Albums are graded on a five-point scale of "Awful-Eh-Good-Great-Classic". I'm highly biased, so don't take it too seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

The Folk Implosion

[#] Take a Look Inside... (1994)

Fuckingaroundcore.

Reviewed July 23, 2019

If one takes Sebadoh to be the side project of Dinosaur Jr. bassist Lou Barlow, would that make The Folk Implosion a side project to a side project? Certainly, it has the lore of one—as the story goes, fellow Massachusetts songwriter John Davis was inspired enough by Sebadoh's III to send Barlow a tape of his own laundry room recordings and the two began writing tracks together. More often than not, on Take a Look Inside..., they have the sound of a side project too, a bizarre mix of the poppy, the confessional (it's a Lou Barlow album, after all), and the downright ridiculous, all dubbed cheaply on cassette. It's too happy for Sebadoh, but it's just as worth celebrating.

That's a whole big paragraph to say that the debut of the Folk Implosion is a brief set of brief songs from two weirdos happy to sit poo songs next to new wave freakouts and elliptic ballads. Not a single track here lasts longer than two-and-a-half minutes, and really, that's about their optimal length. It's uneven by design—you will never revisit "Winter's Day"—but the good shit is really fucking good, whether it's Davis and Barlow mumbling over bass on "Spiderweb-Butterfly" or the Kinksian "Waltzin' With Your Ego" or, hell, dorky fuck anthems like "Slap Me". It's a damn good side project is what I'm trying to say, and quick fun if you're as weird as them.