Copyright 1993 The Seattle Times Company The Seattle Times April 2, 1993, Friday, Final Edition SECTION: TEMPO; Pg. 30 LENGTH: 687 words HEADLINE: SUPERCHUNK: MAKING IT BIG ON ITS OWN BYLINE: BY PHIL WEST BODY: Superchunk, rock music, with Delilah and Incredible Force of Junior, tonight, 9 p.m., at RKCNDY, 1812 Yale, $ 7. 623-0470. ------------------------------------------------------------------- For a band being praised by the indie rock nation as the "next big thing," Superchunk isn't behaving accordingly. The ingredients for "making it big" are all there. Superchunk, who will play RKCNDY tonight, is the flagship band in Chapel Hill, N.C.'s, tight-knit and much-hyped music scene. Superchunk's music is a perfect, searing fusion of ferocious punk rock and well-groomed pop. The band's last two albums came out on Matador, an increasingly important New York independent label whose roster includes meta-pop cult heroes Pavement and indie band du jour Come. If Superchunk were playing by the rules Nirvana rewrote when it stumbled into success in 1991, it would be negotiating a major label contract by now. But as things turn out, the next Superchunk will probably come out on a much smaller label - its own. "Right now, nobody from the major labels are talking to us," said guitarist Jim Wilbur in a recent interview. "That's probably because we've blown them off already. We're doing well on our own, and making a living off the band, which is more than what we expected to do when we started. We sell plenty of records without a major label, so why fix it if it isn't broke?" That's the kind of talk that should put major labels in anguish. In the band's three years, it's grown from its earlier sparse, catchy anthems to the dense, explosive, multilayered songs of its latest album, "On the Mouth." Yet the songs have still kept the band's early urgency and the perfect pop hooks that generated the hype in the first place. There are hooks in nearly every song they write, either shoved in the song's core rhythm, hidden in offshoot guitar parts which force the song into the listener's frontal lobes for days, or in Mac McCaughan's high, wailing, insistent voice, which makes innocuous lines like "It was a robin's egg and it was blue" seem like the most important revelation of the past decade. The latest album is more complex, according to Wilbur, because they spent what they consider a monumental amount of time on the album: a week. "For us, that's rigorous studio time," Wilbur said. "The album before this one only took three days. There's only so much you can do to a song before it loses the immediacy that we like to have. There is more to listen to on this album, though." John Reis, who plays in San Diego-based bands Rocket From The Crypt and Drive Like Jehu, co-produced the record, and parts of "On The Mouth" seem influenced by the bombastic, snarling sound of Reis' bands. Wilbur attributes that to being friends with Reis more than any conscious effort to sound like him. "It's the same studio that they record in, and we liked the sound they got," Wilbur said. "John was just basically along as another pair of ears." The lyrics on the album, which range from the triumph-in-underachieving anthem "New Low" to the exposed andintrospective "Swallow That," come out of a need to have words in the songs and not much more. "The world isn't really weighing heavily on Mac's shoulders," Wilbur said. "He's not Bono. He just needs something to sing. He actually worries he sounds more emotional than he is about things, because he has to condense the whole experience into three minutes.