The Folk Implosion Album Recommendations

The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that 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

[#] Music for Kids (2023)

Great in mood, less so in sequencing.

Reviewed August 2, 2024

I was well-known for a time among my circles for my undying love for The Folk Implosion's "Natural One". "Natural One" occupies a uniquely dated position in 90s indie rock, a creepy, smoggy, loopy exhibition of nihilistic pride through sexual hedonism, something the movie it was attached to, Kids, explored in far more uncomfortable detail. It's become a little hard to find in recent years, though, with the soundtrack out of print and the song nowhere to be found on streaming (I have a CD, neener neener). Worse yet, that soundtrack neither included the entirety of the band's score nor all the licensed music from the movie. The recent reissue Music for Kids attempts to rectify at least the former situation, but it does so in a bit of a baffling way.

The score for Kids is a collection of mostly instrumental sonic collages fitted with crunchy 90s hip-hop percussion, detuned pianos, cheap analog synths, skronky horns, and samples of obscure German films, howling wolves, and the like. It crawls along, sizzled over the New York City streets, downright nocturnal in mindset—until it awkwardly cuts to a selection of songs from 1997's Dare to Be Surprised. As much as I adore Surprised and get the idea of including them because they do come from a similar sonic standpoint, the sudden focus on vocals and the jumbling of Surprised's excellent pacing (all the included songs have roughly the same tempo and structure) does not do them any justice at all. This is still a worthy disc to own for the score and remixes—the brickwall mastering for archive material is always an assy proposition though—but subtract the Surprised tracks and go listen to them in their proper context, please.

Essential:	"Natural One", "Cabride", "Natural One (UNKLE Remix)"
Quintessential:	"Wet Stuff"
Non-Essential:	All the Dare to Be Surprised tracks
Rating:
Further listening:	Download from The Folk Implosion's Bandcamp

[#] One Part Lullaby (1999)

His soul's not the only thing on cruise control.

Reviewed July 18, 2024

Anyone who knows anything about Lou Barlow knows that the late 90s were not kind to him. Sebadoh was one of Sub Pop's shining stars until they weren't. The Folk Implosion got their top 40 hit in with "Natural One" and then imploded less than half a decade later. Ouchie. One Part Lullaby serves as foreshocks: not only is this album solely Lou's vocally (if John Davis truly sang on it, I've yet to be able to tell), but it's far more intentional, humorless, and dour than anything the duo had done previously. John exited stage left by 2003, leaving Lou to recruit alaska! as his backing band with an even more downcast "New" Folk Implosion record that spring. Does any of that mean One Part Lullaby is a bad album? Not necessarily—but it sure is overly long and overly serious and not very Folk Implosion-y.

Perhaps sensing that they should've followed the eerie collage blueprint of the Kids soundtrack on their own albums, One Part Lullaby is indietronica studiocraft through and through. Its best trait is its sonics, a nice mixture of drum machines and loops, guitars, even quirkier instruments like banjos and glockenspiels. It's no surprise the sole instrumental here, the boot camp blues of "Serge", is also one of its finest. It's got plenty of cool-sounding moments, like "E.Z. L.A."'s take on the "California Love" vocoder hook (hell, "E.Z. L.A." as a whole), the minor key rumbling guitar lines pulsing through opener "My Ritual", or the slinky, dungeon-inky "Kingdom of Lies", but the lack of vocal tradeoff and tempo variation and Lou's ceaseless, downright humorless navelgazing about relationships, emotions, and troubled upbringings for almost an hour straight really does send One Part Lullaby in circles. Where's a "Slap Me" when you need it?

Essential:	"My Ritual", "Serge", "E.Z. L.A."
Quintessential:	"One Part Lullaby"
Non-Essential:	"Mechanical Man"
Rating:

[#] Dare to Be Surprised (1997)

Ironically more natural than "Natural One".

Reviewed December 21, 2018

I have this strange habit of digging through the side projects of famous musicians before the works they're best known for. Lou Barlow might've been in Dinosaur Jr., but even if I snuggled up close to what they've been up to lately, I'll still best know him as one half of The Folk Implosion. Originally a warm, lo-fi home recording project built of bass-first indie rock and traded vocal parts, it was the fluke funky downtempo hit "Natural One" that gave Barlow and partner John Davis their first and only hit at radio. Luckily, while its sound was a bit out of the ordinary for the pair, the songwriting was pure Barlow, making it a pretty good introduction to what the group would later release as 1997's Dare to Be Surprised.

While they might've cleaned up their sound a bit, this is still the same poppy, organic, cheaply-recorded Folk Implosion that poured out like sand on Take a Look Inside.... The duo are eager to get the real earworms out early; after all, Davis fought for years for that pole position, and the constant thump of "Wide Web" and tuberculosis groove of "Insinuation" show them no less itchy. The songs here run a bit longer than Take a Look Inside's spidery vignettes, though no worse for it. Experiments still grub ("Park Dub") and dub ("Fall Into November"), and while a defiant streak has taken hold ("That's the Trick", "Ball & Chain"), the duo hit on probably one of the most innocent of indie sentiments as they float along like otters on "River Devotion": "I'll trim my whiskers and I'll wash my fur—anything for her". Dare to Be Surprised is sticky on first listen and proves handily that "Natural One" shouldn't have been a fluke.

Essential:	"Wide Web", "Insinuation", "Burning Paper" (also "Park Dub")
Quintessential:	"Pole Position"
Non-Essential:	None!
Rating:

[#] 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.