There came a point in the early Nineties where too damn much was getting called shoegaze. And while bands like Lilys and Velocity Girl certainly had taken inspiration from that style (even before the style had a name), the records the groups were putting out were drifting further away from the genre. And while lazy critics heard feedback, or a wash of guitar-noise and went, "Yep, shoegaze!", lots more of us stood back, nodded our heads, and marveled at how American indie was absorbing a bunch of raucous British stuff only to reshape it into something largely new
Nowhere was the playing out of that process more apparent than on 1994's A Brief History of Amazing Letdowns, a mini-album originally on SpinART. Reissued now via Frontier Records, the release still charms. Kurt Heasley here, shedding his shoegaze inclinations a tiny bit, edges towards a more spacious kind of songwriting. And while something like "Dandy" surges, the tune underneath the noise is rather lovely. That was Heasley's gift, really, that knack for finding something pretty, and something conventional and soothing, amid the chaos. "Jenny, Andrew and Me" is even better, a throwback to Sixties chamber pop with hooks that are loud. The melody itself is so easy to love that, really, the other players on this one -- Harold Evans (Poole) and Paul Naomi -- could have used any instrumentation around it and it would have still been just as infectious. Certainly "Ginger" sounds like the work of a Slumberland Records band, even if Lilys had moved to another label by this point. But what I'm really trying to say here is that for every moment that feels familiar, there's another that sounds like some new flavor. That juxtaposition makes A Brief History of Amazing Letdowns a masterpiece, and the work by Adam Lasus (originally credited as Red) behind the desk doesn't hurt the sound either.
This edition of A Brief History of Amazing Letdowns is missing the CD-bonus track "Evel Knievel" but it does have the trippy "G. Cobalt Franklin", a previously-unreleased gem, and four songs from a split with Aspera Ad Astra on Tiger Style. That release was relatively rare at one point, so the addition of the cuts here makes a sort of sense, even if these numbers were recorded a couple of years before A Brief History of Amazing Letdowns. As it stands in 2021, they serve to remind a listener just how far Kurt Heasley had progressed in a few years, from 1992's In the Presence of Nothing, itself a masterpiece, to A Brief History of Amazing Letdowns. If Heasley, like his peers in Velocity Girl and other acts of the era, was wise enough to not get pigeonholed by the sound that had inspired him in the first place, he was still young enough to want to turn things up, and let the feedback carry a listener over the simple hooks of something like "Coby", for example. These tunes are good, make no mistake, but sitting next to those of A Brief History of Amazing Letdowns and they can only sound like bonus tracks. That's how good the 1994 mini-album is, and how strong it remains.
A Brief History of Amazing Letdowns is out on Friday via Frontier Records.
[Photo: Era promo picture, courtesy ForceFieldPR]