Combine: The History of American Rock and Roll
1996
Caroline Records
Format I Own it on: Compact Disc
Track Listing: 1. Life, Death & Saturday Night 2. Know Regrets 3. Robert Poss (American Guitar Hero) 4. Big Disappointment 5. Filthy Underthings 6. Superfriendlier 7. Mudpie 8. Denny's In The Bun 9. Attrition 10. Wrecked 11. Don't Mess With No Glue, You Don't Get None, On Yr Hands 12. Richard In A Treestand 13. Stagnation 14. Lila 15. Angelfood 16. The Rock Narcotic 17.
Mudpie Reprise
I first heard this years ago when my friend Joe bought it, I believe, based on the album cover alone. I don't blame him! It is an excellent album cover...I mean, it has not one, but two Lemurs, and Elvis with a poodle head!
I can remember us listening to it at the time and thinking, "Goddamn, Joe really lucked out, this album is awesome!" It made the rounds and we all played the shit out of it...I probably eventually sold my copy in college to buy Ramen or something and kinda forgot all about it....
I kept my eyes peeled whenever I was at the used record store, but never saw it until today when I was at the Zia records outlet...
The Zia records has recently opened a freakin' huge store on Mill Avenue & Southern, and they turned the previous University & Maple location into a "Discount Outlet Store." I wasn't exactly sure what that meant until I went in there today and saw that's it's essentially a $0.99 CD store...The guy working there said they basically shipped away all the stuff nobody will buy at the other Zia locations and put it all into one store and are selling it all for cheap...
The store resembles a sort of Compact Disc graveyard...Hundreds of thousands of Boomerang Original Motion Picture Soundtracks....
...and unloved SWV discs...
...and a cornucopia of corporate/alternative 90's acts with one word names like Dink, Chick, Stick, Smile and Shampoo...
So yea, not many hidden gems in this place, but I did find a Peter Tosh disc I was looking for and oh my God, a copy of "The History of American Rock and Roll" by Combine, which I guess would be another example of a one word 90's band (one word band names were to the 1990's what three word band names were to the 2000's) ...
I really had a blast listening to this Combine disc again...It's in the same vein as bands like Superchunk or Seaweed...Not quite pop-punk, not quite grunge, etc...I also hear the more melodic side of Fugazi in some of these songs...And boy, are a lot of these songs catchy...I probably hadn't heard "Know Regrets" or "Big Disappointment" in 15 years, but that didn't stop me from singing along to every big-ass hook like I had just heard it yesterday....
Apparently the album is based on a book I never read (in other words, a book that isn't "TV Guide") called "Rock and the Pop Narcotic"...
Just about every song is noisy, hooky and exciting...Lots of clanging guitars, feedback and adenoidal singing, best heard on the anguished meltdown "Wrecked" and scrappy album opener "Know Regrets." They do slow things down on the acoustic ballad, "Mudpie" which sounds like Smashing Pumpkins without all the pretension...
I wonder whatever happened to these guys...This is one of the better "forgotten albums" that I've heard and I'm utterly mystified why Combine was so overlooked. If you're hungering for the good ol' days of Archers of Loaf and Superchunk then I can't recommend this enough...It's totally gonna make your year...
As I was saying earlier, there's zero Combine on youtube, so I took it upon myself to upload some...Hopefully they won't term my account...They weren't too fond of my "Beatles Years" radio show videos that I posted earlier in this year for the Beatles posts... So here's "Know Regrets" by Combine...Enjoy...
Man this is freaking awesome! I can remember buying this and listening to the shit out of it but must of traded it down the line sometime. I thought about it once in awhile and wanted to hear it and same as you, I could never find it. After I read this review this morning and listened to it I went right over to amazon and found a copy for a penny!
ReplyDeleteYea, it was something I liked a lot but hadn't heard in a loooooong time, so I was actually kind of afraid to hear it again, in case it wasn't as good as I remembered...But it held up. It sounded more like Superchunk than I remembered.
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