Sebadoh
Bubble and Scrape
Domino Records
Release Date: Jun 24, 2008

Music is birthed from raw emotion and creativity, an ingrained instinct to create words and sounds that relate to life like a personal soundtrack. Sometimes a band creates an album that is so honest in its cause that it spawns an audience generations over, becoming an instant classic that stands on its own for years to come. Such is the case with Bubble and Scrape, the 1993 lo-fi hit for Sebadoh. With a reissue (including an array of outtakes and extra tracks) and a joint deal with All Tomorrow Parties' Don't Look Back concert series, which will put Sebadoh playing the album in its entirety at the Pitchfork Music Festival. The early 90's classic is being revived with a second life for a new generation to consume.

Sebadoh helped usher in the popular lo-fi sound that dominated alternative rock stations in the late eighties and early nineties, along with contemporaries like Pavement, Guided by Voices and Yo La Tengo. Bubble and Scrape opens with "Soul and Fire", a song for the recently broken hearted with deadpan delivery of recognition, "I think our love is coming to an end, I know our love is coming to an end." Lou Barlow's melancholy lines continue on "Two Years Two Day" with, "if you don't want me, I'll have to set you free, I'll have to learn to live without you," words that every person who has loved and lost can relate to. But while the words echo pain, and some songs clearly show a pensive state of mind in sound, Sebadoh's real genius lies in the sharp contrast between words and music it creates on Bubble and Scrape. With clear influences of psychedelic, hard core, punk and the trademark lo-fi sound, Sebadoh creates a forceful and driven sound, bold and abrasive guitars, layers of hollow drums and fierceness in delivery that so many bands lack today.

So how does an album really qualify itself as groundbreaking or everlasting? In the case of Bubble and Scrape, it's a mixture of musical influences and sounds that create a unique enough mixture to stand out as something innovative and fresh in a world of played out music. And to possess lyrics that are so honest and universal that multitudes of people can relate, giving the album no expiration date and letting new and old listeners alike return to a quality piece of art time and again.