Superdrag

Industry Giants

[3/5]

Superdrag wrote two of the most underappreciated rock albums of the ’90s, 1996’s Regretfully Yours and ’98’s Head Trip In Every Key, before being eaten by the major-label machine. They subsequently made a pair of decent indie discs with revised lineups, then frontman John Davis found Jesus and broke up the band in 2003. But like similar major-label sob story Smoking Popes, the band reconvened for an album of all-new material. The resulting Industry Giants is deliberately lo-fi and raw, at times sounding like demos (the Hüsker Dü-lite “5 Minutes Ahead Of The Chaos”). The disc’s low-water mark comes with the two songs bassist Tom Pappas contributes, “Cheap Poltergeists” and “You’re Alive”-two excellent examples of why he never had songwriting credits on the band’s seminal discs. Davis’ material generally fares better (see “Everything’ll Be Made Right” and the ass-kicking “Aspartame”), though while the album has plenty of chutzpah, it lacks the sentimentality and longing of the quieter moments in the band’s back catalog. The exception to this is the brilliant “Live And Breathe,” a song that would make My Bloody Valentine seethe with jealousy. (SUPERDRAG SOUND LABORATORIES/THIRTY TIGERS; superdrag.com) Scott Heisel



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