90 Day Men
We Blame Chicago
NUMERO GROUP
Too progressive for post-hardcore, too angular and jazz-flashy for math rock, and too smug and winding for their own good, the artsy, St.-Louis-to-Chicago transplant ensemble 90 Day Men spent the tail end of the ’90s (their self-released Taking Apart the Vessel EP) and the early 2000s (three LPs on the Southern label) in a squirrelly, amorphous haze of uneasy categorization. Sure, Brian Case, Cayce Key, and Chandler McWilliams (and, eventually, multi-instrumentalist-turned-composer Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe and keyboard player Andy Lansangan) started 90 Day Men with aspirations of being Slint-like without the blasé attitude—but who stays Slint-like with a coronet in the band, histrionic vocals, and long instrumental breaks?
As usual, the historian-curators at Numero Group pick up on a little-known sound that lasted for far too limited a time—ragingly ornamented and searingly rarified post-punk—and isolate its story like microscopists. Backed with a wise, lived-through set of liner notes from one who knows uncategorized Midwest punk (Tim Kinsella of Joan of Arc, Cap’n Jazz, etc.), We Blame Chicago unites the project’s three studio albums with a previously unreleased 2001 John Peel Session, the band’s five EPs, several loose singles, and a cassette featuring their debut track, “Taking Apart the Vessel,” in addition to a handful of previously unissued recordings. Taken in its entirety, from its rampant use of musical non-sequiturs to Case’s back-and-forth between snide spoken interludes and weirdly exclamatory vocalese, nothing about 90 Day Men made sense save for the fact that their up-their-own-ass avant aesthetic was the band’s saving, stately grace. That and all of their hi-hat rides.
Much has been made of 2000’s (It (Is) It) Critical Band and Case’s sounding and writing like a jerk on tracks such as “From One Primadonna to Another” and “Exploration vs. Solution, Baby.” But one man’s jerk is another man’s hero, and by 2002’s To Everybody, 2004’s Panda Park, the 2003 Too Late or Too Dead EP—and with the inclusion of Lansangan’s Tortoise-like layering—Case’s once-broad ham-handedness seems to blend into its surrounding landscape with a weird mix of sang-froid and exposed nerviness.
And if you think that five albums of this stuff might just be too much, I promise that when the 90 Day Men box is over and done with, you’ll miss their addictive, obsessive mix of mirth-meets-naivete and art-/math-/post-everything. We Blame Chicago is that rare bit of revivalism—a reconsidered sound you never considered in the first place.
