Spangled Records
Edition of 1000
1992
Another of the first batch of records I bought after I got ahold of my first record player. I'd have to say that this one is probably the pick of the litter. I believe I picked this up on account of a staff description describing it as "slintish". At this point I was still years away from fully recovering from my first exposure to Spiderland and was on a desperate, and ultimately futile, search for anything that might measure up. By decades end the Slint tag got thrown around pretty easily, and usually meant basement bush leaguers doing soft/loud, talk/yell in 5/4 that at its best was going to play out like Mogwai-lite. But when I picked this up in '93, there was still a chance you might find something that was at least cut from a similar cloth. The Slint comparison is fair enough, but this stuff really probably falls a bit closer to the Rapeman or Bastro end of things. The hallmarks of the genre are all here- odd-metered, bass heavy riffs, angular guitar noise, precision drumming, and obtuse lyrics in that half spoken delivery that are all but buried in the mix. At the time, every third band in the world was trying to pull this sort of thing off, but still nothing quite sounds like those Table records. Despite making truly unique records these guys were fairly unknown. Some of Table's obscurity no doubt though lies in the fact that, well, they never really did much. They apparently existed for around a year, played, maybe, a dozen shows around Chicago, and did two recording sessions before the bassist split town (apparently under shifty circumstances) and the band fell apart. This record comes from the first sessions done with Albini in January of '92. A second 7" appeared in '93 on Homestead by which point I think they might have already been kaput. After that, these guys pretty much disappeared and that was that. Though I recently found out that the bassist, Warren Fischer, popped up a few years back as one half of the electro-pop duo Fischerspooner. hmmm... At some point in the mid-90's, there was a posthumously released CD collection released on Humble that contained both records as well the remaining tracks from the two sessions done with Steve Albini and Brad Wood. If you can find a copy, the CD is amazing and well worth taking the effort to track down. I haven't seen it in years, but i still come across the records from time to time. Cheap usually too. In the meantime, dig on this gem here:
