Swinging Singles Club MN

 I'm tired and my fingertips smell like onion and garlic. Slip It Under the Door (1995) So this band started out with the name Hovercraft. I suppose it wasn't maybe the best name ever, but it works locally. Then based on the switch looks that just like Lynyrd Skynyrd the boys found themselves Working for MCA . From a quick glance at Discogs it looks like there was a concurrent band with a few releases out of Seattle that was also calling themselves Hovercraft (there are seven total listed there.) So that was out and Shatterproof was the new moniker and this album which the Boston Sun-Sentinel thought highly of. Unfortunately for Shatterproof, this release didn't exactly lead to international fame and fortune and thus it was that they ceased working for MCA a short while later. But they weren't totally done yet. Signal Flare (1996) There was still this three song EP the following year (as well as an unreleased 1996 followup album that got Cdr treatment in 2007. I'm n...

  Yeah, I'm going to toss these two up and call it good for a week...     In Stereo Where Available (1995) So yeah, Superman Curl . Middle class, suburban pop punk by white collar office workers making music between weekend barbecues. They're not trying to reinvent or reinvigorate the genre. They just are the hippest motherfucking punk rockers in their suburban neighborhood. (Ok, I'm being a bit harsh. But I had a friend and future bandmate in this band and seeing them live, because I am a good friend who'd go and see your band play on a Tuesday night was, shall we say, difficult.) This exists to remind you that there is always something else you can be listening to.

So it's been my week off work and I have accomplished a bunch  and then again not a fucking thing. I mean, I've been doing things other than worrying about this space so I'm scrambling here to get some things in the queue before I disappoint the dozen or so people who thumb through this mess monthly. Meanwhile, I'm also hustling to get some food ready for the coming work week where I'll do nothing but work and sleep for four days in a row. So I've got some kind of Jamaican style pork and sweet potato stew on the stove simmering away. (I won't even pretend it's an accurate representation of the dish, but it's a synthesis of a few different versions into a (hopefully) delicious Frankenstein of a meal)  Peachfuzz (1995) This band is Peachfuzz and this is their first album. It seems to be the project of one Andrew Chojnacki and starts in Minneapolis before shifting to California. The alleged Peachfuzz website listed on Discogs comes up with a security wa...

 I got nothing. Made in Minnesota Volume 2 (1995) Volume One leans more to the singer/songwriter stuff I'm less fond of, so I never picked that one up. Volume Two has the rock and the pop and the stuff in between. That's the one for me. Tracklist on Discogs .

  'Cuz it's 7/11. Get it? Huh?    Something in French (1995) Oh dear. I don't appear to have made my own scans for this. AND it's packed away in a box still. Sorry for the shitty graphics. This is the debut by Voodoo Love Mint. It's rock and roll and kind of loud.  You like loud rock and roll don't you? Well, don't you?

 I'm buying myself another week of getting my shit together. Fortunately I'm also on "vacation" in that I took a week off work. We're not going anywhere or doing anything but assembling an apartment, but I'm not at work, so I've got that going for me. Meanwhile I have to look up how to tie fishing line so I can use the picture rail in the rooms to hang up our art stuff.  This room won't really feel complete until the Captain Beefheart Reprise promo poster is up. I also need to get the now kind of beaten up Soft Boys Rykodisc poster in some kind of frame. And I found in a forgotten place an original 1983 poster for Mission of Burma's last shows (the first time around) I took it off a wall way back then after the infamous afternoon all ages show. (if you know when to look you can see me in the video of the show on the deluxe "Vs" set from a number of years back.) Anyways, Here's the other the Blue Up?  Spool Forka Dish (1995) I got noth...

  So it appears that I severely underestimated the number of those folding Lp boxes I'm gonna need for this move. By about half a dozen. I just got my ratios mixed up. Five boxes covered about three and a half shelves. I have two and a third to go. If I was good at math I could work it out, but I'm too frazzled and stressed to really want to think about it and I got up too late today to hit the liquor store for a box of stress relieving juice. So here I am. With nothing else to do currently because the tape roll is too loud when I'm packing up boxes and wakes the wife up, I'm just going to by myself a little extra time in the future at the new place to get my lazy ass settled in and figure out where all my shit is and in what fucking order it's in and who's the dumbass who packed all this stuff up this way. What a fucking moron that guy was.... So I think I'm going to end up with a baker's dozen of Lp boxes to go with a like number of Cd boxes and the pr...

  I got some big packages of music in the mail this week. Lots of cheap compact discs and plenty more 7"s to add to the ever growing pile in front of the turntable that I will get back to some day. Midwinter doldrums hit hard, my friend. In the meantime while I rip a large stack of Cds in another window have a compilation of what the fuck was happening in Minneapolis in and around 1995.     Minnesota Modern Rock: the Pachyderm Sessions (1995) Discogs has the track list because I'm too lazy to type it out. But if you look at the picture there are some names you should recognize if you're into that sort of thing from that time. Less familiar names may or may not be forthcoming in future posts. And some already had stuff posted on regular flavor Swinging Singles Club if you want to hunt around for your favorites. There's plenty to love from Big Star aficionados Rex Daisy to Milk to Big Red Ball. But the one thing that links the recordings here as released by long gone al...

  I just remembered I have leftover al pastor tacos in the fridge.  I should get on with this. I type, I eat, I play video games until morning. It's the cycle of life on my days off. I also remember I have whisky which should be interesting since I haven't had so much as a drop of liquor in months. This could turn out to be a swell night. 1995 -Sissy Bar The solo work of Matt Olson of Balloon Guy that was concurrent to that band. It's kind of an extension of that but lesser fi and perhaps even looser. I don't know. It's likely he simply was writing and recording material faster than a regular band could accomodate. I don't know. It's certainly in the same general sonic universe. If you liked the previous. You should enjoy this buzzing ball of angular nonsense as well. Here's a bonus just so I don't have to toss it onto another unrelated post later and to get it on here before this delicious Irish Whisky makes it harder to type coherent sentences in m...

  I'm feeling particularly unmotivated as of late. It's midwinter. It's cold. It's dark. I work nights and seldom see daylight. I'm back to work post-COVID. Everything just seems to require more actual effort than I feel personally up to currently expending. But here I am anyway. Lucky you.   1995 - Soundbull I know without going and actually searching it out because I'm lazy and unmotivated that the Balloon Guy singles were among the first things I posted on the original flavor Swinging Singles Club and invite you to hunt them down for yourself. It was six years ago. December. Anyway. Here's their first foray into the digital compact disc realm and one of those nebulous objects that falls somewhere in between the concept of an elongated play and a full length album. It's seven songs and the final independently released artifact. More buzzy quirk full of dead ends and lyrical mysteries. "I am Punch" is my pick. They were simply too pretty for ...

  I'm just going to throw this one out there. 1995 - Workman's Comp This compilation on the Big Money Inc label is a pretty nice rundown of what any random night at the Uptown Bar & Grill or in the 7th St Entry might have sounded like in the middle of the 90s. You've got some heavy hitters and some Post-Grunge types and folks who weren't on AmRep for whatever reason. I  probably wouldn't have gone out of my way at the time to see any of these guys, but I'm not hating on it now. I just may have matured into a warm sense of nostalgia in my middle age.