18 minutes of nostalgia (sorry)

For separate reasons I've found myself listening to two of my favourite bands from the 90's that no one has ever heard of in the last week. So I thought I'd share them with you.

First up is Catherine. Coming out of Chicago the history of Catherine is entwined with The Smashing Pumpkins from the beginning. Both bands practiced out of the same studio in the early 90's and it was Catherine who introduced Billy Corgan to the Big Muff guitar pedal, which so greatly influenced the sound of Siamese Dream. When James Iha and D'arcy Wretzky started their own record label (Scratchie Records) Catherine was one of the first bands they signed. D'arcy was also married to drummer Kerry Brown for a while. (The two split up a while ago, but Kerry is still working with Corgan as an in house sound engineer for all the "new pumpkins" work.) Hot Saki & Bed Time Stories is a lot poppier than anything the Pumpkins ever released, but there's still a lot of melancholy and psychedelia throughout the album which explains the kinship between the two bands. Lead single Four Leaf Clover also features D'arcy on guest vocals.


Catherine - Four Leaf Clover

(While looking that video up, I also came across this video of the original (and still the best) Pumpkins attending band counseling, which shits all over Some Kind of Monster.)


Smashing Pumpkins Counselling

Second we're going to look at Janitor Joe, from Minneapolis. Limited Edition is just under 2 and a half minutes of post-hardcore, proto-grunge noise rock bliss. (They never made a video for it though so you can check out the clip for Boys In Blue here if you need to know what they looked like.)


Janitor Joe - Limited Edition

Bassist Kristen Pfaff left the band in 1993 to join Hole, and part of the lyrics to Limited Edition became the chorus for Miss World. Unfortunately Pfaff died of a heroin overdose in 1994 around two months after the release of Live Through This (and about two months after the death of Kurt Cobain who died 4 days before the album was released).

Once again the lovely people of Universal Music Group have disabled embedding for the Miss World video clip, but you can still go watch it on YouTube right here.

word cloud

Wordle is a pretty awesome site that lets you make word clouds like this from any text you want, or any blog with an rss feed (like say, this one!) Obviously the post about NIN below pretty heavily influenced what you see. I wish it would go back through all the archives of this entire blog and do it though, it'd be interesting to see how that would come up.

On the music front, I'm loving the new Every Time I Die album at the moment, and am back on Cursive's latest album Mama, I'm Swollen because it is brilliant (like every Cursive album). And I just picked up Babes Say the Hottest Things by Mustache!, an old school sleazy rock 'n' roll band similar to Eagles of Death Metal featuring Adam from Murder By Death's "cousin". And finally also listening to the Saul Williams/Thomas Kessler/Arditti String Quartet collaboration NGH WHT, a combination of hip hop and strings which places one of Williams' poems from The Dead Emcee Scrolls over an experimental composition by Kessler.

All of the above are awesome and should be checked out.

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Now playing: Saul Williams - Chapter 18