Transaudio

Green Day、Operation Ivy、Crimpshrine を生み出したのと同じバークレーのストリートを拠点に、Pot Valiant(別名 Vagrants)は90年代初頭に独自の「ギルマンゲイズ」スタイルを築き上げた。今作には同バンドの Lookout と Sunny Syndicut からリリースされた 7インチ、Transaudio の LP、さらにコンピ収録曲まですべてを1枚のCDに収め、オリジナル・テープからリマスターして収録されています。

Active for only a few years in the early ‘90s, Bay Area band Pot Valiant stood apart from their peers in the punk rock scene with a sound that wasn’t so easily defined. After spending a few years operating as the Vagrants, a more straightforward, rough-edged punk outfit with releases on the Lookout label, the members of the band underwent a transformation that included a name change and an expansion of their sound to include shoegazey guitar tones, slow, deliberate tempos, and songwriting moods in line with the emo wave of the time. Pot Valiant’s sole full-length release, Transaudio, was released in 1994 as the band was breaking up, and includes a comprehensive capsule of their boundary-challenging sound. Songs like “Tapir” and “Nugget Killer” are fuzzy alternative rock, with moments of loud-soft ‘90s grunge dynamics mixing with the classic shoegaze combination of redlined distortion and dreamy vocal melodies. “This Heaven Has Bars” is perhaps the album’s most pop-friendly moment, with a midtempo groove and just a hint of twee in its presentation. The woozy, drawn-out “Last Sun” has similarities to slowcore pioneers like Codeine and Duster, but breaks away from sleepiness with its eruptive, barely in control choruses. There’s even some restless spoken word material and airy-yet-dischordant guitar work akin to Slint’s Spiderland on “Low Dexterity Points,” making Transaudio something of a post-rock record when the genre was just finding its footing. While Pot Valiant cover a lot of different ground on the nine songs that make up their only long player, the entire affair is held together by locked-in group playing, and no matter how much the band experiments, they never stray too far from their punk rock roots. ~ Fred Thomas