Anasarca
Discography 1994-1997
Second Nature
Back in my HeartattaCk-reading heyday of the mid-‘90s, I vaguely remember coming across the name of a little Washington, DC band-that-could called Anasarca. By the way, these were the ebullient pre-Promise Ring/Get Up Kids/Braid days of emo, when the worse you could “sing,” the better, and the more you played with your back to the audience, the cooler. Well, along comes the tellingly titled Discography 1994-1997 to well up a tear of nostalgia in this writer’s eye, wholly compelling me to don a V-neck sweater and black postal-worker shoes with white socks • yep, it’s that good. Then again, at seven songs in little more than a half hour, Anasarca’s Discography 1994-1997I is hardly an extensive “discography” per se, the quintet only releasing two seven-inches and a demo and then calling it a night. Anyway, Anasarca had that loosely clattering yet supremely tense Dischordant sound down cold, kinda falling somewhere’s between Rites Of Spring’s last seven-inch and Hoover’s sole album, but stripped of the former’s comparatively sunny melodicism and the latter’s hypnotic groove-unto-dirge. So, if you’re guessing prime Soulside minus Bobby Sullivan’s bravado, award yourself some “old school” points, but the underlying factor at work here is the former’s frailty crossing muddy paths with the latter’s frigidity, the whole seven-song disc actually bettering itself due to its across-the-board garaged “production” values, but such were the bygone days of live/one-take analog recording, right? Scarcely original, yeah, but a none-more-accurate encapsulation of a time I remember fondly, all misty-eyed and in a fetal position. Now, when is somebody going to release a Julia discography?
Second Nature, PO Box 11543, Kansas City, MO 64138; http://www.secondnaturerecordings.com
