Though released at the tail end of 1994 with but the teeniest shred of recognition, Mother May I's Splitsville is worth a crush or two. An opening slot with Soul Asylum earlier this year helped get the word out on the Washington, D.C.-based trio, but this fine debut on Columbia has been sorely overlooked in favor of their label's bigger names. Like Fig Dish, the guys from Mother May I are nursing a serious Cheap Trick fixation. They manage, in most cases, to work that to their advantage, filtering enough fizzy mosh-pit aggression through the formula to keep it fresh.
Songwriters Damon Hennessey and Rob LeBourdais have mustered up fresh symbolism for love's up and downs, colored with smatterings of social commentary. "Teenage Jesus" and "Painted On" address rock-star idolatry -- projected love, one could argue -- in varying forms. Kids, it seems, can worship a T-shirt logo just as passionately as they do performers on-stage. Further into Splitsville, things get more personal. On "In a Box," a perfect ballad-turned-epic, a love-sick sap obsesses over the preservation of an ex-girlfriend's sun-damaged picture, wishing he'd sealed the thing in a "box with heavy wood and heavy locks," the "perfect hiding place to preserve your perfect face." It's this attention to detail that makes Splitsville such a revelation. And while Hennessey's Robin Zander-esque whine is so one-dimensional at times that it grates on the nerves, it's hard not to empathize with a guy who places so much stock in the more trivial aspects of loss. (****)
The Inbreds are the latest addition to lo-fi's manic-depressive set, preferring, like Sebadoh and the Grifters, to spill their quivering guts among plenty of basement clatter. But unlike Sebadoh, the Inbreds convey a boy-next-door sweetness that makes their obsessiveness easier to bear. On the title track of Kombinator, an Inbred laments the state of a relationship gone sour over a jagged melody, "pretending you weren't sleeping and never getting tired of me." He continues to revel in misery on "Round 12": "He's so tired / And she works so hard / They don't talk / They grow apart." The 12 tunes on Kombinator, the Inbred's debut CD, have a sort of sing-song quality to them, a bit like adult nursery rhymes for the clinically depressed.
The Ontario-bred Mike O'Neill and Dave Ullrich do the minimalist thing with enough technical proficiency to qualify for a transfer out of that department. Granted, they've got their aimless tendencies, but the pair is often rescued by a strong sense of melody and dynamics -- lyrically and musically -- that carries most of their tunes beyond any structural setbacks. Like such incessant twiddlers as Ween and They Might Be Giants, the Inbreds are adept at manipulating a roomful of home recording equipment, generating some way-out clatter that stays surprisingly ingrained to the spirit of the material. Unlike They Might Be Giants, who are often too inventive for their own good, the Inbreds rarely tinker for the sake of quirkiness. Their writing is economical and only occasionally self-indulgent. (***)
With Sleepy Eyed, Buffalo Tom has uncovered its most emotionally exposed batch of tunes yet. The Boston-based band's last two efforts worked to cleanse the group of the self-conscious artiness that dragged down its indie releases; here, they've gone raw in more than one respect, choosing to record Sleepy Eyed almost entirely live, which amplifies the exposed nature of leader Bill Janovitz's tales of alienation and emotional distress and adds balls to bassist Chris Colbourn's contributions, which have a habit of being slight and nonsensical at best. Earlier, Buffalo Tom paid tribute to the band's more contemporary influences -- the Replacements, R.E.M., Pixies. Sleepy Eyed sounds decidedly more retro, with nods to Neil Young and the Stones.
Sleepy Eyed's hormones are all over the place. The L.A.-bashing "Tangerine" and the wistful "Summer" convey waves of disgust and longing. "Sunday Night" has more to do with hating one's self than any significant other, and Colbourn's "Kitchen Door" is a fun toss-off ("I'm the number on your kitchen door / I'm the baseball team from Baltimore") riding out a fairly basic folk-rock groove that benefits from the dynamics of the CD's live feel.
Most of Sleepy Eyed tends to fall back on some sort of love-related ill -- whether it's lost opportunity ("When You Discover") or outright rejection ("Clobbered"). You'd think that Janovitz, supposedly happily married to his college sweetheart for years, would have a hard time throwing together this sort of despair. Perhaps he's digging around in his past for ideas, but whatever the source, it works well. Interestingly, the most curious song of the batch is Coulborn's "20 Points," which in almost textbook fashion takes a brutal look at couples steered to the brink by New York City's fast-paced, morally corrupt lifestyle: "I see that bandage lying on your sheets / I see that blood, it's running down your cheek / Twenty points for me."