Pitchfork

As promised, we cap our five-feature celebration of Sub Pop's first 20 years with a look at some records and artifacts from the label's history that, while they didn't make the cut in last week's Sub Pop 20, still mean something to at least one of our staffers.

Billy Childish: I Am the Billy Childish [1991]
When Sub Pop released the Headcoats' 1990 LP Heavens to Murgatroyd..., those unfamiliar with British bard Billy Childish could be excused for wondering if his Link Wray shtick was more goofball novelty than substantial art. Fortunately, the label disproved that possible misconception a year later via the mammoth I Am The Billy Childish, a 2xCD compilation featuring 50 songs from 50 different Childish-involved albums. Classics from his 1970s band Pop Rivets, 80s groups Milkshakes and Mighty Caesars, 90s juggernaut Headcoats, and much more were included, revealing an artist whose intense devotion to craft had produced a diverse catalog of roots, rockabilly, garage, and primitive poetry. Keeping up with his gargantuan discography was an almost impossible task before (and since), but as long as you have a copy of I Am the... handy, you're a Billy Childish expert. --Marc Masters

Codeine: The White Birch [1994]
While more heads were banged to Frigid Stars, more candles were lit in lonely rooms to The White Birch, and it is the record from the Sub Pop catalog that stands apart from the garden-variety grunge era reflex of snarky self-denigration as a truly sobering and scary monument to depressive catatonia in rock form. After counting out the syllables Codeine's vocalist finds while singing the phrase "and it takes a long time but then I understand," you realize that the slow tempo is not just an arresting affectation but a means of testing the limits of minimalism, figuring out on the fly just how less becomes more. In Codeine's case, less language and less clutter allows the band to focus the maximum emotional impact in a few gestures. Disregard the weepy slowcore baggage that turned this breakthrough into a style and listen to a band asking itself tough questions: "How do you learn to try?/ Why can't I?". Don't hold it against them that they broke up after making this recording. Having stared into the void this steadily is achievement enough. --Drew Daniel

Constantines: Shine a Light [2003]
When Shine a Light was released, the critical equation for Constantines' sound was "Fugazi + Bruce Springsteen." In other words, Constantines write anthems-- damn good ones. Live, Constantines are cathartic, energetic-- sweat and tears; on record, they're much more tense, bottling their energy and only occasionally uncorking it-- even then releasing it in fleeting doses such as the sing-along in "Nighttime/Anytime (It's Alright)".

Shine a Light isn't perfect (for one, it's front-loaded), but the imperfection is kind of the point. The lyrics to the title track mention a diamond in the rough, and pervading the album is a sense that the rough is as worthy of attention as the diamond. By turning the struggles, anxieties, and uncertainties of real life into anthems, Constantines made Shine a Light an album-length ode to what Rainer Maria Rilke called living the questions. As they sing on "Nighttime", "it's hard not to surrender," but they implore us to keep trying. --Dave Maher

Dwarves: Blood, Guts & Pussy [1990]
The third Dwarves album is a 13-minute veneration of the Misfits' hardcore period ("Let's Fuck" is basically "Green Hell" played sideways) that strips away the devilocks and monster-movie metaphors, leaving behind nothing but the sound of a speedfreak id. If they have any impulses other than getting off and getting high, they aren't about to let on; they give off the sense that the reason they play so fast is that the sooner the song's over, the sooner they'll get to hump something. And it's hilarious-- not just because it tries so hard to fake giving offense without an actual scintilla of menace ("Old enough to pee, and she's old enough for me"?), but because of the big goofy pop heart pumping all over it. They've spent the last 18 years trying to recapture its Platonic ideal of phallic stupidity. --Douglas Wolk

