Bubble And Scrape

sleepy and boring

So I've now spent about half my life older than the angsty punk inspired teen who was probably the intended audience of this album. Coincidentally, this album came out just a short while after I was born. Hopefully when I am 50, 60 or 70 years old, I will still enjoy listening to this blend of grunge, punk and indie rock and roll, as much as I did today. This album is great. At first I was looking for faults - and finding them. The mix is a a bit weird with the vocals hard to hear on a few tracks, the guitar playing sometimes feels a bit clumsy, it's probably too long and could have the fat trimmed off it a bit... but the faults are actually what makes this feel fantastic. Its got so much raw energy, it feels like the ultimate debut album. Your can feel the youthful energy in a group of guys still trying to find their sound, obviously pulling inspiration from the scene around them. I loved this album, I only wish I could have found it half my lifetime ago...

I was showering praise on Dinosaur Jr. just a couple of days ago, but this side project is a real case of diminishing returns. The idea is there, but the music really lacks a bite while keeping the dissonance and it's substantially weaker as a result. I enjoyed a couple of tracks but, overall, disappointing.

Mid slacker rock with unimpressive vocalz

Very good

Inoffensive mid 90s rock. Not sure what distinguishes it from all the other mid 90s rock though.

As far as 90's indie rock goes, this is just okay. Okay production, okay songwriting, okay vocals, but nothing that makes them stand out among other bands from that time. Sonically, it lacks texture and bite with small exceptions. I would have liked more aggression and noisy elements, because when they do that, the record is at its most appealing.

Loved this. Knew i was supposed to get on Sebadoh and vaguely remember them from 90s MTV so this was a real gem

I totally dig this. Slow grunge with a surprisingly wide range of styles, from sweet ballads to more punk-oriented tracks, and even a couple of more experimental parts ("Elixir Is Zog" was so much fun !). It sounds like the perfect poster band for 90s indie music, and I loved every minute of it. Sure, it's not perfect - as a 90s kid, I know a huge part of my enjoyment probably comes from sheer nostalgia for that unmistakable low-fi sound ; but I don't really mind. It's not every day this list lets me have fun, and last week sucked so hard that I feel generous. Sebadoh certainly doesn't deserve such a low global rating. 7/10

It’s completely irrational… Alternative rock from that era is just my thing, a musical comfort zone where I instinctively feel at home. I’m not entirely sure what this album is doing on the list, but I’m glad I discovered it. It’s more restrained than Dinosaur Jr., more acoustic, yet still pretty close. The vocals are somewhere between detached and vulnerable, and Barlow’s touch on bass is unmistakable. Some tracks are little gems (Soul Fire, Homemade…). The hardcore roots barely show through, and yet… they’re still there. Some might find this album too long. I certainly don’t.

Indie rock.

1993 indie rock Soul and fire Homemade

I was expecting something great, as Dinosaur Jr. is a brilliant band, and Barlow was a valued member, but this really let me down. Much of the album was decent: 'Soul And Fire', 'Cliche', 'Sacred Attention' and 'Bouquet For A Siren' to name several, but it has the same problem that most album with a plethora of short songs have, there's too much filler, much of which is quite undeveloped and boring at times. I didn't dislike this album, but it felt like most Indie and Slacker Rock of the time, but just weaker in just about every way.

Influential maybe, but not really for me. Sounds like lots of other bands from the era and from this distance there aren't really anything that sets it apart (actually Homemade is a pretty great song)

Should have enjoyed this more, it just felt tired and without the punch that could have helped. 2.5/5 but probably wouldn’t listen again

Loved Think and Soul and Fire, I could leave the rest

If I want to listen to Dinosaur Jr., I'll listen to Dinosaur Jr., not this low-effort wannabe.

I like what they're doing: the sound, the guitars, even the atonal adjacent songs. The album has too many songs, lessening its focus and power. 3.5.

Not my cup of grunge.

Terribly dissonant. I would use this as torture for bad people if I believed in torture.

Bern on a good run of albums since getting Lou's old band Dinosaur Jr about three weeks ok. I'm a bit worried there's a lot of dross coming my way at some point. The first track was really good but it dipped a bit after that and at times sounded a bit like a mismatch of Sonic Youth and Guided By Voices. I did like Sacred Attention and the acoustic penultimate track Think a lot but overall it was pretty hit and miss.

