Labradford- Everlast

Retro 8

1992

In 1992, the independent/underground music stratum was pretty much, top to bottom, rockist in nature.  Even those who looked to expand, destroy, or just piss on conventions were still working with the tools and language of Rock N' Roll.  The music was overwhelmingly guitar based, abrasive, and usually relied on sheer volume to make its point.  Obviously, there was no shortage of bands who incorporated, to varying degrees, a number of the same influences (Sonic Youth, Spacemen 3, Glenn Branca, Swans, My Bloody Valentine, etc, etc), but those elements were almost always absorbed into a more or less traditional rock band setting (guitars, drums, verse/chorus song structure).  But Labradford seemed to jettison most overtly "rock" influences in favor of thick washes of analog synthesizer, delay drenched guitar, and simple bass ostinatos whose only analogous contemporary was perhaps Talk Talk.  On this and their full length follow up Prazision (which, fittingly, launched the Kranky label) the sound owes a serious debt to the pioneering German electronic musicians of the 1970's- Ash Ra Temple, Popul Vuh, Klaus Schulze, Kraftwerk (Their 2nd album in particular) and Cluster.  Other folks at the time though were starting to sniff out those old Krautrock albums and as such Labradford was banded together with a disparate group of artists- usually Stereolab, Tortoise, Cul de Sac, Ui, and Trans Am- and thus the concept of "Post-Rock" was introduced.  While the term is often met with derision now, at the time it referred to bands who were genuinely pushing music into new territory.  Being the least "Rock" of the fold spared Labradford the hordes of cheap imitations that plagued some of the other groups and their records remain unburdened by over saturation.  Both of these tracks were added to the recent reissue of Prazision.

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