Labels: Boss Tuneage
Review by: MH
This is a band I’ve seen a few times – however, it was a loooong time ago. Sometime in the early nineties when I was first really getting into music and going to see bands. I can’t say for sure who I saw them play with but it would have been someone like Senseless Things, Mega City Four or Midway Still – perhaps all three. They share a similar sound to all three of those bands too – kind of an honest indie/punk rock sound with catchy enough tunes. Although I liked them live I didn’t really delve too far into their releases at the time but in those days paper rounds didn’t cover enough to buy music by every single band you liked and there was no online streaming or anything to check them out. We used to buy different records and then tape them for friends. I remember conversations like “I’ll buy that Bivouac LP and you get the new 3 And A Half Minutes record – then we can record them and swap tapes”. Genius. Somehow Elmerhassel slipped through the cracks and I never had a tape with their music on it and so I’m only familiar with a few of their songs on here.
On to this discography then – this is the first of two parts and so gives me a chance to rectify my not having checked them out properly before. This initial one features a healthy 23 songs and comes mainly from their “Honour Your Partners” EP , a 7inch and their “Billyous” full length. Elmerhassel were a decent band and there are enough good songs on here to make looking them up well worthwhile. A good starting point is “Dehydration” which is a definite highlight. That UK sound was something I was hugely into in those days and it’s bands like this that helped form my musical taste. Bands like this were never meant to write long songs over six minutes long but “Water Coloured” is 6 minutes and 26 minutes long and something of a corker. The same goes for “Shoulders” which is almost as long. I kind of wish I’d given Elmerhassel more of a go initially in about 1993 as I’d have been flogging some of these songs to death on various paper rounds and on the car stereo – Boss Tuneage is doing a great job of digging up some of the better and, perhaps, unheralded bands of that era.