Eric's Trip: Love Tara [1993]
Having grown up in the Detroit area, I always believed New Brunswick natives Eric's Trip to be much more popular than they actually were. In the early 1990s, the Detroit area's big alt-rock station was Canadian-owned, and therefore forced to play a certain percentage of music from that country; along with Sloan, Jale, Thrush Hermit, and Superfriendz, Eric's Trip thankfully made up a decent chunk of those requisite spins. Like many of their fellow Eastern Canadian artists, Eric's Trip played melodic, catchy pop music at a time when-- outside of other long-time power-pop hotspots like Chicago and Boston-- this was largely uncool. Fuzzying their music up with bits of Sebadoh-like lo-fi and distortion and noise borrowed from the group that inspired their name, Sonic Youth, Eric's Trip's ramshackle guitar pop didn't make the deep inroads into the U.S. it deserved, but as Sub Pop's first Canadian signing the group kick-started the label's love affair with the north, a fruitful relationship that went on to spawn records from Zumpano, Constantines, and Wolf Parade. --Scott Plagenhoef

The Go: Whatcha Doin' [1999]
One of my favorite music-dork jokes I like to throw around is that I was into Jack White before all my friends-- the catch being that the band I was actually into was the Go. [Ha, some of us Michigan natives were into Goober & the Peas-- Ed.] Whatcha Doin' came out in autumn 1999, months after White parted ways with the group and the release of the first White Stripes record, but the Go-- who signed to Sub Pop after a memorable opening gig for ? and the Mysterians in Detroit-- were in heavy rotation on college radio, and the moment I picked up the record and heard that stammering angry hornet guitar on "Keep on Trash" I was hooked. But while White's contributions were limited largely to that track and the caveman stomp of closer "Time for Moon", the rest of Whatcha Doin' was just as fierce if not more so. So long as you don't mind some meat-and-potatoes rock-dude lyrics, this record holds up remarkably well as a garage-punk classic: bassist Dave Buick and the underrated drummer Marc Fellis put their shoulders into some tight, legit danceable rhythms, the raw harmonies of Bobby Harlow and John Krautner push things towards some idea of superpower pop, and Krautner's guitar-- even muffled under some suitably swampy production-- sounds absolutely vicious. --Nate Patrin

Grifters: "Queen of the Table Waters" [1994]
By now, everyone knows just how much was lost on the relative flop Ain't My Lookout, Grifters' Sub Pop debut. Calling that record "overcooked" would be charitable, and while their final record on SP (Full Blown Possession) was almost a return to form, this stand-alone 7" single that came before either of those full-lengths was the band's last gasp of greatness. An incongruous audio montage lasts half a minute, before the singer croaks out a plea to "spit out the jams again," a mock salute to party-rockers like MC5, before a careening tuned-down riff kicks in that vaults them among those bands' company.

Some bands-- well, most bands-- just do better when they don't think anyone's looking, which might explain the flop of Lookout, but that attitude of making music for escape rather than responsibility gets summed up pretty succinctly by the band right here: "I don't want to make a record! I wanna... I wanna go fishin'." A vintage Grifters full-band collapse isn't far behind. Despite the best efforts of the SP Singles Club, it was exceedingly rare for a late-90s band to put out a 7" single, never to be compiled; Grifters managed to do it with one of their most essential tracks. --Jason Crock

The Jesus and Mary Chain: Munki [1998]
In the 1980s, both Sub Pop and the Jesus and Mary Chain played pioneering roles in establishing the noise/pop template that so much indie-rock was based on, but by 1998, both were considered to be spent resources: Sub Pop was still in the throes of a post-grunge hangover that saw its roster turn ever more disparate (or was it desperate?) while the Mary Chain seemed destined to settle into an adult-contemporary alt-rock comfort zone, as anticipated by their countrified 1994 semi-hit "Sometimes Always". So when the surly Scots signed to the Seattle label, it seemed to be a what-the-hell move for both parties, and this insolent attitude may help explain why Munki is the Mary Chain's longest, toughest, and hands-down funniest record: the impetuous sound of cranky old(er) men who love rock'n'roll but profess contempt for just about everything else-- television, school, weathermen, the president, OJ's dead wife, McDonald's ("shit"), even children ("fools")-- before coming to the conclusion that they don't really like rock'n'roll all that much either. Munki did nothing to reverse the band's nor their label's fortunes-- the notoriously combative brothers Reid would fall out for good by the end of 1998-- but, like a messy one-night stand, the immediate gratification outweighs the regret. --Stuart Berman

