Sentridoh
Lou B’s Wasted Pieces ‘87-‘93
Shrimper / Revolver
Original Dinosaur Jr. member, Sebadoh front man and Folk Implosion explorer Lou Barlow has spent his share of time holed up in front of a four-track, recording snippets of sounds and the occasional complete song of lo-fi whimsy and barely-coherent slacker folk. During the early ’90s, tiny indie label Shrimper released three cassettes of his bedroom sounds, of which Lou B’s Wasted Pieces was one. Out of print for years now, it’s finally being released on CD for the very first time, much to the delight of the Barlow completists who up until now have had to track down super expensive copies in the seedier parts of town – but of only minor consequence to most other people.
Barlow is certainly one of the most influential and important people in the indie rock community of the late ’80s and early ’90s. Musically, however, Sentridoh hasn’t always been his most interesting project. Sure, there are some really good things on here – a couple of great songs and a few mildly interesting sound collages. But at 31 songs (extended from the original version), this is far too spurious and casual to maintain interest. It really is just a lot of sketches thrown together, a bunch of ideas that have been deemed unusable for other projects put down on tape only to get rid of them.
To the extent that this is interesting, it is so because it appeared in the early ’90s, and that Barlow is behind it. It’s a good thing to put it out on CD, so that some poor Barlow fan doesn’t have to pay fifty bucks for an original cassette. But that’s about it. It’s conceptually fun, and perhaps even (sub-)culturally important. But from a purely musical point of view, it seems rather pointless to revisit this today.
Revolver Distribution: http://www.midheaven.com/
