#supreme dicks

The Emotional Plague Supreme Dicks 1996, Homestead (Bandcamp)

In the ‘80s it became a trope of punkier/grungier alternative bands to include little gobs of noisy tape experiment gunk on their releases, often as a b-side or hidden track. By the ‘90s there was a whole loose subgenre of artists that could be summarized as “if Dinosaur Jr.’s ‘Poledo’ grew limbs and became a band”—Dino alum Lou Barlow’s Sebadoh being the most obvious outcome, but Amherst, MA’s Supreme Dicks maybe the purest. Early conceptions of post-rock as a genre had an apocalyptic undercurrent: what would music sound like a century after rock’s disappearance, when the hairless blind mole children crawl out of the fallout shelters and discover a half-eaten guitar?

Supreme Dicks’ The Emotional Plague sounds like a primal soup of life. Protozoan cells of folk, free jazz, noise rock, minimalist chamber music, etc. mill around, eating and interbreeding. Occasionally enough of them stick together for something burly and song-like to lurch from the bog and stagger around for a few minutes before crumbling back into the pool. Yet even in the formless stretches afterward, the texture is fascinating, blobby with saxophone skronk and unplaceable cries reminiscent of bleating lambs. When something familiar emerges it feels like a remnant of the old world being rediscovered, like the resplendent exotica of “Along a Bearded Glade.”

Sprawling movements like “Porridge for the Calydonian Bear” and “Siberian Penal Colony (Ode To Joel Stanley)” push a certain version of dreamy post-hardcore past anything recorded by Slint or Unwound, and nearly 30 years later The Emotional Plague feels like a landmark. While there are certainly some passages that begin to grate, I often find myself with Dicks on the brain (ugh, fuckin kill me).

SUPREME DICKS - THE EMOTIONAL PLAGUE (Homestead, 1996)