30 June 2020

JAWBOX


A whole lot of this world kinda skipped me. It hit when I was still in Oklahoma and merged with a lot of then "college rock," in a not entirely unpleasing way. There wasn't much of a dividing line between the post-Revolution Summer sounds and the burgeoning grunge scene though, and it was all muddied by the underground dreamboats going mainstream and I still was trying to devour all of the punk things that I could while I was also a new waver at heart and I thought CLOCK DVA was the shit (still do). I was busy and was poor, so the things that stuck with me were pretty all over the place and I missed some stuff. I've come to understand that adulthood was designed specifically for catching up on the stuff we missed...so I popped in this JAWBOX tape. Tools & Chrome-era recording and tracks - it's pretty damn good, and it makes you wonder why this or that so-and-so "made it" and those other so-and-sos just faded away. JAWBOX tried to make it, and they did manage one more major label slab than their west coast JAW contemporaries, but they more or less went from indie darlings to fizzlers in about two years. Must be weird. Anyway...I kinda like this tape. It wasn't the shit I listened to, but it holds up, and "holding up" is a legacy worth striving for. 



1 comment:

Media Hits said...

Ah I remember that awkward (not in a bad way) year of 1993, before the punk era, listening to bands like Jawbox, Jesus Lizard, Pavement, Seaweed, Tad (the trifecta of indie, grunge and noise rock) reading Flipside and Alternative Press.