L7: Smell the Magic [1991]
The t-shirt promoting Smell the Magic featured the image of a leather-clad dominatrix harnessing a guy's face to her crotch. That pretty much summed up L7's M.O.: A bunch of sweaty L.A. metal chicks who were perpetually pissed off and horny, but always in a good enough mood to make dirty jokes. Their finely tuned feminine rage burned fast and frightening on their second album, a collection of bubblegum grunge tunes about hating traditional gender roles ("Broomstick"), hating life ("Deathwish"), hating abusive men ("Packin' a Rod"), and hating, well, everything ("Shove").

Although L7 only released one album on Sub Pop, their spirit lives on at the label through current signings CSS, an equally badass gang of smelly girls (and one guy). In early 2007, CSS covered L7's "Pretend We're Dead"; L7's Donita Sparks returned the favor by creating a mashup of "Pretend We're Dead" and CSS' "Alala". --Amy Phillips

"Loser" t-shirt
The notion of "underground popular music" suggested by the original name-- Subterranean Pop-- Bruce Pavitt gave his Olympia, Wash., fanzine has suited Sub Pop pretty well. Consider too a more literal reading: "under pop" or even "worse than pop."  Sub Pop was never a scene-- even in the mid-90s their roster was geographically and stylistically schizophrenic-- but the label's aesthetics nonetheless served as a guiding principle for so many alterna-grunge-y-whatsits. As such, Sub Pop's iconic "Loser" t-shirt was doubly useful: projected inward, the label pre-empted insults likely hurled at anyone in Sub Pop garb; projected outward, it is as pissy and combative as the label's best releases. Now remember the story of Matt Cameron being refused purchase of a Kill Rock Stars T at Lollapalooza on account of him being a rock star, how provincial and confusing that seemed. Whichever way those block letters point, the Loser T is for everyone. (That bit about the return of the Loser T to Sub Pop's shop being the real impetus behind their resurgence in the last eight years? Not so much). --Andrew Gaerig

Low: Drums and Guns [2007]
Low's been down in the dumps since the beginning, but it was a sadness they at least had a mastery over. Which is why 2005's The Great Destroyer felt like a shocking career suicide from several angles-- Dave Fridmann's snarling, aggressive production almost felt intentionally at odds with what fans had come to love about the band, and Alan Sparhawk ended the record with two songs about quitting music, burning his guitar, and walking into the sea.

But what didn't kill Low only made them give less of a fuck than ever. Drums And Guns is arguably even more cynical and negating than its predecessor, but it's also imbued with a sobriety and focus that give its tone an almost Patrick Bateman-level sense of deadpan misanthropy: see the unencumbered bitterness in the album's mantras-- "all you pretty people are all gonna die," "there has got to be an end to that," "you might need a murderer." And yet, once you get over the initial scent of piss and vinegar (as well as the snarky strange fits of "Hatchet" and "Your Poison"), underneath the placid beauty of "Belarus" and the aching desparation of "Murderer" is a sense that hope still cruelly has a hold on Low. Once a band that was arguably easy to peg as slowpoke miserablists, Low enters their third decade as one of indie's most surprisingly unpredictable, rewarding, and complex bands. --Ian Cohen

