Tiger Trap - International Pop Underground Vol. 36

Tiger Trap were like a shooting star, they burned brightly, but only very briefly. The band split after releasing one full length album, an EP and a few scattered singles and compilation tracks during 1992 and 1993. I first became aware of the band when they released a 7" single as part of K Records' International Pop Underground series. Two of the songs featured on the single ("Supercrush" and "You And Me") later appeared on their debut album, which is available for download from the usual sources, but a third track, "Hiding" did not.

Tiger Trap encapsulated many of the great things things that were going on in indie music in the early '90s; their sound was "twee" but not so much so as to be cloying, and it was balanced by a love of noise, fast tempos and serious hooks. The band, an all female group, also had a tangential connection to the riot grrrl movement with their inspired amateurism, even if they skipped the agit-prop politics.

Tiger Trap is probably best remembered today because of the involvement of sweet-voiced singer Rose Melberg who would go on to become a member of The Softies, Go Sailor and Gaze, as well as establishing herself as a solo artist. But I wanted to single out drummer Heather Dunn for praise, because I felt that her solid timekeeping was the glue that held the band's sound together. Amateurism in music can be a great, but a drummer who cannot keep time is almost never a good thing, and it's something that I felt held back many similar bands. Heather could keep time for sure, but she could do a lot more than that. I totally lack the technical vocabulary to describe the way Heather plays, but take a listen to the drumming on "Hiding." Heather seems to have an instinctive sense for where to place the beat to both keep the music moving and to develop tension within the song.

I saw Tiger Trap perform twice during their brief existence, and both times my focus ended up on Heather's drumming. I later saw her perform with Lois at a show in Toronto. I understand she also played drums for a re-formed version of The Raincoats.

Beck - The Early Years

I have to admit that Beck did not make an overly positive first impression on me. While I recognized "Loser" as a catchy song and something of a zeitgeist moment, I wrote him off as one-hit wonder. When the know-it-all music buyer I worked with at Kim's Video made a comment along the lines of "this guy should mail 50% of his royalties to Lou Barlow," I didn't disagree with him.

In my mind, Lou Barlow was the real deal, the tortoise to Beck's hare. Ironically, it was Barlow who attained one-hit wonder status with his appropriation of Beck's slick fusion of indie-rock and hip-hop on The Folk Implosion's 1995 hit "Natural One." Beck meanwhile went on to become, well, Beck. I haven't purchased a Lou Barlow-related album in nearly 15 years, while I now count Beck among my favorite recording artists. Shows what I know.

But listening back on some of Beck's early material, I can understand why I was initially underwhelmed. Mellow Gold is a very good album, better than I thought at the time. But Beck's small label releases--the ones that were supposed to establish his indie cred--didn't do much for me at the time. Beck got much better at more conventional songcraft on later albums like Mutations and Sea Change than he was on early ones like One Foot In The Grave and Stereopathic Soulmanure. I can certainly hear hints on these albums of the talent that I would only fully recognize later, but I can also hear why they didn't sound particularly fresh or original to me at the time.

"Sleeping Bag" is one of the better tracks from the now out-of-print One Foot In The Grave, while "The World May Loose Its Motion" remains one of the rarer early Beck tracks, having only been released on the compilation Periscope: Another Yoyo Compilation. In 1994 I thought these tracks sounded like bandwagonesque lo-fi indie rock, but today I hear them as solid songs from an emerging talent. And unlike many lo-fi indie-rockers, Beck's songs actually benefited from the meticulous production eventually provided by producers like Nigel Godrich.