American indie rock band Sebadoh, which plays in Taiwan for the first time this Sunday at The Wall (這牆), dates back to the days when aspiring musicians recorded demos on a four-track cassette recorder instead of a computer hard drive.
Sebadoh’s “lo-fi” sound earned the group a loyal following, thanks to its cassette albums of folk and post-punk laced with off-the-cuff noise and sampled sounds. The “band” began as a one-man project in western Massachusetts in the late 1980s by vocalist and guitarist Lou Barlow, also a founding member and bassist of alt-rock legend Dinosaur Jr.
At first, Sebadoh was Barlow’s personal creative outlet — at the time, he felt overshadowed by the songwriting prowess of his Dinosaur Jr bandmate J Mascis. Then it became an outlet of frustration after he feuded with Mascis and got kicked out of Dinosaur Jr. That experience partly inspired The Freed Man (1989), a beloved album among devout Sebadoh fans.
Photo courtesy of Earwax Productions
Beneath the tape hiss, there was a clear sense of songcraft in Sebadoh’s music that helped the band get signed with Sub Pop, the Seattle indie rock label best known for nurturing grunge groups Nirvana and Soundgarden and currently popular bands like the indie folk ensemble Fleet Foxes.
While scores of indie musicians and fans today have embraced lo-fi as an aesthetic and even a genre, Barlow says it’s just a “technical term referring to the way a song was recorded.”
“I think we are mid-fi,” he wrote in a brief e-mail interview with the Taipei Times.
“We recorded our songs well but not to industry standards.”
Through Sub Pop, Sebadoh reached its closest to mainstream success with Bakesale (1994) and Harmacy (1996), which saw Barlow’s melodic, confessional songwriting come to the fore. The band’s sound became more focused, favoring anthemic indie rock songs full of cynical musings on love and heartbreak.
Barlow has been keeping busy in recent years. He is now back touring and recording with Dinosaur Jr. And Sebadoh is picking up steam again: Sub Pop re-released Bakesale earlier this summer, and the band has just finished a tour of Europe and Australia, with a run of shows scheduled in Japan after its Taipei concert.
Concertgoers will hear songs from Bakesale and Harmacy on Sunday when Barlow takes to the stage with his bandmates, bassist Jason Loewenstein and drummer Bob D’Amico. Barlow says the band’s current repertoire of 30 songs also includes a few from outside of those albums.
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