overlooked 90's groups

I cast my vote for The Ropers. Their first (and only, really) album is a noise-pop classic and probably the best US post-shoegazing LP.

I could go on.

Also: Suddenly, Tammy! They broke up eons ago, but Beth Sorrentino plays solo shows around New York sometimes.

i also second harriet the spy. you'd think with all the fandom of the party of helicopters, more people would remember harriet the spy.

Lifter Puller (getting their due now, like 4 years too late...)

Hickey (San Fran post-hardcore/pop-punk with an ear for manic melodies and rhythms... Released a ridiculously nuts album on Probe in the mid 90s. Their singer just died in October)

Let me second this. Never read one interview/review/story on them EVER -- but they were pretty cool.

The Mysteries of Life's first album was v. nice. Whatever happened to them?

Second that, if its the Hickey I'm thinking of. The singer wore thick frame glasses (before the era of thick frame glasses)? A young man. I'm shocked...what happened?

http://www.mattyluv.com/

Chavez!

and seconded for the Loud Family

Best band ever, and I've only ever met one other fan...

(Sorry, but if ever there was an inexplicably overrated band -- both Electric Company and Amnesia were vast improvements...)

man there is almost no information about the wicked farleys on the internet, except from a shitty old website that is inexplicably still up. such a good band - came from the same boston scene as the swirlies and kind of mining the same american take on shoegaze sound. "make it it" is classic and i wish it was on spotify.

ha on further research, wicked farleys frontman rob laakso is listed as a current member of the swirlies

swirlies kick ass too btw

^^^^^^^ love that first EP, such a classic

Considering who was in it, it's kind of interesting that the band Vodka are like completely completely buried.

Lead singer has one degree of separation or less with Swans, Mommyheads, Guided By Voices, Mofungo, etc.
Drummer was instrumental in the AIDS-denialist movement and has her own Wikipedia page (which doesn't mention the band).
One guitarist was in Cat Power way back when, plus turns up all over the place in experimental circles.
Other guitarist engineered or recorded a large chunk of indie rock as we know it.

They weren't bad either. Not great, but not bad.

And oh neat, I'd never heard the Television cover ("Friction") by this *other* overlooked 90's group that the lead singer was in...

http://www.sensitiveskinmagazine.com/timber-released-unreleased/

I caught this band Nemo from Belgium, very randomly, back in the 90's and bought their first album, which is one of the better Pixies-inspired things out there (though nowhere near Mclusky). Shelled out big $ for the follow-up, which was not in the same league. I'll be plagued until I die by the fact that I don't know what song they finished the live set with, 'cause it totally killed the crowd of like 12 people at Brownies...

OMG. That's one of the dEUS related bands. Well, related to other Belgian bands like Evil Superstars (probably one of my fave live bands ever), Dead Man Ray, Metal Molly,... Shit I feel exceptionally old now. lol

http://youtu.be/RmQBij7ZeWk

"Little clouds of sperms..."

God I loved the Evil Superstars.

rRope is getting a complete collection release (3LP) possibly by this spring. Via Deathbomb Arc.

Which I'm finally getting around to listening to. It's great.

space streakings' 7-toku was good but hatsu-koi is their ne plus ultra. the albini engineering job did not do them justice on the former, and the latter has all the quality riffs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtbF2iTA7go

just noticed that some (all?) of the edsel albums are on spotify. i could have sworn i searched for "techniques of speed hypnosis" in the past year and couldn't find it so maybe recently added.

Any excuse to post some Superconductor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DZxYoO4d1Q

I love Edsel! Here's the likely reason you recently found it on Spotify?

http://www.comedyminusone.com/023.php

http://www.comedyminusone.com/017.php

xpost

oh cool. i only really know that one album but it's a good one. comedy minus one doing the lord's work these days.

Oh, you have to check out the other one. This track is great:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXN1OYGpV6I

And yes Comedy Minus One is killing it. Jon, the guy running it, seems very nice given the email conversation I had with him.

I had a sudden need to see whether anyone had ever mentioned Moped on ILM.

Bless electricsound of jim for doing so. In this thread. In two different years.

insides

I was thinking about Tunic today, they did a mediocre cover version of A-ha's Manhatten Skyline on the NME C96 CD, then released two singles I really liked, also apparently two LPs which I haven't heard, however there seems to be nothing about them on the internet aside from discogs and one very old site, and amazingly none of their music on youtube as far as I can tell.

Is it wrong for me to hype my own band on here?

https://open.spotify.com/album/1ttc7KoPS9ittZffhiDSBe?si=qEOyb9J4QcWasha0yQRD9g

i've heard that several times on ILX. the phrase was familiar to me when sebadoh released the "gimme indie rock!" parody/diss single in '91, but maybe it was more common in some areas/scenes than others?

― Fozzy Osbourne (contenderizer), Thursday, March 15, 2012 4:26 PM (six years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^ specifically bashing sonic youth, pussy galore and dinosaur jr. as purveyors of played-out, cash-grabbing "indie rock"

― Fozzy Osbourne (contenderizer), Thursday, March 15, 2012 4:27 PM (six years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That song was celebrating those bands, dood

Lol there was a 90s band called the 1985?

Anyways the answer is disco motherfucking inferno

Anyways the answer is disco motherfucking inferno

so yesterday I am sorting stuff out in my digital archive and I chance upon a zip file of the 5eps that I got at the time of the reissues that I thought I had lost.
I extract the zip, and then wait for sonos to index overnight.
turns out that I now get the whole ILM vs DI thing.
bottom line : are they still overlooked given the reissue campaign ?

