Album Recommendations | mari@macintosh.garden
Artist: The Folk Implosion
Albums are graded on a five-point scale of "Awful-Eh-Good-Great-Classic". I'm highly biased, so don't take it too seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.
Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable. Read the review.
Dare to Be Surprised (1997)
Ironically more natural than "Natural One".
I have this strange habit of digging through the side projects of famous musicians before the works they're best known for. Lou Barlow might've been in Dinosaur Jr., but even if I snuggled up close to what they've been up to lately, I'll still best know him as one half of The Folk Implosion. Originally a warm, lo-fi home recording project built of bass-first indie rock and traded vocal parts, it was the fluke funky downtempo hit "Natural One" that gave Barlow and partner John Davis their only hit at radio. Luckily, while its sound was a bit out of the ordinary for the pair, the songwriting was pure Barlow, making it a pretty good introduction to what the group would later release as 1997's Dare to Be Surprised.
While they might've cleaned up their sound a bit, this is still the same cheaply-recorded Folk Implosion that poured out like sand on ...Take a Look Inside. The duo are eager to get the earworms out early; Davis fought for years for that pole position, and the constant thump of "Wide Web" and tuberculosis groove of "Insinuation" show them no less itchy. The songs here run a bit longer than ...Take a Look Inside's vignettes, and while a defiant streak has taken hold, the duo hit on probably one of the most innocent of indie sentiments as they float along like otters on "River Devotion": "I'll trim my whiskers and I'll wash my fur—anything for her". Dare to Be Surprised is sticky on first listen and proves handily that "Natural One" shouldn't have been a fluke.
| Essential: | Quintessential: | Non-Essential: | Rating: |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Wide Web", "Insinuation", "Burning Paper" (also "Park Dub") | "Pole Position" | None! | Classic |
Kids (1995)
Creaky sounds for a rather notorious movie.
How strange to have your big album be a soundtrack. What a strange soundtrack this is! Kids as a movie is, well, I haven't seen it, but given that the tale of a bunch of teenagers giving each other HIV was funded by none other than Harvey Weinstein (I'm not kidding, look it up), I'm fairly certain it's aged poorly. Kids as a soundtrack is neither fish nor fowl—it's one part the Folk Implosion's score and one part indie rock and 90s east coast rap, only two of which appear in the actual film—and you don't need to know anything about the movie to enjoy it. Thankfully.
Sad analog synth cries, drum loops, and melting bass lines make up the score here, lots of cool, eerie sounds, even occasionally catchy! The few licensed tracks come from indie heroes Daniel Johnston and Slint (the agonized screaming at the end of "Good Morning Captain" is forever harrowing)—none of the rap music from the film appears, though Lo-Down's grim "Mad Fright Night" is a very worthy substitute. Oh, yeah, and there's that "Natural One" song. I like that one. It's ephemeral and of its time, but it's a nice mood piece if you like your indie rock creepy—and it's at least a million times more enjoyable than watching a twelve-year-old getting rough-fucked, you'll be surprised to hear.
| Essential: | Quintessential: | Non-Essential: | Rating: |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Natural One", "Spoiled", "Mad Fright Night" | "Wet Stuff" | "Simean Groove" | Good |
Take a Look Inside... (1994)
Fuckingaroundcore.
If one takes Sebadoh to be the side project of Dinosaur Jr. bassist Lou Barlow, would that make The Folk Implosion a side project to a side project? Certainly, it has the lore of one—as the story goes, fellow Massachusetts songwriter John Davis was inspired enough by Sebadoh's III to send Barlow a tape of his own laundry room recordings and the two began writing tracks together. More often than not, on Take a Look Inside..., they have the sound of a side project too, a bizarre mix of the poppy, the confessional (it's a Lou Barlow album, after all), and the downright ridiculous, all dubbed cheaply on cassette. It's too happy for Sebadoh, but it's just as worth celebrating.
That's a whole big paragraph to say that the debut of the Folk Implosion is a brief set of brief songs from two weirdos happy to sit poo songs next to new wave freakouts and elliptic ballads. Not a single track here lasts longer than two-and-a-half minutes, and really, that's about their optimal length. It's uneven by design—you will never revisit "Winter's Day"—but the good shit is really fucking good, whether it's Davis and Barlow mumbling over bass on "Spiderweb-Butterfly" or the Kinksian "Waltzin' With Your Ego" or, hell, dorky fuck anthems like "Slap Me". It's a damn good side project is what I'm trying to say, and quick fun if you're as weird as them.
| Essential: | Quintessential: | Non-Essential: | Rating: |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Spiderweb-Butterfly", "Had to Find Out", "Waltzin' With Your Ego" | "Slap Me" | "Winter's Day" | Great |