Modest Mouse: "Never-Ending Math Equation" b/w "Workin' on Leavin' the Livin'" [1999]
I heard this 7" on the heels of my introduction to Modest Mouse via The Lonesome Crowded West, and was immediately drawn into Isaac Brock's particular brand of existentialism, which seemed even more elemental and refined on vinyl. He half-raps on the A-side about how everything can be reduced to numbers but humanity remains an unsolvable formula, and the guitars start as a simple idea and build into a torrential brainstorm. "Workin' on Leavin' the Livin'" is even weirder, an Escher drawing that turns a line from Eraserhead into either a life-affirming mantra or a soundtrack to ascension. Both tracks would appear on catchall Building Nothing Out of Something (still one of the band's best full-lengths), but they sound better flipsided, where they form a musical Möbius Strip-- compulsively repeatable into infinity. --Stephen M. Deusner

Nirvana: "Sliver" b/w "Dive" [1990]
Bleach was cool, but if Nirvana had stopped there, I probably wouldn't have given them a second thought. And Nevermind, well, it's one of those albums I can play in my head any time I want, so I never play it in rooms or cars or through headphones. But some of the tracks that streamed out between those two records-- a few of which found Nirvana practicing to be a pop band, kind of in secret, when not so many people were looking-- are as alluring now as they ever were. On the A-side of this 1990 single, released at the tail end of Nirvana's short Sub Pop tenure, we hear them first realizing what they could do with the quiet/loud dynamic on loan from the Pixies. We also get the kind of simple and memorable melody Kurt Cobain had a genius for married to concrete and evocative lyrics about an unhappy trip to grandma and grandpa's house. When he sings "Had to eat my dinner there/ Mashed potatoes and stuff like that/ I couldn't chew my meat too good," you can see that meal on the plate, and brother, it does not look appetizing. The B, "Dive", instead of nimbly jumping between two extremes, just kind of plows forward with a mean, bass-heavy thud. Its meaning is less clear as far as words, showing instead that distinctive Nirvana ambiguity, but it lets the rough fabric of Cobain's voice and the pummeling music say all that needs to be said. A powerful band gaining confidence with every passing day, showing its two best sides on complimentary but still quite different songs-- that's 7" perfection right there. --Mark Richardson

Poison Idea: "Taken By Surprise" b/w "We Got the Beat" [1990]
Growing up a lonely, would-be punk in 1980s Portland, Oregon, Poison Idea seemed larger than life. There was their sheer size, of course-- guitarist Pig Champion was so huge he had to play sitting down, his instrument looking more like a ukulele against his XXXL expanse-- as well as the violence their shows inspired. But the band was also intimidatingly ubiquitous in a town that had few true heroes. Frontman Jerry A himself would deliver the group's self-released records to Second Avenue Records, displaying an accessibility that was both inspiring and terrifying; when he darkened the door of the Blue Café on the night of Fugazi's first scheduled Portland appearance, stinking of whiskey, his presence was at once unthinkable and inevitable. (When he said that the show was cancelled, Fugazi's van having broken down in Olympia, a naïve 17-year old had to wonder if his fifth of Jack was what had jinxed it.) Poison Idea's 1990 Singles Club contribution is in line with that year's Feel the Darkness, fusing the full-metal onslaught of their 80s records with the straight-ahead rock'n'roll of "Taken by Surprise" (and even a tongue-in-cheek cover of "We Got the Beat"). The single itself was surprising-- what were these self-proclaimed "Kings of Punk" doing cavorting with Seattle's clown princes? I loved Mudhoney, but compare "Hangover Heart Attack" to "Touch Me I'm Sick": Poison Idea were terrifying in a way our bluesier neighbors to the north never would be. But it also signaled Poison Idea's arrival, and even enduring worth-- no small matter for a kid with a second-city complex. --Philip Sherburne

