By Robert Breckenridge
Arizona Daily Wildcat
January 11, 1996
By Robert Breckenridge
Arizona Daily Wildcat
January 11, 1996
Eric's Trip
Purple Blue
Sub Pop Records
Eric's Trip is a great band. With garage/trash and psychedelic influences, this combo delivers super fuzzed out and driving rock, along with cool melodies and unusual rhythms. Their use of simple song structure (just a few basic chords) in conjunction wit h whacked out tunings, distorted guitars, and lo-fi recording techniques may be typical indie rock fare, but this band stands out in my mind above and beyond its cohorts in rock.
Purple Blue is not a departure from the previous records produced by Eric's Trip. With a range of songs, from neo-ballads to punk rock, and vocals delivered by all of the band members, the album is tough to pigeonhole. Similar to mid-eighties Sonic Youth (Bad Moon Rising, EVOL, Sister) in both style and content, this album, like their previous effort Forever Again, presents Eric's Trip as a varied and inspired rock band.
Recorded by Bob Weston (engineer on Nirvana's In Utero and bass player for Shellac), the album sounds pretty much the same as the rest of the band's discography (which is almost entirely the result of home four-track recordings). However, the fuzziness, o verdriven vocals, and oddly mixed songs suit the character of the music.
While neither a classic, nor a critical masterpiece, this record nonetheless deserves kudos overall.
Noise Addict
Meet the Real You
Grand Royal Records
Noise Addict is a band of high school teens from Australia.
They sound like it.
Just what we all need, another band jumping on the pop-punk bandwagon. This is way more Green Day/Doughboys inspired than I ever would have expected. All the guitars sound really clean, almost painfully bright, and I think I only heard two drum beats on the entire album. Better than Silverchair though.
Ben Lee, the guitar player, released a solo album last year which is better than this record. On Meet the Real You, the song "The Frail Girl" is pretty good, but its a lot weirder than anything else on the record. This seems a lot different from most of t he records on Grand Royal (home of the Beastie Boys and Lucious Jackson).
Brad Wood recorded this album - no wonder everything sounds like either a Veruca Salt or Liz Phair record (though there aren't any hit singles here at all).
Oh well, they're only kids.
