It was Barlow's songwriting, along with that of partners Eric Gaffney and Jason Lowenstein, which secured the band's legacy. A critic once offhandedly referred to it as "is-it-punk/is-it-pop." Musically, Sebadoh defined the evolution of '80s hard-core punk into the quirky, amorphous and unbelievably fertile genre called "indie rock." This phenomenon is clearly evident in Sebadoh's early material, which juxtaposes Gaffney's blasting noise with Barlow's vulnerable folk-rock, as if literally documenting the growing pains of both the art and the men themselves. Gaffney left the band in 1993, and this tour brings him back for the first time since. Barlow and Lowenstein turned to straight rock for Bakesale, often considered the band's best, or at least most consistent, album. Even this quite accessible and relatively well-recorded material, however, reveals a compromise between the juvenile simplicity of punk and the cheap sophistication of pop, yielding an aching, but oddly comforting, look at the ambivalence of post-adolescence in the age of irony.