The Postal Service: "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight" [2003]
I'm convinced that Ben Gibbard & co. and their flabby, Dear Diary Death Cab oeuvre has done more to extract sex and danger from underground rock than a truckload of twee. And I've never been an IDM girl. So I should've hated all Postal Service product and I should hate it now. But I love this song! Lyrically, it's like one of those films where the audience is always two steps ahead of the protagonist, taking its smug pleasure in his neglect and misinterpretation of all the obvious signs. Its the track's sonic algorrhythm, though-- Gibbard's earnestly sung melody, female backing vocals, and mealy hiss & pop, buoyed by Jimmy Tamborello's hiccupping, hyperactive, soap-bubble beats-- that was so terrific in 2003, when this dropped as the second single (and best track) from the uneven Give Up LP. With equal measures head and heart, emo and electronic, nuance and bombast, this single (and the cross-country duo's earlier collaboration, "The Dream of Evan and Chan") introduced new tricks to old pop that have yet to be fully exploited or bettered. Who says long-distance relationships can't work? --Amy Granzin

The Rapture: Out of the Races and Onto the Tracks [2001]
In a way, Sub Pop helped keep indie rock balanced in 2001: The Shins' Oh, Inverted World made it feel safer and more approachable, while the Rapture's Out of the Races and Onto the Tracks made it feel more dangerous and daunting. As James Mercer conjured his new slang amid whorls of snowy ambiance, Luke Jenner and co. were ferociously working over an older patois: Chris Frantz's pulsating syncopations, Andy Gill's straight-razor guitars and Tom Verlaine's shrapnel-bomb ones, James Chance's soul-punk bark and free-jazz skronk. Like the original version, the new No Wave would last for an eye-blink before shading into safer, reconstructed post-punk territory, with bands like Radio 4 carrying on the torch, and the Rapture would follow suit, leaving their more convulsed elements behind in favor of the house-punk masterpiece Echoes and neo-soul platter Pieces of the People You Love. But on Out of the Races..., they were still working with wire and broken glass to create a willfully repellent homage to downtown menace. --Brian Howe

Soundgarden: Screaming Life EP [1987]
The appropriately named Screaming Life EP came at the dawn of the grunge era: From the first second of that diving clarion guitar busting outta the beginning of "Hunted Down", and its subsequent 10-story-tall serpentine bassy guitar riff, a dark and defiant presence seemed to be, uh, screaming, "the new guard has arrived!" Understandably, when you take hard rockers with philosophy and chemistry degrees, punk rock/DIY/skate culture pedigrees, East Indian (guitarist Kim Thayil) and Asian (bassist Hiro Yamamoto) heritages, and a willingness to unashamedly let their Hessian freak flags fly-- hello, reworked Led Zeppelin riffs! -- the rawk takes on a novel shape. Of course, having a playbook packed with Melvins and Skin Yard certainly helped: Skin Yard were Soundgarden's (often uncredited) stylistic predecessors and this seminal EP was produced by that band's ace guitarist Jack Endino. The EP's artful and textural presence had the angriness of hardcore but an attitude of experimentation lacking in a lot of hard rock at that time: Check out Thayil's dissonant atmospherics ("Nothing to Say") and his (as filtered through Jimmy Page) Indian-styled riffing ("Little Joe"). Countering Thayil's sonic six-string explorations were Chris Cornell's cocky, classic rock-embracing banshee wails that successfully found the new in the old. Don't blame him for the even more histrionic imitators that came after. --D. Shawn Bosler

SUB POP #9: Fanzine Cassette Compilation [1982]
I'm not arguing that this release is better than the Codeine, Earth, or Grifters albums on the label. I just feel it's important to remember the roots of much American indie-rock lie in the cassette underground of the early 1980s. Spearheaded by R. Stevie Moore, among others, and popularized by the brilliant, Pac NW-based OP magazine, the cassette movement was a crucial, democratic thing. Tapes often sounded like shit but they still beat your average mp3. Teen Beat and K began as cassette-only labels. And fanzines not only described "the scene," they sometimes became it. Subterranean Pop was not the only fanzine that became a label; there was also Touch & Go, while Gerard Cosloy of Homestead and Matador initially gained notoriety as a teenage writer of biting wit for his Boston-based and aptly named 'zine Conflict. I didn't know any of this at the time, though. I bought this cassette because it looked cool; Charles Burns from RAW had done the cover. And how is it? It sounds a bit too Nerd Wave these days. There's probably a reason you've never heard of the Incredible Casuals, Reind Deers, Velvet Monkeys, or Limp Richards. Well, the Velvet Monkeys were actually super amazing, but the point is we've all got to start somewhere, and this tape is a really interesting time capsule. Don't hock your bike to get a copy on eBay but definitely check it out at the EMP or somebody's cassette blog. --Mike McGonigal

