I'll tell ya, the 90s were mystifying times. To elaborate, two things had always baffled me about this decade-- its sheer deluge of creativity and how much of it was left unrecognized. In 90s alternative and indie rock especially, the list is almost endless, bringing to mind bands like Chavez, Shudder To Think, Grifters, Shiner, Kerosene 454, and the oddest of the bunch, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282. Despite their being a bit of an anomaly, something relative to TFUL282's sound could be mapped out at the focus of Sun City Girls and Trumans Water.
The San Francisco quintet has a pretty sizable discography rife with diverting rock eccentricity that swayed from 'noise-' to 'math-' labels. The "weird" epithet is no stretch and it's worked both in and out of favor for the band. It's inseparably pinned idiosyncrasy to their music and littered albums like Mother of All Saints with inconsistency. In that respect, 1996's I Hope It Lands looms large as the most coherent summation of TFUL282.
"Roses is plants / Flowers is too / My cow, he went to the moon / My pigs is headed there pretty soon."
I Hope It Lands bursts open at the start of "A Lamb's Lullaby" in a flurry of manic noodling and rolling snares. It soon straightens into a coherent, structured alignment of ghostly falsettos and tireless disco beats, equating to one of TFUL282's most potent songs to date. Others falling into this category are tunes like "Lizard's Dream" and "Elgin Miller", which, bearing equivalent songwriting brilliance to their predecessor, are just about indescribable due to their eclecticism. This is the unambiguous prowess attained by the best of the band's peers including the aforementioned Sun City Girls as well as Polvo.
The album also accounts for a great deal of variety, namely attributed to TFUL282's rotating cast of vocalists. Mark Davies, Brian Hageman, and Hugh Swarts occupy singing duties on a majority, but bassist Anne Eickelberg fronts a pair of very resonant pieces. Though her delivery on "Empty Cup" pales in comparison to the enthusiasm provided by the frontmen, her transistor-fed whine leaves its mark on "Cuckoo at the World", a thunderous mutant surf-punk assault. Eickelberg shrilly exclaims "horrible mistake!" on "Triple X", foretelling the song's gradual descent into amorphous guitar noise. We all have our disparate perceptions and definitions of the 90s, and to this day I Hope It Lands' forward-thinking application of accord and discord looms large over that thought.
[Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 Website]
[Buy I Hope It Lands from the Communion Label]
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