Sparklehorse - Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain (2006)
Hawthorne Heights - The Silence in Black and White (2004) Split Habit - Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is (2003) The Lovehammers - Murder on My Mind (2003) Rainer Maria - A Better Version of Me (1999)įall Out Boy - Take This to Your Grave (2003) The Promise Ring - Boys + Girls EP (1998) Rainer Maria - Look Now Look Again (1998) Soul Asylum - Let Your Dim Light Shine (1994-1995)Īrchers of Loaf - All the Nations Airports (1996) The Young Fresh Fellows - Electric Bird Digest (1991)Ĭhainsaw Kittens - Flipped Out in Singapore (1992)įreedy Johnston - This Perfect World (1994) King Snake Roost - Ground Into the Dirt (1990) Killdozer - Intellectuals are the Shoeshine Boys of the Ruling Elite (1984) Some albums may be not available in all countries. To read the entire story, purchase this issue from our online store.Strikethrough albums (9/45) are not available on Spotify. It’s one of the definitive albums of Sub Pop’s early years, and its charms were immediately apparent: Entertainment Weekly went as far as to suggest that the world would be a better place with less Rick Astleys and more acts like TAD. In truth, the band’s entire catalog (at least through 1993’s Inhaler) is worth revisiting, but we salute 8-Way Santa for taking a basic canvas of ugliness and transforming it in to something groovy and hypnotic. 8-Way Santa suggests a 50/50 split between strange-but-true autobiographical narratives and equally vivid confabulations, with tracks like “Jack Pepsi” (a.k.a.
Part of the band’s genius was the overall sense of menace and dread conveyed by guitarist/vocalist Tad Doyle’s and bassist Kurt Danielson’s perversely humorous lyrics. The shift on 8-Way Santa was every bit as dramatic as Die Kreuzen’s October File or Head of David’s Dustbowl, in terms of presenting the band in a shockingly different context some TAD fans-and even some members of the band-continue to have an uneasy relationship with the album because of it. “Flame Tavern” and “3-D Witch Hunt” feature sung (as opposed to growled) vocals, two of the more overtly “poppy” songs on an album that openly flirts with traditional pop song structures throughout. The album’s bookends-“Jinx” and “Plague Years”-were way ahead of the curve of what was going on with underground music in the year punk broke. In some respects, 8-Way Santa is the outlier in TAD’s catalog, an unapologetically melodic and unpretentious collection of biker-rock anthems. In short: Pretty much everything that could go wrong did, in fact, go wrong, and the process of making the record drove drummer Steve Wied out and put a hard stop to the original incarnation of the band. There’s a lot to sort through in this cavalcade of catastrophes-a fair amount of screen time in the provocative TAD documentary Busted Circuits and Ringing Ears is devoted to just getting the facts behind 8-Way Santa straight. Both are extremely evocative of the band’s live performances from the era, but the Satan-worshipping, chainsaw-wielding backwoods maniacs (not really) in TAD were too musically restless to settle into formula.Īlmost 25 years after its release, the controversy surrounding 8-Way Santa’s infamous original album art, Sub Pop’s ingenious/ill-conceived marketing and promotion strategy, and the multiple lawsuits that crippled the album’s commercial prospects remains the dominant narrative. According to guitarist Gary Thorstensen, the initial concept for the band, presented in their first rehearsal, was “to sound like an eight-cylinder car, running on seven cylinders.” That’s exactly what the quartet’s 1989 debut God’s Balls and the following year’s Salt Lick EP sound like: blisteringly loud and raw SST/ Touch & Go-style noise rock set to a molten Black Sabbath tempo.
No band that rose out of the Pacific Northwest music scene of the late ’80s was as committed to the idea of sonic punishment as TAD.
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