Records of the Month Club: Tsunami, Miles Davis, and More

Tsunami’s new five-LP box set Loud As Is collects the work of this too-overlooked Virginia band that were a pillar of the indie rock scene in the 1990s. They might not be remembered as well as some of their higher profile peers, but between their excellent music and bandleaders Jenny Toomey and Kristin Thomson’s work with the Simple Machines label, Tsunami were one of the most important indie rock bands of the era. Their three albums, long out of print, have been reissued by Numero Group in a gorgeous box set, along with a two-disc compilation of singles and other assorted strays. Loud As Is is a must-listen for anybody who likes smart, noisy, nervy rock music, whether you’re already familiar with Tsunami or not. 

Indie rock was never a good name for a genre, but in the ‘90s it at least evoked a specific kind of sound. Guitar-driven, noise-drenched through distortion or lo-fi recording equipment or both, discordant but tuneful, vestigial punk ethics but without the rigid musical orthodoxy… it was a largely American trend that grew out of hardcore and ‘80s college rock a la R.E.M. and The Feelies, with other influences (classic rock, power-pop, folk, free jazz, no wave, krautrock, many more) popping up here and there on a band-by-band basis. It was less of a distinct style than a mindset, a way of thinking about art and music and how to produce them, and few bands embodied that independent spirit better than Tsunami. 

The true revelation with Loud As Is is that their final album, 1997’s A Brilliant Mistake, is their strongest; this whole scene was kind of fraying by ‘97, with the best bands from the first half of the decade either stagnating or trying hard to grow, and as a college radio DJ enamored with post-rock and indie-pop and the hometown Elephant 6 scene Tsunami seemed to have hit a lull by the time they released their last album. Big goof there on my part: A Brilliant Mistake might not share the more obvious indie rock trappings of their first two albums, but it’s the band’s highwater mark on almost every level; it features Toomey and Thomson’s most nuanced and powerful songwriting, their strongest vocal performances, and the most varied and interesting arrangements in their catalogue. It’s the kind of record where the first song is so transcendent that you almost want to put it on repeat and not even get to the rest of it. That’d be a tragedy, of course, as the rest of the album is almost as great as “Old Grey Mare.”

This is in no way a slight to the band’s other albums, or the material collected on World Tour & Other Destinations. Deep End—released in ‘93, recorded in ‘92—is a sterling snapshot of the scene at that exact moment in time, in the wake of Nirvana’s eruption blowing everything wide open and driving desperate major label A&R men to hit on any band with a seven-inch and a modicum of college radio buzz. It includes what’s probably their best-remembered song today, “Genius of Crack,” a minor indie rock anthem and mix tape staple of the day. Part of the band’s touring for Deep End included dates on the Lollapalooza second stage in ‘93 alongside Sebadoh and a couple of Sonic Youth-related projects, to show you the kind of circles they traveled in. They followed that up quickly with the 1994 LP The Heart’s Tremolo, which is a dronier, more atmospheric, and more complex record, and then ‘97’s genuinely brilliant swan song. The first two albums, especially, are a great summary of what college radio sounded like in ‘93 and ‘94, but you can also hear why this great band didn’t become as big as colleagues like Sebadoh, Yo La Tengo or Pavement; their songs are probably a little too challenging for high school kids, less generous with pop hooks, and simultaneously a little brainier than something like Sebadoh but also more emotional than a band like Pavement (although not resembling ‘90s emo in terms of sound or lyrical self-indulgence). Loud As Is a powerful reminder that Tsunami wasn’t just “important” but also really good. 

Miles Davis

Birth of the Blue LP
Analogue Productions

I wrote about this one a little bit last month, but I’ve since been able to actually spend time with a copy. I’m in no way a part of the “hot stamper” crew, those folks who pay close attention to who masters a record and how, and so Analogue Productions’ whole high-end focus doesn’t mean a whole lot to me. This is one beautiful package, though, a thick chunk of vinyl inside a lavishly printed gatefold sleeve with a new essay from Miles Davis scholar Ashley Kahn. The music itself isn’t some lost grail of cool jazz, or anything—all these recordings have been released before, albeit not packaged together as a single vinyl collection, though—but it does contain some truly virtuosic performances by the band that would record Kind of Blue, recording together here for the first time less than a year before making that masterpiece. Jazz historians and Davis completionists might have heard this all before, but not in such a wonderful package, or mastered and cut with such care and quality. It’d make a fine gift for the jazzbo in your life.

Love Child

Never Meant to Be: 1988-1993 2xLP
12XU Records

Okay, this isn’t new, per se—it came out back in March—and the music obviously isn’t new, since this whole column is about new releases of old music. (Plus it’s right there in the damn title: 1988 through 1993 was a hell of a long time ago, as sad as that might make all of us.) I’m pretty sure Paste hasn’t touched this one yet, though, so now’s the time. Will Baum, Rebecca Odes, and Alan Licht formed Love Child in the late ‘80s; all three wrote and sang songs and put out the scrappy lo-fi pop LP Okay in ‘91 on Homestead (kind of like the Ottoman Empire of notable ‘80s/’90s indie rock labels), which landed to raves from the right folks but deafening silence otherwise. Baum split thereafter, while Odes and Licht added Brendan O’Malley on drums and made ‘92’s darker, deeper, more ambitious follow-up Witchcraft. Then Odes and Licht split too, ending Love Child right when the kind of stuff they did started to really dominate college radio for a spell. (I think it was Ben Goldberg who said Love Child could’ve been Yo La Tengo if they stuck around, in his Bands Not in the Trouser Press Guide Guide, but the internet has no record of that and Love Child actually is on the Trouser Press site, so maybe I’m totally misremembering that whole thing.) The two-disc comp Never Meant to Be collects songs from both albums, along with some singles and radio sessions, and gives a great overview of a band that matured quickly, broke up too early, and never really got the respect or attention they deserved, even though they foreshadowed so much of the indie rock of the last 30 years. The songs from Okay aren’t always as simple as they first seem—“Sofa” starts as a haphazard, two-chord garage-y stomp somewhere in Beat Happening territory before collapsing multiple times into a free jazz freakout—but the leap from that album’s light, buzzy din to the noisier, more intricate songs on Witchcraft is still jarring today. If you’re familiar with Licht’s rich, varied catalogue of minimalist guitar music, you know he’s one of the best to ever do it, and when you bundle that with Odes’ incisive songwriting you’ve got a band that balances the line between noise and pop songcraft like a Wallenda walking the high-wire. Never Meant to Be shouldn’t be a replacement for the two albums, but it’s a great introduction, and features enough previously unheard stuff to make it mandatory for anybody who’s been clutching onto those two records for the last 30 years. 

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.