Sebadoh
Sebadoh’s new album, The Sebadoh, opens with a sustained dull electric buzz, like the sound of a cheap guitar amp turned up too loud. It’s a noise many old fans will surely take as a sonic welcome mat. After an unprecedented three-year hiatus, the loss of drummer Bob Fay, and the move to LA by founding member and longtime Massachusetts slacker Lou Barlow, that buzz signals Sebadoh’s continued allegiance to the little grease-stained flag of lo-fi.
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For this the album has been received with mixed reviews, some of which hint at a kind of betrayal. It shows how far back Sebadoh’s roots go: these days this kind of sentiment is aired more often in the rap world than in the rock arena. Though lo-fi has always been one of the least funky sounds in an alt-rock continuum increasingly influenced by hip-hop, in a way it has always functioned in that continuum with the same puritanical regulatory force as “keepin’ it real” has in rap. Speaking by phone from his new house in LA, Barlow hinted at this by stressing hip-hop’s effect on his aesthetic: “The funny thing is, I think hip-hop has been one of the most influential things to us, just sort of almost spiritually. It’s been that way from Sebadoh III [1991] on, pretty much. Just because of the ferocity of when N.W.A came out, there was the shock of this new blood in hip-hop with a new edginess to it. To me, that stuff was a real influence, in that it just got me to get off my ass and do something that represents me, the way that I feel.”
Even so, Barlow still believed in the rightness of the collective approach, and he continues to do so: “In the 60s there were bands that had multiple songwriters like the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield and the Beatles,” he explains. “You had people who had definite styles working together. To me that’s a way to make music much more interesting. Through the 70s and the 80s people got into the idea of a band being one guy with a personal vision and a scrappy bunch of guys behind him who are there to present his tough rockin’ image. It’s sort of the idea of Bruce Springsteen, or Tom Petty, or whatever: the idea of these rough-hewn, Dylan-influenced geniuses who are at the head of this family of people that produce these very homogeneous records. That’s not really where we come from. We’re much more about the 60s colliding with hardcore and new wave and stuff that really does away with that.”
This new relative cohesiveness forms the basis of much of the criticism that’s been leveled at the record. Says Barlow: “Some people who have heard the new album have the same reaction. ‘Wow, you’ve really cleaned it up this time!’ And I’m like, ‘Whoa! More than on Harmacy?’…[But] I do know why [they say it], I think: it’s because this record sounds like a unified piece, so it suggests this cleanliness or order to it.”
