Sebadoh: Bubble & Scrape : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Ever since their beginnings in 1986, Sebadoh have been terrifically inspirational for some of the best of the current generation of indie-rock bands. Originally founded by Lou Barlow, formerly of Dinosaur Jr, and Eric Gaffney as an excuse to stitch together exquisite songs out of acoustic guitars, found sounds and tape hiss, Sebadoh soon added Jason Loewenstein for a more recognizable "rock" orientation. But while their sound may be obviously rock – and Bubble and Scrape, their latest, is nothin' but – it's still not obvious rock.

Bubble and Scrape is dedicated to the argument that Nilsson, the Stooges, Syd Barrett and Sonic Youth can live together in the same musical universe without irony, pity or apology. Yet the individual songs can't be easily pigeonholed; Sebadoh don't believe in merely recycling their sources. Instead, they reinvent them.

Gaffney writes and sings most of the scratchy psychedelic tunes. While he tries to come off as an archetypal rock & roll bad man, he's altogether too trippy and poetry sotted to make the gesture convincing: As he tells his story on "Telecosmic Alchemy," he's "the kindest drifter you'll ever meet." Barlow's songs are more informed by folk and pop, even when, as on "2 Years 2 Days," they're filtered through righteous distortion. On "Homemade," he demonstrates that it's still possible to write songs about love (longed for, failed and otherwise) that aren't deadened by cliché. He asks you, the listener, to get down – yes, down – with him: "Here I am, on my knees/With nothing to blame but my curiosity/It got the best of me." And Loewenstein splits the musical difference with four fine songs that would steal the album if it weren't so good to begin with. Which is testimony that, on Bubble and Scrape, Sebadoh manage to sound more like a genuine collective than ever before.