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Spike Hyzer
A big fan of Post Punk, Punk, Goth, New Wave, and Electronic music, the more British or Euro the better (though I am from the US and love much of our own as well).
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Spike Hyzer's Album Reviews
The clarion call of a siren-like guitar impels the listener to turn up the volume and announces a revolution while foreshadowing the song that would, at the time, become a bit of a manifesto for the group (I saw Bob fall down drunk during that line in Echoes Myron when he played a show in Madison WI on my 40th birthday).
The most remarkable thing about this album is that Bob had seemingly given up on the band and any dreams of success when a small offer prompted him to assemble a new album around a pair of songs that might only have been a single (though Gold Star for Robot Boy and I Am a Scientist might have been the greatest single of all time). Like the collages that grace his covers, the album was assembled from scraps dating back a decade or more, whipped into shape by a few sympathetic musicians and the inimitable recording talents of Tobin Sprout. The result was a pop album that functioned as prog rock--but without the wimpy production that made the guitars thin, or the pretentious keyboards that ruined the era--but sounded more like punk rock and maintained that DIY energy. The lyrics and Bob's vocal performance were the finest of his career, fluid and powerful and open to any number of interpretations, and Toby was in the midst of providing the very best songs of his career on this and the next few albums (his solo career and later reunion with GBV cannot ever be spoken of that highly).
I attempted to rank each song and found perhaps four in the twenty that I would rank as 4 star songs, but this is not a fair way to view this album, as many of the shorter songs act as bridges to the meatier pieces.
It's not simply the singular masterpiece in Bob's career, but a defining moment in rock history and the best--and arguably most influential--album of the 90s.
The most remarkable thing about this album is that Bob had seemingly given up on the band and any dreams of success when a small offer prompted him to assemble a new album around a pair of songs that might only have been a single (though Gold Star for Robot Boy and I Am a Scientist might have been the greatest single of all time). Like the collages that grace his covers, the album was assembled from scraps dating back a decade or more, whipped into shape by a few sympathetic musicians and the inimitable recording talents of Tobin Sprout. The result was a pop album that functioned as prog rock--but without the wimpy production that made the guitars thin, or the pretentious keyboards that ruined the era--but sounded more like punk rock and maintained that DIY energy. The lyrics and Bob's vocal performance were the finest of his career, fluid and powerful and open to any number of interpretations, and Toby was in the midst of providing the very best songs of his career on this and the next few albums (his solo career and later reunion with GBV cannot ever be spoken of that highly).
I attempted to rank each song and found perhaps four in the twenty that I would rank as 4 star songs, but this is not a fair way to view this album, as many of the shorter songs act as bridges to the meatier pieces.
It's not simply the singular masterpiece in Bob's career, but a defining moment in rock history and the best--and arguably most influential--album of the 90s.
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