by John Bear
Daily Lobo
I've never been a real big fan of nostalgia. It is, in my opinion, the lamest of all emotions.
And as I listen to Sleepless in Seattle: The Birth of Grunge, I cannot help but notice that the ten-plus years that have passed since grunge rock was popular do little to efface my love for it.
No doubt about it; I am nostalgic. Curses.
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And the bands present on this album, most of them anyway, don't register even a slight blip on the radar of my memory.
I have no idea who Mr. Epp and the Calculations are, or were. If you say the name Blackout, you will elicit little more than a confused stare from me.
But whether I remember any of these bands by name is not the point. It doesn't matter. The spirit of the early '90s is here in all of its flannel-clad, heroin-addled glory.
Grunge marked a brief spot on the spectrum of time when I was in style, through no fault of my own. And the music spoke to me. I appreciated its honesty. I also liked the fact that it simultaneously destroyed '80s hair metal while paying homage to it.
Though a fair amount of the CD contains songs by unknown bands, there are a few of note. Green River - the precursor to Pearl Jam - brings us the slowed down, metal-feedback parade of "Come on Down." According to the liner notes, they did this in 1985, smack dab in the middle of the seventh circle of cock-rock hell. Nice work.
The Melvins, who released an album with Jello Biafra of Dead Kennedys last year, come with some disgusting sludge. The instrumentation is metal as heard from the bottom of a well and the vocals emanate from the stalls of a truck stop where the singer is constipated to the point of heart arrhythmia. I never said this music was pretty.
Mudhoney shows up for fun with drum solos and chorus pedals on "In 'N' Out of Grace." Personally, I would have gone with "Acetone," a classic love song about a girl who drinks too much paint thinner.
Tad - whose 300-pound singer lost a fight with a train a while back - Screaming Trees, Babes in Toyland and Seven Year Bitch also show up with dirty Seattle sounds. Other than that, I have never heard of any of these other bands.
Anonymity of most of the bands notwithstanding, this is a fairly representative sample of what was once grunge. Strangely absent from the proceedings is Nirvana, but I guess we don't need to give the surviving members and spouses of dead ones any more royalty money. Let them get jobs.