3/5. This comparison feels a bit unfair as this album predates most of their discography, but my biggest thought when listening to this record was “this just feels like diet pavement.” That being said this is still a solid record. theres a good handful of fun 90’s indie/slacker rock tunes on here like the opener “Soul and Fire.” Even at a relatively normal 46 minutes though it feels like it overstays its welcome a bit. which is due to the whole thing being quite one-note, there’s not a ton of variety or versatility in the track-list. not a bad album at all, but there’s much better music from this scene and era to explore.

Was I supposed to hate this? Oops ;)

“Homemade” legit changed my life.

This was not my cup of tea. I had never heard of Sebadoh so didn’t know what I was in for. The first track was fine, and then I lost interest. By the time Elixir is Zog came screaming out, I knew this was not my jam. Listened twice. Just not my thing.

Raw and unpolished

3.5 it’s my kind of music for sure, I adore Barlows other band Dinosaur Jr, I love fuzz, chunky guitar, and the general “sad bastard” tone of it all. I’m not well versed in Sebadoh there are a few tracks that have popped up that I like, I really liked Homemade, but I remain distant to them. Maybe it’s the more focused topics of the songs, while Dino captures a feeling from a broader theme. I don’t know

I’ve always preferred Dinosaur Jr and only listened to a little of Sebadoh but this ruled. So much crammed into one album. Different styles and moods but it still feels part of the same whole. I’ll be listening to more of their albums now for sure

kms

First song is the best but a solid listen throughout

First song was promising. The less said about the rest of the album the better

Nah.

What a load of shite

Not bad but what am I missing?

I notice when it’s a low scoring half-arsed-90s-US-alternative-rock album, no-one mentions the US bias of the book.

boring

Favorite Song: Sister Least Favorite: Fantastic Disaster

Sebadoh is a band without an identity, or rather too many identities. The album opens on a strong note with Soul and Fire and then it loses and gains my attention multiple times over its hour plus runtime. It turns out I like Harlow as a songwriter but not Sebadoh as a band so much.

Mannnn there’s some BAD music on this one After the first song I thought this was by no means a bad album, that was actually perfectly reasonable. There’s some other ok to good tracks on here where the vocals aren’t dreadful and the instruments sound like they’re being played on purpose It gets real, real terrible after a bit though. Around song 2 I started to understand why this one was so unpopular, songs really start to lack direction and technical ability. Then we got to Telescopic Alchemy which is truly an abhorrent song; it has everything I hate about bad songs including garbage vocals, horrible instrumentation, unintelligible lyrics, and just not fun all around. There’s like 3 or 4 other awful songs on this though I think that’s the worst it gets. Even the non shitters are still disappointing and do not excite me in the slightest I thought there’d be enough normal sounding songs on here to keep this out of the dreaded 1 zone, but the remaining songs really are that bad; most of the album is genuinely worse than silence. I can definitely name 10 albums worse than this, but make no mistake this is straight up awful

This is an album written by three people and one of them was clearly worse than the other. I liked the good parts. I really liked the good parts! But that last third. That last guy who had to simply bring it all down. I will simply take with me the songs I liked and pretend the other ones don't exist, because I liked the songs! I liked the weird instrumentation! The melodies were great! And I don't want to tangle them with the purposely abrasive tracks!

Usually down for some lo-fi Indie rock but I had never really heard of these guys. Quite an uneven album, some really decent stuff than a dong or two I would kind of tune out. 6/10

Likte det!

I was a fan of Sebadoh in the 90s, but I don't think I've ever listened to a whole album of theirs. I do like a lot of the songs, however some were discordant and odd. Overall this album was fine but if I'm going for 90s alt rock nostalgia, this probably isn't the album I'm putting on.

These Gen X slacker rock albums are all so lame. It’s not cool to sound bad on purpose.

Me gustó bastante. O sea no sé si lo escucharía de nuevo, ni tampoco hay tantas canciones que me gusten por si solas, pero escucharlo me pareció una experiencia super interesante.

Fine

#483/1001. Another paint-by-numbers slot of musical history colored. A rather tiny spot next to fellow labelmates Nirvana, Mudhoney and tens of others, not far from Pavement, Pixies, Eels and Beck - bot too bad place to be in a way. If I had heard this in 1993 this might be a nostalgic piece fun to return to, but now it is more or less just one album or of one era, not the worst example though.

This was fun. Some songs were cool. Some were weird.