The Thermals: The Body, the Blood, the Machine [2006]
For terrifically selfish reasons, I've been waiting for years for the winds of indie favor to once again shift towards the peppy, rangy, crappy-sounding sounds I grew up on and have never yet tired of.  After a few years where smoother-sounding stuff seemed to take over (oh, Sufjan), it's happened, and these days it seems like I'm finding another rickety crew with a Pollard jones to rival mine practically on the daily. But the Thermals? When things were at their grimmest a few years back, those Thermals got me over. More Parts Per Million slays, and Fuckin A-- perhaps to its detriment-- does virtually the same. But man, The Body, The Blood, The Machine is even better, and not just 'cuz it came at a time we four-track fanatics needed it the worst. Hutch Harris' poison pen grows more and more venomous over the course of these clampant anthems-- about God and control and escape-- and the big fuzz of before is blown wide open to reveal huge (and hugely inspired) riffs. That it's another platter of scuzz-rock songcraft par excellence came as no surprise, considering the sources. But I do recall being pretty pleased to have a record this gnarly with this many hooks on it a couple years ago. And even now, in the midst of a welcome surplus of such things, I still find myself reaching for this one. --Paul Thompson

Tindersticks: "Here" b/w "Harry's Dilemma" [1995]
The stateside debut of one of the UK's best bands of the 90s (for me, they were the best), this single establishes Tindersticks' knack for exuding melancholy and transcending sentimentality. Stuart Staples' syrup-thick baritone turns Pavement's already wistful "Here" into a full-on tragedy-- when he sings "everything's ending," he sounds like he's carrying the weight of every letter in the words. "Harry's Dilemma" convincingly weaves a spoken narrative about a depressed, doomed dog through a maze of strange, wandering jazz. Even though it's easy to find antecedents, it's impossible to find anything that truly sounds like Tindersticks, and this single was a great opening shot. --Joe Tangari

Ugly Casanova: Sharpen Your Teeth [2002]
No matter the outcome, year-end lists act as obligatory rites of passage for young music writers. While working as one of three critics at the student newspaper of a large public university in North Carolina in 2002, I organized a tally in which each member of the music staff delivered individual lists of winners, exchanged unfamiliar recordings from those lists, and reconvened a month later to select the collective Top 30 Albums of 2002. Our list, published in February 2003, crowned the Books, dismissed Sonic Youth, and embraced Robert Randolph. But the biggest lesson I learned from that first decisive body-- and one that I try to keep close constantly-- stems from Ugly Casanova, a band whose Sub Pop debut, Sharpen Your Teeth, landed in that top 30.

But Sharpen remains a B-level work from guys with top-tier Amerindie pasts and (let's hope) futures-- producer Brian Deck, Modest Mouse's Isaac Brock and Califone's Tim Rutilli, among others. By claiming he was only producing the album for Edgar "Ugly Casanova" Graham, a crazy fan-turned-friend, Brock was able to sidestep terms of his new major label contract with Modest Mouse so as to tinker with acoustic sounds, different singers and junkyard percussion. As such, Ugly Casanova possessed the scope one would hope for a main gig, but-- as the experimental and somewhat subdued exit valve it is-- it's full of ideas left undeveloped and influences gone unsurpassed. Aside from a few fragments, it delivers little but promise that was later realized in part by Modest Mouse's Good News for People Who Love Bad News and Califone's Roots & Crowns. Mostly, though, it delivers a personnel that led plenty to think it was better than it was. Is there a better indie rock rite of passage than learning that lesson? --Grayson Currin