B-Side Sunday.
August 10, 2008
Consider the B-Side. A musical tourniquet to bolster the tracklistings of flimsy third singles packages from disappointing second albums, or the bejewelled underbelly of pop’s fattened calf, where only those with the tenacity to wade through its less salubrious moments can discover prized thickets of lustrous dream pop in which to lose themselves? The sole territory of sexless alt casualties with vinyl-encrusted fingers or a category of songs needlessly shackled with pejorative associations just because they were tossed off in the last few minutes of studio time whilst the bassist waited for the drugs to kick in? As it so often is with such matters, the answer lies somewhere between the two.
At least, that’s the charitable answer. The B-Side is, for the most part, undoubtedly home to the sort of musical afterbirth that sends eyes rolling skyward and fingers scrambling towards the ‘eject’ button. But not always. Some of the best music has sprung from the unassuming origins of ‘Side Two’ and, on this day of days, Canned Applause wishes to doff its fashionably distressed cap in the direction of those session tracks that didn’t quite make it onto the infinite digital plains of YouTube, iTunes or Hypemachine and must languish, forever forgotten, in some dusty corner of a long-since closed record exchange.
First up is this, a track plucked from the single ‘Trial By Fire’ by indie also-rans Terris. But first; some context. Big news for all of 12.6 seconds back in 2000, Terris made the sort of records that made you wish your stereo had a volume setting lower than mute, with tracks so trying that they could have made Mother Teresa reach for her uzi with an exasperated sigh. The band managed only one album of sub-Joy Division/Smithsian jangily dross before sinking back into the indie marshlands faster than a lead-coated turd down the khazi of pop culture. Their entire recorded output was singularly awful, except for this – a B-Side that was ironically far better than any of the singles it shadowed. Walking the tightrope between raw-throated assurance and morbid twittering without doing anything as crass as submitting to either, it sounds like a fisherman’s wife got the Beta Band drunk on bathtub-brewed hooch before sailing away with them on a dinghy lined with the fur of a Super Furry Animal, pausing only to record the whole lot for prosperity on a busted Dictaphone covered in gravel. Like all best the B-Sides, it softly creeps into your subconscious and rides along shotgun until you wake up one day to discover you’ve been whistling it for three days straight and have got the lyrics tattooed onto the inside of your thigh. Like all the best music, you can love it without having to fully understand why.