Is it wrong for me to hype my own band on here?

(I like it, btw!)

Cathal Coughlan's Fatima Mansions were fantastic. Brilliant live act, too.

Any love for Small Factory?
https://youtu.be/CoJekie1Br4

I'll cosign kinski's 2003 vote for Marion.

Any love for Small Factory?

Yes! I Do Not Love You was perhaps my first online purchas based entirely on online recommendations, ca.1995, which felt risky at the time. One of the better LPs of its genre, I came to conclude.

Put on Revelater by Jennyanykind as I was moving my CDs last night. Really unique for it’s day and age, though the piano sound would make a Spoon fan intrigued

Surprised I never mentioned the Judybats in this thread, so, the Judybats.

The 360s.

Pale Saints!

I’m certain I’ve said as much in this very thread but my under appreciated 90s are Fuck and Jf*E

Flop are totally overlooked. They released some great powerpop tunes but got lost in the churn of the Pacific Northwest 'grunge' hype.

Someone mentioned 3Ds. They're totally not overlooked here in NZ. They're considered an absolute classic of the '90s Flying Nun roster, which to be fair is somewhat overlooked compared with the label's '80s output.

^^ Also seconding Fuck, who fucked their chances with a stupid name. I guess their lyrics were pretty stupid too though. Some nice songs though.

Long Fin Killie
Bows

Long Fin Killie were great, but I don’t know how much more “looked” they could have been… they were so unique and creative, but definitely not for even mainstream “indie” taste (in the US, anyway)

Jf*E were hot sh1t for a minute, at least in the “scene”… but yeah, they didn’t end up becoming the Strokes or anything

Subskin Cables
Sacred Miracle Cave
Hitting Birth

prob dozens more

Fuck and Flop are some of the more hilarious band names I have seen lately.

Fuck had the funniest busy-cartoon-landscape album cover.

Xpost: yeah I guess you’re right.

The followup project “Bows” didn’t get much attention, probably because it was too late in the game for trip-hop despite them doing a very unique take on it.

I still have my old Virgin Brief History of Ambient CD compilations, and I was surprised to find out that Towering Inferno did so little. One album, Kaddish, a track on Ambient IV, and that was about it. I have the impression that the recording budget was huge and the album lost a tonne of money. One-half of the band died in 2005.

I remember it was a big thing in the early post-rock scene. It's a bit like Scott Walker's later stuff and it's sad they never worked together. I can't think of much to say about them but they existed.

My first thought was The Books, but I'm not sure they qualify either as a 90s band or as overlooked.

well their first record was in 2002 and every album felt like it was discussed endlessly on message boards like this one

but yeah one would think for such an innovative and supposedly influential band there'd be a ton of Books-inspired stuff left in their wake, I think the reality is what they did was so unique and labor-intensive that nobody could really duplicate it

similar story for AnCo's MPP I think

to all the groups I’ve overlooked before

Continuing through the CD pile and going through more Chapel Hill bands, I wouldn't have thought they were forgotten because they were on a premier indie of the time (Bloodshot) and Greil Marcus talked them up, but Trailer Bride only has a few hundred Spotify listeners.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wm1xtbKVO0w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gibuGcpZF7A

Floraline. Band from Atlanta who put out one album on Minty Fresh in 1999, after which it seems no one in the band ever released anything else, so admittedly they're pretty easy to overlook. That one album is really lovely though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoUHJV1pF2c

omg Trailer Bride!!! I remember them! Her weird singing was so refreshing to me.

Oh yeah, Trailer Bride! From that era of distinctive female-led Bloodshot bands, though being on Bloodshot then, rock was just part of it, often a sharp part of the attitude/boldness: also Moonshine Willy, The Meat Purveyors, Neko when she was covering Loretta Lynn (7"-only, originally, and non-obvious choices of material), as well as Scott Walker, writing like a combination of those, working w Kelly Hogan and the Mekons and others---but back to Trailer Bride: xgau also endorsed them, and I think that's how I got to them, like with most of the other early 90s acts on here, so, whatever the audience for indie etc. may have been aware of, reviews did count for more back then, as bendy indicates
Thanks to this reminder, I finally thought to check bandcamp, and here's the s/t, pre-Bloodshot, and some reviewers say not as good bandwise, but I haven't yet played it:

https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a3167590376_10.jpg

Trailer Bride’s 1996 self-titled record is a long-lost relic of the blooming Chapel Hill, North Carolina music scene of the ‘90s. Superchunk, Polvo, Archers of Loaf and other indie rock darlings were leading the town’s indie rock movement while Southern Culture on the Skids were pushing the alt-country genre forward. Then comes Trailer Bride who combined both of those worlds with a gothic, lo-fi sound that centers around Melissa Swingle’s atmospheric vocals and cryptic lyrics. Swingle started Trailer Bride following the demise of her band Pussy Teeth and would later go on to form the indie rock duo The Moaners with Laura King (Bat Fangs, Speed Stick), but the dark, southern sound that defines Trailer Bride’s debut record provides a mystifying listening experience a quarter-century later. No Depression said it best in their 1997 review: "They’re impossible to describe, but whatever you wanna call it, they sound really good.”
credits
released November 5, 2021
1996 Melissa Swingle under exclusive license to Yep Roc, LLC.

Swingle’s Moaners are good too, but I don’t know if any other post Trailer Bride projects put out records. These days she’s running the Chapel Hill bar in that video, The Cave.

bendy bringing the NC <3