Read em and weep. For me.

I’m housebound this week after all, so you can expect an extra newsletter coming tomorrow in addition to Friday’s edition. Five records is about all I can take at a time, and for some of you random stoker Phish phans out there even that seems like I’m pushing it. But there’s a lot of good music coming or having recently dropped, and I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you about a lot of it.

So yeah, more to come. You’re lucky to have me as I am you!

Submissions to PO Box 25717 Chicago IL 60625 USA // [email protected]

Off we go. Subscribers get it all past the free review, and you’ll want it this week for sure.

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HUGGY BEAR Basic Strategies for Going Out: Peel Sessions 10” EP (JABS)

An octad (yeah I do the crossword) from the government wayback machine that is the BBC, featuring the inscrutable Huggy Bear in mint condition. Some things are evident: even if you have all the singles, splits and scraps, the pieces don’t make a complete puzzle picture. Even if you read the band’s amazing and inscrutable oral history Killed of Kids (also published by JABS), and get the underlying foundation of what they did and how they did it, there is no path to recreate it against the modern metric, even though the map is right there, you need have the eyes to read it against the mess we’re in now. Huggy Bear fortified themselves with mountains of words laced with boobytraps and provocations that put them in the crosshairs of UK tabloid media. They built easy, atonal, pounded-to-the-beat musical choices into an impenetrable forcefield forged by teenage psychics out of discarded culture, perverting an early/surf rock hedonism motif into spiky Ron Johnson Records-inspired anti-pop, a seething, snotty, youthful ball of conflicts, pronouncements and putting as much pepper on the word “yeah” as it could take. Their most well-known song “Her Jazz” (featured here) pushes for a “girl-boy revolution” while spitting on that same sentiment, rebuking a macktivist agenda while flipping it to their own terms. They were branded as Riot Grrrl but seemed to bristle against that notion, even as they wound up as the national ambassadors of the movement. Every one of their records demands that you hold space for converging ideas and cheeks beaming and slapped red on both sides, being enlightened and angered, brought into the fold and outcast instantly based on cruel data unavailable to you, a whipsaw subversion of youth culture born to burn. Not too many bands could walk this walk for long (Nation of Ulysses, mk 1 Bikini Kill, and Atari Teenage Riot spring to mind as corollaries before and after), and that they spun all of this up into a maelstrom of discord and hype seems like a revolution in and of itself. And after three years, they were done, their obsolescence planned in the headiest era of the past five decades (1991-1994). Here’s eight songs of that, two or three of which haven’t turned up on any of their other releases (which used to happen so much, bands that didn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t document themselves allowing albums of material to break off into the cosmos). They do everything I wrote above and more in mere minutes, and leave you assed-out, spun out and ready to start trouble.

More below for those of you who wised up.