Ashbury Park Press
                             July 28, 1995, Friday

SECTION: D, Pg. 6, New Recordings

LENGTH: 507 words

HEADLINE: A tantalizing look at Superchunk's punk-rock legacy

BYLINE: MATTY KARAS; PRESS CORRESPONDENT

BODY:

Superchunk "Incidental Music 1991-95"

Merge 085

   TIME was when Superchunk was going to be the one to finally plant the
punk-rock flag at the top of the pop mountain that the Buzzcocks and
the Replacements and so many other great ones before them had failed to 
climb. But some guys from Seattle got there first, and while those guys 
kept claiming that they didn't really want the crown, they wore it anyway.

   Superchunk went out of its way to avoid big-league promotion and 
distribution, quietly asking its record label, Matador, to be dropped from its
contract when the formerly independent Matador arranged to have its product
distributed by Atlantic Records.  Superchunk,  one of the Matador bands that
Atlantic reportedly wanted most (along with Pavement, who stayed with Matador
but also refused Atlantic distribution), now releases its records on Merge, the
small label run by singer Mac McCaughan.

   And on "Foolish," its first full-length on Merge,  Superchunk  pulled back
from its fast and noisy guitar heroism and embraced romantic pop music. It was
more pretty than rousing, which may be a good idea if you're Bette Midler, but
which can get you into trouble if your core audience feels most at home in a
mosh pit. Foolish, indeed.

   "Incidental Music," which randomly collects 19 singles and B-sides and
various ephemera released on a variety of indie labels during the time, more or
less, that the band was signed to Matador, is a tantalizing but also frustrating
glimpse at what might have been.  Superchunk  made its early reputation
onanthemic pop hooks set to a blurring, gray haze of punk-rock guitar, but
always, it is now clear, yearned for something more.

   "Incidental Music" includes, for example, an acoustic version of "Throwing
Things," a song from  Superchunk's  pulverizing pop album "No Pocky for Kitty,"
and makes it sound like a folk-pop standard. Conversely, there are much harder
and blurrier versions of two songs from the next album, "On the Mouth," the one
where Superchunk  started to clean up its sound.

   These versions of "Mower" and "Precision Auto," with feedback howling and
fingers scratching across electric guitar strings like fingernails on a
blackboard plugged into amplifiers turned up to 10, suggest an alternate path
for  Superchunk  in which the music would have kept getting noisier and noisier
at the same time the writing was sounding more and more like classic 
rock. This Superchunk  would have made the Flaming Lips sound like a 
born-and-bred pop band by comparison, and might have tested the real 
interest of modern-rock radio and modern-rock consumers in hard, bracing 
pop music.

   Or it may just have run out of steam. "Incidental Music" is mostly B-sides,
granted, but you can't help noticing that it all starts sounding the same. The
major hooks, like "Mower," rise above the sameness, but perfectly decent ones
like "Shallow End" (originally released, ironically, on Atlantic, as part ofthe
"Jerky Boys" soundtrack) and "Makeout Bench" slide in a bit too easily.