further

The next time anyone starts getting all precious about their indie-rock cred, remind 'em of further. Before becoming a prolific '90s underground sensation groovy enough to release 7-inches on Bong Load, play their hometown's cubbyhole of cool, Jabberjaw, get a UK deal with Creation and have Lee Ranaldo guest on their debut album, the Los Angeles trio was (with one additional member) known as Shadowland, whose lone album is an embarrassingly obvious attempt to jumpstart a pretty-boy arena career with a misbegotten and overheated mash of Tom Petty, the Waterboys, U2 and Sunset Strip glam-metal. (Like everyone else owning such a damningly skeleton-equipped closet, further now condemns the band's music, laying the blame on producer Pat Moran and going so far as to put "The Death of an A&R Man" on "Grip Tape" as a belated attack on then-Geffen staffer Tom Zutaut. Of course, no one made these poseurs write songs with lyrics like "Hey there Mrs. Polka-dot/Come and lay your love on my street/Hey there Mrs. Yesterday/You just crush your will beneath my feet." Best bio quotation: "We don't pretend to be anything we aren't.") Those looking for clues to Shadowland's future stylistic development need look no further than the absurd "Heroin Eyes": "Her cigarette burns in my soul like the pavement keeps burning through this hole in my shoe."Adding untainted guitarist/drummer Josh Schwartz to their merry cabal, Florida-born brothers Darren (vocals, guitar, etc.) and Brent Rademaker (bass, vocals, etc.) and drummer Kevin Fitzgerald reinvented themselves as the murky lower-case childish-print first-names-only further, greasing their downward rehabilitation with a monstrous lo-fi noise-pop onslaught. (So much for the exaggerated faith people have in alternagod talent. As obvious as it's always been to some, here's irrefutable proof that any bozo with a fuzzbox and a pair of earplugs can be J Mascis or Stephen Malkmus.)"Grip Tape", recorded as badly as possible by New York scene veteran Wharton Tiers, is a riot of distortion and croaky off-key singing, straggling happily through its peppy and tuneful pop-song bits to reach the chewy center of slack squall jams each contains. More energetic than Dinosaur Jr, more melodically sensitive than Sonic Youth and less abstruse than Pavement, further cherrypicks those bands' sounds and still manages not to reek of beer-soaked carpetbaggery. ("Super Griptape" is an expanded version, with four added songs to the hour.)Having demonstrated a superior facility for wrecking shop in high chaos mode, further tried on minimalism's simple housedress as well-a far more dubious enterprise for such a demonstrably skilled combo. (C'mon guys, we know you own guitar tuners.) The overlong 25-song "Sometimes Chimes" paraphrases Beck, covers Unrest (nicely pruning "Isabel" into an acoustic folk song), sketches out songs like Sebadoh on a rushed schedule and occasionally noodles around as clumsily as a bunch of ten-year-olds locked in the K Records warehouse. Actually, the album gets off to a fine start with a brace of extremely catchy pop creations cut with onslaughts of happy aggression: "Generic 7," "Duck Pond," "Phase Out," "J.O.2" and especially "She Lives by the Castle 2" are all sublime mixtures of breezy allure and jagged styling that brush against British fuzzbusters like Jesus and Mary Chain, Verve and My Bloody Valentine without resorting to out-and-out replication. Basically, the first half of Sometimes Chimes would have made a solid album, but further makes like the Energizer bunny and as it proceeds to approximate Ween, Sleepyhead, Dinosaur Jr, Half Japanese, etc. sends the ratio of quality to futile slackery plummeting.With Fitzgerald out of the group( to focus on his other band, The Geraldine Fibbers), Schwartz, the Rademakers and a drum machine made the nine-song "Grimes Golden", a pure crystal dose of slop-pop cooked up in a busted rec-room crockpot that puts the group's bounciest ideas in a confined space and lets them ricochet around. With a charge of Neil Young winsomeness and a few Beach Boys vocal fillips, sweet little ditties like "Artificial Freedom," "Quiet Riot Grrrl" and "California Bummer" don't try to move hell and earth with guitar amplification or fall apart on contact, and the resultant rudimentary intimacy is an elixir for both songs and band. Neat.The double 7-inch "Distance" gives each member a two-song side of his own, with a slapdash four-song rendezvous bringing up the rear. Darren's pair sounds most like the band, only scaled down in sound and style. Brent's melodic sense is stronger, as is the charged assault of his guitars and the willfulness of his ineptitude (the terrible drumming