I don’t remember when or how I discovered Suburban Lawns. I think ‘Janitor,’ the fast-paced quirk-rock explosion about a misheard comment at a party, was the first song I heard. Or, at least it’s the one that had an immediate impact on me. The short, chaotic album (clocking in just under a half an hour) it lies on quickly became one of my favorite records. Sue Tissue’s vocals are always front and center, with ‘Green Eyes’ and ‘Unable’ being close to ‘Janitor' as the stand-out tracks on the disc. Even the songs she doesn’t sing on, like ‘Pioneers’, and ‘Computer Date’, are equally infectious and chock full of both melody and attitude. Devo and Talking Heads both come to mind. New Wave has always kind of been a bullshit genre, in so far as lumping bands that probably don’t belong together into one group. I’d argue that if it was a genre coined to describe what the Talking Heads were doing, Suburban Lawns definitely fit that bill.
The follow-up EP, Baby, is as strong, if not stronger than the first record, and again the Sue Tissue fronted songs ‘Flavor Crystals’ and ‘Baby’ seem to be the strongest tracks on the disc. Though only five songs to the first record’s fourteen, the run time of the EP is only ten minutes shorter. It almost feels like they were working out how to write songs with a little more substance that didn’t need the quick in-and-out handling of the songs off their first record. As good as both these albums are, the moment of joy of discovering this new music is quickly subverted by the realization that these two short records were it for the band. Really? That’s all the music they made?
Not too long ago, I came across the mid-1990s Sheffield brit-pop band, Longpigs, and their first album, The Sun is Often Out. In a similar fashion, my joy over the new-to-me music discovery was tempered again when I learned that other than one other (seemingly out-of-print) album, this was it for the band’s output. It’s an absolute gem of an album. How can there not be more? If these guys couldn’t make it with music this good, how the fuck is anyone expected to make it? Crispin Hunt's vocals on 'On and On' take a relatively pedestrian lyric (hey, it's the 2020s, after all: unrequited love and heroin are about as uncool as it gets) and make it burn through your soul. ‘Lost Myself’, ‘She Said’, ‘Dozen Wicked Words’…this album is just full of what the kids these days call “bangers”.
Like Suburban Lawns, Longpigs would go on to produce one more album, 1998’s Mobile Home. It’s strong, though I would argue not quite as strong as the first album. Maybe it’s a bit more derivative of the entire brit-pop genre that existed around the time of its release. While the first album felt like it was on the cusp of something new with the genre, the second album seemed like it was less trailblazing and more going through the motions. Less leading the way, more following the times. Look, I know that Crispin Hunt went on to work with such notable acts as Florence and the Machine and Lana del Rey. I know that Richard Hawley became…well, Richard Hawley. But that’s not what I want. I want more Longpigs.
These don’t seem to be bands that gleefully self-destructed of their own accord. There are no storied legends of self-medication to excess, self-abuse, and self destruction, like The Replacements. There’s no evidence of years of legal hell fighting to get their music out to the masses, fighting the very record companies (or the ashes thereof) that were supposed to make them famous. This isn’t like The Stone Roses or The Toadies. You can’t really even argue that they’re like Television, another band that didn’t have nearly the mainstream presence that their music deserves. At least in that case Tom Verlaine can sleep well at night knowing that Television lives on as an oft-cited influence of countless other bands through the years.
Suburban Lawns...Longpigs...they just sort of worked at it for a while, didn’t get anywhere, and then stopped. And in the case of Suburban Lawns, they seem to have just faded cheerfully into obscurity afterwards. What bothers me about all of this is this: these are just a couple of examples of great bands that I’ve stumbled across. How many other fantastic fucking bands are there out there that actually had a chance and just…faded away? I’m not talking about great local bands that never even made it this far; that’s a whole other thing to be depressed about. I’m talking about bands who got the fifteen minutes they surely deserved, but for reasons that clearly seem to have nothing to do with their music, just vanished.