Replay: Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Strangers from the Universe, 1994

The slow-simmer sound of the Bay Area's TFU can really thicken; its early-'90s songs typically range from muddled detachment to some noisy, genuinely recalcitrant affairs. Never too austere, thankfully, but never close to ingratiating either--something of that early Pavement "we don't care and you shouldn't either" quality that tends to ward off the cheap attachment of alt-promiscuous fans. If you've never heard of TFU, it could be because the band did this so well as to ward off any knowledge of their existence among even the narrower pool of potential devotees. So it often goes with composers of the unsettling.

As scary as Strangers from the Universe can get, TFU establishes something gentler with the album's opener, "My Pal the Tortoise." The Brian Hageman-written ditty chugs along with a rhetorical heraldry of little contortion, offering lines like "What does he find in the mud under rivers?/ Sweet lumps of honey wrapped in golden gowns," or, even cuter, "What does he file at the Hall of Records?/ A proclamation of tortoise intent."

Sticking this tune at track one was a good choice. It's got that brave gallop of the Talking Heads' "Thank You For Sending Me An Angel," which opens that band's similarly distressed More Songs About Buldings and Food. "My Pal the Tortoise" also serves to proclaim TFU's friendly intentions by simple association: Any pal of this tortoise is a pal of mine.

From there, things go cross-eyed and painful and yet there is beauty, much beauty, even if we're looking at a handful of listens to bring it all out. "Socket" lumbers all woozy and carnivalesque through a short narrative describing a childhood electrical shock, benevolent angels, awakening to hospital tubes and a current condition where "sleep is my worst enemy." Something great happens with "Guillotine" and its two repeated lines ("I saw you in the line up/ You deserve something finer"), softly sung, set to a tremulous guitar warble and anchored with reverbed cello of just-discernible comedy. It's a messy tune, but with perfect patience--Radiohead gone truly low-fi.

In any case, Strangers from the Universe introduces a minimum of weirdness-for-weirdness'-sake, and that's forever a good thing.--Dave Surratt