by Matty McPherson (@ghostplanetmatt)
“The Stax, not the Motown” was the way Mike Sniper described the 28 cuts showcased on Strum n’ Thrum: The American Jangle Underground 1983-1987 in a rollicking interview with Aquarium Drunkard. His label, Captured Tracks, has quietly cultivated several reissues, big and small, dedicated to overlooked gems. While a couple series like the Shoegaze Archives and Fantasy Island have been retired, the promise of this new one, Excavations, is intriguing (think Cherry Red genre box set with Numero Group liner notes). Strum n’ Thrum acts as the inaugural release, offering both a potential template for what the series could entail, along with a compilation that likens itself an American C86.
Cassette comps of American labels (from K to Homestead) could never rival the C86, and Strum and Thrum feels more like a history lesson on why a C86 style comp was lost in analog America--even as it went through the parallel channels. As Ric Menck (who plays on two on the comp tracks) explains “You read about this music in print fanzines, maybe heard the songs played on low-watt college radio stations, and discussed it all passionately with a secret cabal of maniacs...it was grassroots music...that’s one of the things that made it so special.” While there is great documentation of this era in Michael Azzerad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life, Azzerad purposely shied away from covering jangle. While REM and the Feelies made splashes on college radio in the 80s, the choice jangle pop cuts are often tied to UK or New Zealand bands. That often leads to an assumption that there were few American acts influenced by REM that also sought the same “DIY and get a record out” ethos of 80s punk.
Strum and Thrum collects over two dozen of those types of tracks, even though there could honestly be another two dozen of these acts out in the wild of 80s college radio. Unless you know the catalogs of Homestead and DB Records or your regional music history, then you might not know a single track. Fortunately, Sniper’s history with “subgenre-music” as Blank Dogs and having been personally paid in the discographies of bands like Absolute Grey in the 90s give him a unique ear to discern through this sprawl. In that ‘83-’87 time frame, he curates an experience based around jangle’s flexibility in a series of budgetless cuts.
Artists go a mile wide in their approaches to jangling, with tracks that deserve greater than footnote status. The Homestead-signed Salem ‘66 “Seven Steps Down” is a sugary pop machine, fleet footed in its verse chorus structure; a subtle foreshadow of Throwing Muses’ pretense for pop song writing. Bangtails’ “Patron of the Arts” (one of four songs they ever recorded) opens with a Soft Boys like psychedelia before hitting a rollicking bass n’ drum thump that ends with an emotive scowl; notably, guitarist, Andrew Prewitt, later went to perform in the Sea and Cake. Sex Clark Five’s “She Collides With Me” take jangle to a reverent, rattling shambles; they still record rock operas to this day.
Cursory listens may not immediately reveal this, which is why I highly recommend digging this blog’s cultivation of three specific subsets (C86 pop, post-punk “doom,” and shambolic rock) that provide a grounding of just how broad a jangle sound is on this compilation. The physical edition goes a step further: detailed liner notes and a sprawling booklet with an oral history. It is a wealth of reference points revealing how region, word of mouth, and record collector knowledge influenced the direction of these band’s sounds. Also, there’s a lot of unexpected joy hearing stories of REM praise and disavowal along with Mitch Easter providing his own take on a sound he is steeped in, having produced several of the songs found on this comp.
Even if the atmosphere of 80s DIY felt like one of endless possibility, the booklet reveals many bands struggled to break out. One chapter is dedicated to the woes bands faced trying to be signed to majors, chalked up to bad timing or A&R fatigue of this sound. Meanwhile, the most clued in acts, 28th Day and The Springfields, played to storied distributors (Enigma) and English labels (Sarah), respectively, just to find their audience. As for those who released, there was even a chance that they still have unsold backlog of their DIY 12”. Yet no one seems particularly scarred by the experience, more amused and able to look back in retrospect and note that there was a level of parallel evolution that happened organically, without any internet discourse.
Where Nuggets or Pebbles may have been the influence for these bands in their heyday, I mostly see Strum and Thrum as a history collection for the janglophile, perhaps even moving a few titles into your discogs wantlist (as it has with me). Still, it is an actively engrossing experience that goes beyond anything CT has accomplished before with its reissues. Actively entertaining “what if '' threads like this (as Third Man Records’ excellent Michigan Space Rock compilation has as well) could prove to be an killer angle for future endeavors in the Excavations series.