I never really got Sebadoh. I like the unvarnished slacker deal and the songs are OK but they've never really grabbed me.

Lou Barlow’s Sebadoh project is far weirder, looser and also more tender than anything he’s done, before or since, with Dinosaur Jr. While it occasionally feels like they’re just fucking around while rolling tape, there are some real gems in this highly varied set of (mostly short) songs. More earnest than Pavement and less hook-driven than Guided by Voices, this nonetheless offers a good showcase for the noisy 90s lo-fi aesthetic.

I listened to this a lot in my emo 20s and probably put at least one of these songs on a mix tape. Today it sounds like an American Morrissey who smokes weed and does a lot of home recording.

Drivel

What do you get when you cross an innate sense of melodic songwriting with atonal and purposeless noise experiments? Sebadoh has some really good songs in their catalog, and Lou Barlow, if he had wanted to, but this sounds like it's often purposefully unpleasant as a rebuke to corporate rock. At the time that was a big deal among indie bands.

Bakesale by Sebadoh is one of my favorite 90s rock albums. This is not Bakesale. This is not Harmacy or III either. Baffling choice for the only Sebadoh album to put on the list but it still has some great songs, and the weirder songs are entertaining.

First couple songs were decent, but then the wheels fell off hard

It didn’t grab me I probably need to listen again. It may be a hidden gem.

It's like members of Slint, Elliot Smith, Mudhoney and Meat Puppets came together to make an album but could not agree on a cohesive style. Most of these songs were 2.5/5, with better exceptions being Elixer is Zog and Bouquet for a Siren which leaned 4, and worse exception being Fantastic Disaster which was horrible. All together I calculated a 2.7ish, but because the album is so inconsequential, they band members could NOT find common ground which made the experience super choppy, and the first and last songs were not great ways to bookend the album I gotta reduce the score by .1 for each. 2.7-.3= 2.4/5 -> 2/5

There's no reason why this is here. It's like a bootleg Collective Soul. Are they only here because they were on SubPop in the early 90s? I don't see where these guys were influential.

It's ok, but not essential for me

2.6. This is what I think of when I hear indie. It’s fine. Not bad

It sounds like a garage band that needed more time to work on their sound. There's some decent riffs here and there, but overall it wasn't very good. The best moment was the intro of Emma Get Wild. The biggest mess was No Way Out.

I liked this album. A group I never heard of. Now that’s what I’m talking about!

It's a cross between Sonic Youth and Pedro the Lion. Too many break-up songs. I didn't love it. I did love Barlow's "Homemade" which sounds like it could have been on Keep It Like A Secret. Update: I have since learned that "Homemade" is about beating off and now I feel gross. Whatever. Three stars.

It says "American Indie Band" on the tin and the first few chords couldn't be more like the cliché version of it. Mind you - I love many American Indie bands (this is grungy but we had Nirvana and Soundgarden too, so the standard was high). This is just a boring one - not that is sounds "bad" per se. It will go on my pile of Threes.

First song on this gave me such high hopes, but it falls off a fucking cliff.

Ok. Not exactly my favourite kind of music but wouldn't skip it either if it was played on a playlist.

No wonder Sub Pop ended up selling merch at Seattle Airport.

Listened to a third of it. Painful stuff.

Wasn’t really into this. Like a few of the songs though.

Sebadoh are a spinoff from Dinosaur Jr and, while they’re not quite as popular or influential as some of their indie rock contemporaries, they still made some awesome music. Bubble and Scrape is an all around solid indie rock album that draws from many influences; there’s a bit of lo-fi folk, a bit of psychedelia, and a lot of noise, punk, and grunge.

First few tracks were a bit hit or miss. Then I got to Sister which was a belter of a song and I really enjoyed everything after that. Top Track - Sister

Fine, slightly worse Pavement without the hooks. 2.5

A band that I didn’t really have on my radar as part of my musical tastes. However I can definitely sense the environment in which it was released, right at the peak of the grunge explosion and the massive focus on alternative rock. I enjoyed finding songs about heartbreak, fragile melodic folk-rock and other bursts of experimental noise influenced by punk and psychedelia. Compared to some of their earlier work, you can really notice the maturity of this album. Maybe I don’t fully connect with their approach but I’m keeping these songs as personal references for my own music: Think (Let Tomorrow Bee) and Sister.

