Lenola - Colonial 509

(Tappersize, 1994)

Aw heck. This isn’t my finest night. Because of a mishap involving an unstopped sink and my beloved Mach 3, I had to shave using a horrible plastic razor that I bought a few years ago on vacation as part of a $1.69 twelve-pack from a San Francisco bodega. Making matters worse, said beard-scrape was done in the dark after my bathroom light burnt out and I realized I didn’t have any replacement bulbs (the penlight I held in my left hand was quite a help, though). Now finished, the 99-cent “Men’s Choice” aftershave has hardly soothed my angered skin, and I sit here with a scowl gracing my burning skull.

All of that makes my vivid memories of transporting this very single across the country – broke – on a sweltering Greyhound bus (San Diego to Worcester!) rankle considerably less, even while its stomach-churn guitars make me wish I was safely in bed with the booze-bottle closed. Decent work here, though, Lenola guys. This debut release is bendy-note nausea-gaze pedal-box weirdness that stakes out what I suppose is a rough middle ground between Pavement and the Swirlies, particularly on the A, with B-side “Greedo” tending towards the latter in its extended instrumental sections. Fairly gifted with melody, better stuff was to come once the band tightened up, “got normal,” and veered into Rev/Hopewell/Home country around the turn of the century (The Electric Tickle, etc.), but this one is certainly worth sniffing out on the cheap. An underrated group.