Gastr del Sol - The Serpentine Similar

Gastr Del Sol's debut LP back in print for the first time since 1997, and with it a reminder that even the most sui generis of bands come from somewhere. The Serpentine Similar is hardly conventional, though its influences are a little more obviously rendered than on later recordings, expressing the groups connections with the post-hardcore scene they'd only just about escaped after the dissolution of first Squirrel Bait and then Bastro. Significantly, Jim O'Rourke had yet to join at this point, and you can hear his absence, the trio of Grubbs, McEntire and Bundy Brown instead deconstructing alt. rock tropes in ways that felt akin to Slint's slow-core horror and the mathy intensity of US Maple. GDS don't quite have the southern gothic drama of the former, nor the theatrics of the latter, but they are  inventive and flamboyant in ways that must have seemed as equally unpredictable in 1993, especially on a label like Teenbeat, the indie label who originally released the LP before Drag City got involved. This isn't the post-rock you'd typically associate with the group's other three albums, though it's not your standard math rock either, touched with a little alien quality that McEntire certainly carried on into Tortoise. These guys would have been young when making this, and it's still exciting to hear them working out their uniqueness in real time, that dry guitar sound happy to embrace the quiet and the unconventional time signature while most around them were gunning for noise. A still majestic first look at a band who went on to be one of the most inventive and consistently surprising of their generation.
 
FFO: Slint, US Maple, The Shipping News, Tortoise