Each week, KALX receives dozens of new releases to be added to the Features bin in our legendary library. Including CDs, 7”, and LPs, we have anywhere between 500-700 pieces of music from local to international bands in this small section. Every piece of music in the feature bin is new music, meaning it’s the first place our DJs go to discover the next big thing. The music is constantly changing, and every time you take a visit to the bin, there is something fresh waiting. This is a review of just one of our amazing records currently in our feature bin.
The year is 1996. Grunge is at the height of its power and in Portland, Oregon an up-and-coming band that could retrospectively be called a supergroup, is falling apart. Composed of four friends, some of whom met in high school in Texas and the rest who fell into the same circles at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, Heatmiser had finally stumbled into some minor success signing with Caroline, an indie-ish imprint of Virgin records. The recording sessions quickly fell into bickering and what bassist Sam Coomes would call musicianship that was “decent, but could be better.”
It’s true that most of the musicians behind Heatmiser at that time would come to resent the band, at least for a while. In the broader history of 90s indie and grunge, this final album would be painted not as an end but as a beginning of more illustrious careers. Guitarist and songwriter Elliott Smith would go on to earn a grammy for his solo work; Bassist Sam Coomes became one half of the legendary duo Quasi (with Sleater-Kinney’s Janet Weiss); Drummer Tony Lash’s had a long career in music production, and songwriter Neil Gust later formed the group No. 2. Smith himself saw this album as a formative moment in a sort of ironic way, when he realized this loud sound wasn’t his style: he finally came to the discovery that he “didn’t have to turn all these songs [he] wrote into these loud things.”
But this rerelease, on Third Man Records, comes at a perfect time for a reappraisal of the band’s final effort, 30 years since it first tore them apart. In retrospect, the tension in the record, between soft and loud, angry and sad, is palpable. Multiple Smith songs on the record were reworked and put out as acoustic versions on the posthumous release of New Moon. At the same time, this rerelease includes an electric version of “Christian Brothers” off Smith’s self titled 1995 release. This interplay between Smith’s solo and his Heatmiser work point to how large a role this often forgotten footnote in his biography played in his musical development, even if it was only to wholesale reject the sound Heatmiser had spent years building. However, no man is ever a monolith, and in later albums (especially 2004’s posthumous From a Basement on a Hill), Elliott would reclaim the loud sound he once shied away from in his solo work.
Beyond the phenomenal Christian Brothers cut, which every Smith fan should listen to, the unreleased tracks add layers of complexity to the album. There’s “Burnt Out, Still Glowing,” which features some of my new favorite Smith lyrics. Yet with its frantic, almost dizzying melody and buzzing guitars, it is still utterly Heatmiser. Some tracks feature the classic Heatmiser move: cheesily shouting the song’s sound title (see: Get Lucky Demo, Everybody Has it), which perhaps foreshadow exactly why Smith was sick of the group, while others sound like they could have been released on New Moon (You Gotta Move, I’m Over That Now).
Equally revealing and astonishing are Gust’s bonus tracks, tight rock songs which were perhaps cut not because of their inferiority, but instead because of their explicit homoeroticism. At the height of its popularity, Heatmiser was still often dismissed as being queercore, a pejorative that other gay led rock bands would be labeled with. This is not necessarily a label Heatmiser tried too hard to shy away from – Gust himself revealed in an interview with The Guardian this year that “Elliott was fully on board with being a queer band,” and that Elliott often didn’t use female pronouns in his own songs in solidarity with Gust.
Behind this backdrop, it seems remarkable that nearly 30 years later, Gust’s more explicitly gay songs, perhaps cut from the album for fear of how they would affect sales, finally found their place back on the album. The songs definitely hold their own against Smith’s: “Dirty Dream” is a darkly funny and haunting song about sexual repression and the closet, while “Cocksucker’s Blues” shows the more seedy side of Portland’s gay scene in the 90s, all set to a more upbeat soft indie sound. “Silent Treatment” is perhaps my favorite new Gust tune, both angry and melancholic, about seemingly an argument with a lover, who at the end simply pretends that nothing has changed – a universal feeling that Gust’s specific lyrics get at with striking accuracy.
Although the original album and bonus tracks were recorded in the 90s, the songs’ justified anger, sadness, and cynicism about the music industry, relationships, and queer acceptance feel just as prescient today. On “The Fix is In,” Smith harnesses his classic angry whisper while singing “I can’t stand by here waiting while you dumb me down.” Even if the world wasn’t quite ready for a queer male grunge band in the 90s, Heatmiser wasn’t waiting around. Their songs were overtly political, from the anti-cop “Plainclothes Man” to “Dirty Dream.” Finally, with the release of these songs, we can rediscover a band whose message resonates today, and whose future was cut short in many senses– at one point near his death, Smith mused that he might want to have a Heatmiser reunion, having finally made peace with all his bandmates.
On his fantastic 2022 album, “First Love” Gust wrote one of the most devastating queer love songs, released under the band name No. 2. On it, Gust sings “My first love wouldn’t say he loved me back / I’ve come a long way, the time goes fast.” Much of these songs seem teleported right from this time of initial heartbreak, the understanding that his love was forbidden. The album’s loud rock sound that eventually led, at least in part, to their break up, lends itself to expressing the freshness of this pain before time has slipped away from Gust, becoming simply a crushing memory. Mic City Sons brings us right back to the urgent sound of protest, anger, and heartbreak that ring through the rest of Smith and Gust’s careers.
Review by Mia Call
