No, Five Songs isn't back, not really. Probably soon, though. Why not! I figured out how to make emails on these things work, which would be nice. No, instead I'm taking a break from writing on my newly resurrected gaming blog about my new in-progress game design to write about music a bit. And this seems like the right place? Geez, why am I plugging my gaming blog here? Nobody reads either of these things.
Anyway, I was thinking about EPs. As I often do. The thing about a great EP is that it almost by definition has to be all killer. A great album can be marred by a duff song and still be great. In fact, most great albums are that way. But if you've got four songs or so, they all have to smoke otherwise you're going to lose at least a grade. So a truly great EP is always going to be an awesome hang, if a brief one. As a result, I think very fondly about my favorite EPs, and probably disproportionately often.
EPs are also kind of the hallmark of a music sicko. Having strongly held opinions about the EPs of various bands means that you've perused their music enough to learn about those EPs, never mind listened to them enough to be able to rank them. You're in deep. Or I'm in deep, I suppose. I don't know about you.
Anyway, I wanted to highlight an EP in particular, maybe my favorite EP. It ranks ahead of Fugazi's self-titled debut, an incredible piece of work featuring a couple of their best songs, and one not really matched by the follow-up Margin Walker (which is why 13 Songs isn't their best record, also it's also not really an album (that's in here just to annoy one person)). But seriously, an EP with "Waiting Room" and "Suggestion" is really setting the bar high here, but this mystery EP clears it.
I'm also not talking about Pavement's Watery, Domestic, which is pound-for-pound my favorite Pavement record, which is really saying something. All four of the songs are absolutely vintage Pavement, and as tight as the band got during that time frame. I think in a lot of ways the songs are done a disservice by being re-issued, re-packaged, and re-packaged, alongside other songs that might not be as strong. Try listening to those songs, just those four, and marvel at how locked in they were (even with Gary Young still on drums).
I'm not talking about Signals, Calls, and Marches from Mission of Burma, as good a post-punk record as anybody has ever made. Post-punk this taut just feels right in a compact package.
(Yes, this blog is just "Let's Remember Some EPs".)
It's not any of Belle & Sebastian's various majestic EPs, from which it's difficult to pick my favorite, although I suppose I'd probably pick This Is Just A Modern Rock Song. B&S never really scrimped on the tunes they put on EPs, especially early, and they released a lot of them. Maybe the best body of EPs of any band, taking into account the full set?
I could go on for a while. Spiral Scratch! Celebrate The New Dark Age! Beaster! Out Of Step! Superfuzz Bigmuff! Convict Pool! The Unreleased Themes For Hellraiser! Broken! Hit Self-Destruct I'm sure I'm missing others. I did write myself a little script to look for records in my collection that have more than 1 track and fewer than 7, just to jog my memory, but that probably misses some EPs (but had 526 possibilities). And there are others that have been re-released with bonus tracks or on comps. Not to mention EPs that are relatively recent that I'm not sure where they rank. Like, geez, that Khruangbin/Leon Bridges EP is really good.
But all of that leads me to my favorite EP. There was a band in Davis, California, back in the early 90s to mid 90s called Lawsuit that I only became aware of because a friend saw them at a show when he was going to grad school at UC Davis. According to Discogs, they only put out two releases, a fantastic album (Emergency Third Rail Power Trip) and the EP in question. It's just called EP, and my goodness, it's so good. Lawsuit play a kind of horn-laden pop-rock that calls to mind the bouncier Talking Heads tunes or maybe Oingo Boingo. Paul Sykes manages to sound both completely forlorn and hopeful at the same time, a neat trick. The arrangements are so full, so rich, that you can pick out so many parts to follow along with and still hear new stuff. It's just an incredible record, one I highly recommend to everybody.
If only it weren't basically impossible to hear. I couldn't find it on Youtube, and it's hopeless to search for. It's probably on there somewhere. But, this isn't just me gassing up a record nobody can hear to tease you all. No, what I discovered tonight is that Lawsuit is on Bandcamp. And you can listen to Emergency Third Rail Power Trip, a record that should have been bigger than it was (I don't think it made it away from Davis, really). And, maybe most interestingly from my perspective, there's stuff on there I've never heard.
One of my most beloved bands, one lost to obscurity, suddenly has a record that was remastered in 2020 that I get to listen to. The internet is mostly bad these days, but occasionally, it's magical.