on "Spheres of Influence" and the crummy punk singing on "LHS '79' "). Josh pours it on even harder, glorying in the hapless bluster of his deep well explorations, the first of which ("Wett Katt") is unendurably tuneless.The eight songs on the Japanese-only "Next Time West Coast" mark a giant step in further's approach to a point that balances genuine skill and pretensions of rank amateurism. While still occasionally drifting into static meltdown and at no point even suggesting slick, the generally restrained and carefully recorded songs display more craft and chops than anything in further's past. (So much for commitment.) However they got here, though, it would make an excellent place to rest a while: "Be That as It May" adopts a rangy Neil Young folk-rock sound that works wonders, and "Grandview Skyline" is an amusing dose of humming psychedelia. The others fall in related regions between those poles. But all this progress may be headed for danger: beneath the scowls of feedback, "You're Just Dead Skin to Me" bears a frightening resemblance to a certain shadowy band of the not-so-distant past...More further: the group also has chucked out singles and compilation tracks for a variety of labels, formed a festival's worth of side bands (Summer Hits, Tugboat: 3001, Yak, Rusty Troller) and contributed a track ("Insight") to the Joy Division tribute album "A Means to an End".Biography by Ira Robbins, TrouserPress.com=========Here's something I just found on the internet today...it's kinda innacurate(to the best of my knowledge..??) but amusing nonetheless...Next Time More Famous: FurtherPosted by: steve | From: June 10, 2004My partner in crime, Mr. Zac Pennington, astutely pointed out the obvious last week that the more obscure a band is the harder it is to track down photos of them on the internet for use in this humble music appreciation site. Well, Mr. Pennington, I toast to you, as I have found your theory to be dead on. In my searching for photos of the mid 90s rock back Further, I returned exactly 0 photos of the band. The only image I found (exhausting google image search and all the links in the first ten or so pages in a standard google web search) was the image you see to the left, the cover of their last release (Next Time West Coast). The other album cover you see below was the result of me taking a photo graph of the eight or so year old copy of their first album (Sometimes Chimes).The insane obscurity of this band is really surprising. The leaders of Further, brothers Brent and Darren Rademaker, had been in Shadowland, a band that had put out two releases on major label (Geffen) in 89 and 90. Shadowland went through a lot of grief with Geffen forcing them to want to make Further so obscure (I am assume that their obscurity was mostly their own decision). The trouble with the major label even seeped into Further's material the first thing you hear on their debut album is a sample of somebody saying "and we got the shaft from the record company," with a song on their second album, Griptape, called "The Death Of An A & R Man." Shadowland was heavily influenced by 60's music, as to where Further was influenced by more contemporary peers like Dinosaur Jr, Sonic Youth, Sebadoh, and Teenage Fanclub. Actually, in most reviews (of the few you can find) they are criticized for emulating these bands too closely. This can be a knock, but I also find it to be a positive for this band. Yes, they do sound like many bands of the day, but I think they combine different aspects of these bands wonderfully. In fact, they had a good sense of humor about being accused of ripping of their contemporaries by naming of their songs "furtherdoh-jr.q" (a reference to Sebadoh, Dinosaur Jr, etc.). Not the most original band but Further did make good music.further.jpgFurther released two full lengths and three eps over their short three or four year career. The Rademaker brothers both went onto bands that were nowhere near obscure as Further, with Brent going on to the wonderful (60's influenced) Beachwood Sparks, and Darren going on to (60's influenced) The Tyde. Chris Gunst, the principal singer and songwriter for Beachwood Sparks played guitar in Further towards the end of Further's lifespan, and I actually read in one article the Jimmy Tamborello of Dntel, The Postal Service, Figurine, Strictly Ballroom, and more was in Further for awhile. All this evidence points to Further being willfully obscure. Further may not be the greatest band in the world when it comes to execution and originality but when it comes to effort that has to be put in to enjoy this band, concept (willful obscurity), and charm Further truly is The Greatest Band Of All Time.