Enjoyed this one too. Sounds like the 90's in an album. Love that lo-fi indie sound. Like Pavement.

I expected to like this, but didn't.

I wanted to like it - I really did - but ultimately I couldn't. Too much half finished Ideas.

Until today, I thought Sebadoh was a Lou Barlow solo project. I had no idea that this one is pretty evenly distributed. It just so happens that Barlow’s songs are the only ones here that don’t suck. That being said, Barlow’s songs are consistently the weakest parts of every Dinosaur Jr. album. There’s a good reason J. Mascis only gives him two.

The first track gave me the impression this was going to be a mildly-grungy-lofi-indie thing, which probably would have got a fairly low rating from me for being uninteresting, generic, indie from the grunge era. Fortunately it's actually quite different from that. Unfortunately it's utter shit.

This albums sounds so rawwwww. Kinda sounds like lo-fi sonic youth. I love how it sounds like it was just recorded in someone's garage. Some instruments come in and out of focus as if someone just turned their volume up without too much thought. Music is music and placing a snobby barrier that it's only good if it was recorded with expensive equipment in an expensive studio just means that you miss out on stuff like this. Why is there a harmonica. There's a back and forth of high energy songs and low energy songs. I definitely prefer the high energy songs in this sound High 3

Reimer Bo siger det meget godt.

* 29 Det er bare ikke særlig godt. Miv.

Hold kæft 1.4

Det er fair nok, hvis det er svært at finde på 1001 albums, som man *virkelig* skal høre inden man dør, men for det første så bør man så lade være med at lave en sådan liste, og hvis man alligevel gør, så må man fanme sætte en minimum standard, og ikke bare hive random albums ud af røven. Der er INTET ved det album, der berettiger en plads på nogen som helst lister - på nær værste albums i musikhistorien. Det er så forfærdeligt, at jeg næsten tror forfatteren troller os. Jeg ved godt, at det er en lo-fi modreaktion på datidens musikscene, og der faktisk flere steder, hvor jeg synes, de har fat i noget musikalsk interessant, men så kommer deres vokaler, eller et eller andet unødvendig musikalsk krumspring, og ødelægger det hele - det lyder bare så ufatteligt amatøragtigt, at det ødelægger alt andet. Men kan selvfølgelig være mig, der bare ikke forstår det...

They are doing their own thing and that's neat for them. I don't ever want to hear anything they make again though.

This album feels like it doesn't really knows whether it wants to be proper punk, or just some whiny indie rock, and then fails at both.

Fav songs: ‘Sister’, ‘Sacred Attention’, ‘No Way Out’. Liked drinking wine while listening to this. Liked the harmonica. It feels like an album you could make yourself, but it has some ineffable quality—childishness? charisma?—that you can’t replicate. Didn’t listen to this band for years because I thought their name was silly. Glad I finally received the impetus to check them out.

Grungy weird lo-fi indie. Yeah, I liked it.

Album 14/1089 Songs known going in : 0/17 Favourite song : Bouquet for a siren rating :9/10 notes : soul and fire the instrumentation isnt mind breaking, nice to listening to listen to. Twoyears two days his voice sounds like the guy from REM im confused by fantastic disaster but I like it Sounds like me on garageband in primary school Happily divided is a lot chiller but still got character This albums fun. I bet its not particularly well recieved on here but I like it

ok

Trust me. You can die without listening to this. You're not missing out.

Dinosaur Jr. stuff I guess. Not really necessary. Also it’s kinda bad. Indulgent, annoying, noisy but not experimental, playful almost, but nowhere near actually fun. It would be cooler if Pavement hadn’t done this exact shtick a billion times better on Slanted and Enchanted, but when that album exists, as better, shorter, and more pivotal than this album ever will be, there’s no real reason to listen to this. Not much more to say. 4.9/10 DOES IT BELONG ON THE LIST: NO REASON: not relevant and not really that good

Almost good enough to be a demo tape. Almost.

Kinda dark and grueling

Não me agradou tanto, apesar da primeira faixa ter me surpreendido ao fazer uma queda de tom no drop.

No me motivó mucho la verdad

Где-то между 2 и 5

Aggressively meh. I don’t know why this album is notable over any other obscure indie band from the 90s. I didn’t hate listening to it, I was just bored and frustrated with the whole list.

Heard of them but didn’t hear them before. Just so-so for me.

Another day another underwhelming indie album...

God this was boring