Loud Family live album with MBV, Pixies, Eno covers!

I actually saw the Loud Family play a HEADLINING show during their "last" tour. That is, it was rumored to be their last (due to piss-poor sales, even by independant label standards, and various other factors), and it proved to be their last. They were great, playing a set not too dissimilar to the one found on this live disc. There is a tendency for their recorded work to skate a bit too close to wanky jazzbo noodling @ times (esp. on their last album, where the bass is all over the place), but, live, there's nary a whiff of pointless noodling. They were tight.

If you scoot on over to the Loud Family site, you'll find a feature where Scott Miller (the lead Loud) answers questions from fans & interested passerby. After the Loud Family dissolved, Scott mentioned that he'd seriously thought about not making music anymore (for popular consumption), simply because he wasn't able to give people what they wanted. (I'm paraphrasing, of course.) Now, granted, giving the world a batch of super-literate, guitar-genre-spanning, noise-laden pop songs might not be the best thing to do, if your goal is to please all the people. It's a damn shame, tho, that his supposed "failure" almost caused him to quit. (He hasn't, thankfully; he still plays out every so often, somewhere in California.)

Scott Miller wrote excellent songs; they might be tricked out in fancy glitches and unaccomodating arrangements, but underneath all that obfuscation, there were solid songs. (The best mix of mess & song is _Interbabe Concern_; the best separation of mess & song is _Days For Days_; the best songs are on _Plants & Birds..._) I'm not sure it's even fair to use "obfuscation", either - in terms of making the songs accessible, yes, it's a problem. In terms of constructing something a bit more challenging, though, it comes off as a back- handed complement. There have been plenty of groups that muddied their songs with inspired bouts with distortion and other studio tomfoolery that might sound inaccessible. I'm hard pressed to think of any so attached to both the notions of "guitar pop" and "inaccessability" as the Loud Family, though - some of their best moments (the marble dropping on "Don't Respond She Can Tell", the sped-up drum roll on "Nice When I Want Something") are often the most jarring.

What confounds me most about the Loud Family is how they fell COMPLETELY through the cracks - I'm not sure if it was due to bad timing, or Alias Records dropping the ball on promotion, or some other confluence of bad juju and evil eyes, but they managed to slide right past the alt.rock bonanza of the early 90s into the same damning critical-darling cult limbo that smothers and suffocates fine rock outfits like Big Star and the Posies. And it's a damn shame.

Sadly the only other record by them I've been able to find is Days For Days, and while I like it a lot too, I prefer the mess vs separation of noise/pop.

I really love them, particularly Interbabe Concern, but most of the reasons I love them stem directly from Scott Miller's songs. Their actual sound was never a big point of interest for me, so I can't say I'm too excited about hearing them play other people's songs.