The band came together in the late 1980s, when Will Baum, Rebecca Odes and Alan Licht were still students at Vassar. Licht, of course, later made a name as a critic and noise-minimalist. His work with Love Child overlapped with Blue Humans and slightly preceded turns with Run On and the Pacific Ocean. His collaborations with Jandek and Loren Connors took place later, in the second half of the 1990s.

The earliest cuts here come from a 1990 single, the brash, ragged-bassed “Sofa” (memorialized here in Love Child’s only video) and the vaguely “Summertime Blues”-ish “Crocus” (with its indelible line, “My mom threw me out until I get some pants that fit/She just don’t approve of my strange kind of wit.” ) Both balance garage-rock minimalism with a bursts of noise. “Sofa” intersperses catchy, kicky girl-boy choruses with blasts of unfettered guitar squall.

The first full-length, Okay, came on Homestead in 1991. Its tracks take up a large portion of this compilation, which is fine because they bang pretty hard, especially the multi-voiced “Diane” and “Fortune Cookie” which blends the pure blasting amp noise of J. Mascis , the yelping angst of Television and the clanking post-punk bass sounds of, say, Gods Gift. But other cuts run towards jangle pop, notably “He’s So Sensitive” a lofi girl group garage rocker featuring Odes on lead vocal. The other album, Witchcraft, followed a year later, also on Homestead. It’s a bit smoother, a bit more melodic, a bit more reliant on Odes’ buzzy, dreamy vocals. “AAA/XXX” is almost dream pop, though sharp guitar slashes prop up the verse, while “Something Cruel” jangles lyrically for a seconds before cranking up to pogo speed.

Additional, previously unreleased material bookends the album. “Asking for It,” from a 1992 Peel Session comes first, layering bratty, confrontational punk on wild eruptions of near rockabilly guitar; an oozing, sludgy noise interval bisects the cut. “Greedy,” another song from the same session exults in feedback and loose harmonies, tough and vulnerable at the same time. There are also a couple of cuts from a KSPC show, including the dreaming, droning, guitar-led “All Is Loneliness” with its shades of VU. That track was recorded in 1993, near the end of this evanescent outfit’s run, and it hints at other directions that they might have taken if they had persisted. Still no use mourning what never happened. There’s plenty to celebrate here without it.