Sebadoh - Bubble And Scrape (1993)

I know nothing about Sebadoh, except what I accidentally read just now pulling up their album on Rdio.com. The review on top reads, "This mainstay of '90s indie rock didn't manage a consistently listenable record until their fourth try in 1993, two years after Nevermind, so the youth were going gaga over grunge." There's a few things in here that bother me, mainly that despite being a mainstay during my time as a youth I've never head of them. More than that is the idea that Sebadoh is called an "indie rock" band, which I haven't ranted about how much I hate that term in quite some time. Perhaps worst of all is how a band can make it 4 albums before making one people are willing to call "consistently listenable." Is that meant to be a compliment of some kind? Can you imagine eating at a restaurant that made food best described as "consistently edible?"

Even in the early 90s "indie rock" was synonymous with "whiny rock." The opening track "Soul and Fire" the guitars sound really sad, and the tempo is so leaden it feels like the song is getting slower throughout it's short run time. Not exactly how a band should kick things off. I understand the comparison to Nirvana's Nevermind even though I've never heard that album in its entirety (yet). Sebadoh uses short chunky riffs and heavy distortion to support angsty vocals, pretty much just like every other grunge band.

"Fantastic Disaster" is a pretty apt title. It sounds like the band is just kinda playing notes without any thought to progression or making the various instruments blend together. It's not really grunge. I would say it's a lot closer to what bands like Bare Naked Ladies would do later in the 90s, a kind of joke rock, but it's much harder and practically indecipherable. The album largely follows along this trend for a while. Instead of the lyrics sounding angsty the band tries to sound angry while not caring that they also sound like shit. Most of the middle of the album follows a pattern of making noise that almost sounds like music. Thankfully the songs are pretty short and mostly uptempo. The one glaring exception is "Homemade," which is a slow 5-minute mess that might have had a decent riff/melody idea if they had played it with a bit of energy.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention "No Way Out". At first I just thought the song was mercifully fading out once the band realized it sounded exactly like every other song they had already put on the album. Instead after the long fade they used samples of a bunch of distorted noise. I'm not even sure what I heard. I think there was a piece of a newscast, some piano tootling, and shrieking violins. It went on for about a minute, and seriously had me thinking about giving Bubble and Scrape 1 star based on that injustice alone. But the rest of the album was just so mediocre that it would take way more than one shitty mistake to tip the scale in favor of 1 star. In any case, the penultimate song "Think (Let Tomorrow Bee)" was a nice acoustic guitar diversion. If Sebadoh had done a bit more of that earlier I might have leaned towards 3 stars. Though the parentheses are pretty freakin' obnoxious.

While the review I quoted in the first paragraph dismissed (or praised, hard to tell) Sebadoh as "indie rock" I find it more accurate to call Sebadoh a fusion of grunge and punk with a touch of noise rock. Since their technique is so sloppy, it's hard to know if they have much talent. Sebadoh certainly doesn't stick out from the pack of early 90s rock much if at all. Most important is I didn't hate Bubble and Scrape. It's not the most incompetent album I've heard on this list, so that's at least worth 2 stars.