youngmanhattanite:

Pointed jokes are wearing thin, 

Portrait of the artist with his face punched in…

I’ve been revisiting Spent’s Songs of Drinking and Rebellion all week and damn is it timeless. Some of the best mid-90s indie rock out there in my opinion. If you like anything resembling Superchunk (they were on Merge after all) then you will dig this. So damn indie even MAURA didn’t know them. One MeFier says “Excuse Me While I Drink Myself To Death” is an example of a song that climaxes at the very end, which I suppose is true if you count the last third of a song the “very end.” Kicking myself I missed their reunion show in Brooklyn last year.

This is probably more of a keep-it-in-the-family reblog, but I was pretty happy to see YM giving some much-needed props to Spent. Full disclosure: The guy who sings this song is my boyfriend. But still.

Spent were actually around the New York scene at the same time as my old band, so even though we didn’t meet each other until 2005, John and I were both well aware of each other’s work. Texas is the Reason was, after all, totally into Superchunk — obviously! — so Merge Records artists were high on our band’s list of albums to high-five over. He still doesn’t believe this, but everyone I knew in 1996 owned a Spent record. Because of that fact, you could also say this is a see-I-told-you-so reblog.

All biases aside, Spent really were one of the great unheralded indie rock bands of the ’90s — and maybe one day I’ll make a list of the other ones everyone seems to have forgotten. (In a just world, Seam would really be a bigger deal than Unrest.) I will say this though: Missing the reunion shows for and around XX Merge is definitely worth kicking yourself over.