band Treepeople, too.
Overall, yeah, SiS suffers from both aesthetic and substance drawbacks, and probably should've been called Grunge: The Music We Could License. But what is here is interesting and, more often than not, extremely listenable. (www.livewirerecordings.com) 3 stars Scott Harrell
Audition
P.O.S.
Rhymesayers
This album, P.O.S.'s second, starts like any number of brutal underground hip-hop CDs released lately, but when a screeching electric guitar and a screamo refrain come in on "Half Cocked Concepts," you know you're dealing with a different beast altogether. The record is still hip-hop first and foremost, and the aggressive live instrumentation only hints at punk rock rather than pushing it into hideous rap-rock territory. This also allows a wide range of guest shots, from the expected (like Atmosphere MC Slug) to the improbable (the Hold Steady's singer-guitarist Craig Finn). P.O.S. unfortunately still relies a little too much on a flow that aims to be seething and scary, but he varies the formula just enough to pull himself up above the indie pack. 3 stars Cooper Lane Baker
Love Press Ex-Curio
Charlie Peacock
Runway Network
Best known as a producer/writer for such Christian pop acts as Amy Grant and dcTalk, pianist/composer Peacock struts his formidable jazzbo skills on Love Press Ex-Curio. He cut these dense sonic mélanges in New York and Nashville with a diverse flock of upper-crust players that includes trumpeter Ralph Alessi, guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, saxophonists Ravi Coltrane and Jeff Coffin, bassists James Genus and Victor Wooten, drummer Joey Baron and sundry other guests and sound collagists. Love Press Ex-Curio melds post-bop sensibilities, acid-jazz sonics, funk and free about as well as can be done. Most of the tunes feature full-fledged jazz melodies played by trumpet/sax front lines, stuff that could've made it onto a '60s Blue Note LP. Somehow, Peacock keeps the large-ensemble workouts well organized, and the ace soloists make their statements tight and energetic. Peacock seems content to play the ringleader, rarely stepping out front (save for a couple of brief solo piano outings), but his consummately musical approach makes for an altogether winning effort. (www.charliepeacock.com) 4 stars Eric Snider
Film School
Film School
Beggars Banquet
It would be a breeze to play Spot the Influence when you put on the self-titled sophomore album from this San Francisco five-piece, hopping around alt-subgenres of the past 25 years or so. This is just a long way of saying that Film School isn't impressively new, but the band members have studied up well: making pots of coffee for all-nighters with the Pixies and poring over class notes scribbled down by the Feelies. The band's tunes are winding and heavy on atmosphere, but the melodies never seem to get lost. 3 1/2 stars CLB
Imperial Bedroom
Elvis Costello
Columbia
Imperial Bedroom signaled the close of Costello's angry-young-man phase and had critics hailing him as a young Cole Porter type. With a passel of sophisticated melodies, urbane lyrics and his passionate (but not overcooked) singing, matched by smart, full-bodied arrangements, Cos hit a home run on this one. Includes "Man Out of Time," "Beyond Belief," "Almost Blue," "Shabby Doll" and a handful of other songs that rank high in the Costello canon. ES
This article appears in Feb 15-21, 2006.