HÜSKER PÖLL: Warehouse - Songs and Stories

You're half right.

sides 3 & 4: mostly terrific
sides 1 & 2: mostly boring

Sides 1-4 all awesome

CAG and FYW are my favorite Husker albums.

Same here! I'd probably rank this one third - it's great but there are definitely a few songs I could lose - I've got to admit I've no idea why You Can Live at Home is so well-liked. That bassline is so clunky! Also I just think the vocal fade-out of Up in the Air would be a perfect album/career closer.

Teasing: https://twitter.com/numerogroup/status/777259538776854528

If it's what I heard a few years ago it's a full scale remasters/reissues of the catalog plus all sorts of extras

Remasters you say???

If these albums are actually remastered--as in, you can play them without getting a headache--I will write Numero a blank check

Wow numero group???

This is exciting

I just realized the idea of huskers demos would be really enticing to me. I hope there's demos in the extras.

the idea of non-spot (and non-warners-80s-glossy) huskers albums is both thrilling and terrifying to me.

Extras/demos are very appealing but spending $$$ on music I already know by heart, less so.

Interesting. The post mentions "seven years in the making." The first I'd heard of anything re: Numero and Husker Du was back in 2012, I'd say, but when I asked Mould for confirmation then the best he would give was that all three members of HD were for the first time sharing the same legal representation. Which is not nothing. Why now and not then, though, I dunno.

Wait, is this ... this: New Double CD of previously unreleased Husker Du pre-Landspeed/Everything Falls Apart demos coming out!

It could be! So hard to say. Also, my comment upthread about remasters... That was the plan at some point I think, keep in mind grant hart is involved in all these decisions so things can be.... fluid I would imagine

I always heard Mould was the sticking point, that for the longest time he wanted control of the masters in exchange for his Ok.

yeah that could be, they both seemed to shit on greg a couple years ago in the press, too so who know if that was part of it

I'd always heard that the masters were shitty and that remastering them wouldn't make the sound any better. I think that was Mould's take over the years.

But after hearing the cleanup on the Beatles' Live At the Hollywood Bowl, it seems that technology is going to allow some true turd polishing.

Also:

https://twitter.com/numerogroup/status/778368625849864192

Jeepers. Too bad they waited until no one pays for music anymore.

feel like the target market for that husker set is literally the only people who pay for music anymore

was gonna say

why are we assuming it's a box set?

I actually hope it isn't

Numero has teased demos and New Day Rising so far; I can't imagine they'll release them separately.

it's just that I can probably only afford the paid-download option (bc I can chip away at it album by album), and if it's a box I won't be able to afford that either

My disposable income is 20 dollars a month at most rn

the great thing about numero is it will be in print for some time--i save up for their pricier box sets myself and then splurge

Gonna start a "never remaster HD" campaign

Bleh I'm seeing that numero doesn't even have a pay to download option by itself. You have to buy the physical (presumably LP only?) to be able to download.

yeah good point i think they just did that

not from Numero, but missed this when it was announced (Walker Art Center is putting out the record):

Join us in the gallery as Yousif Del Valle performs the complete drum track from the newly released, limited-edition LP Land Speed Record. A set by his thrash metal band Hate Beast follows.

The limited-edition, clear vinyl LP contains a rendition of Hüsker Dü’s original drum track played by Del Valle and recorded live at 7th St Entry on April 14, 2016. Published by the Walker, the album serves as the catalogue for Larson’s exhibition and includes liner note essays by Walker exhibition curator Siri Engberg, Walker artistic director Fionn Meade, independent curator Dieter Roelstraete, and Rev. Russell Rathbun, founding preacher at St. Paul’s House of Mercy. A separate, deluxe edition of the LP additionally features a color photograph, signed and numbered by Larson, of the salvaged objects from the home of Hüsker Dü drummer Grant Hart, which are the subject of his film on view in the Walker galleries.

Available in the Walker Shop, this 2016 LP release coincides with the 35th anniversary of Hüsker Dü’s Land Speed Record and Del Valle’s in-gallery performance. Album $19.81 ($17.83 Walker members); deluxe edition $500 ($450).

I give ranking this album a go.

Can we talk about the bridge in "No Reservations" (from 1:35 - 2:47):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyOnt77oSOg

I think I'm picking up 4 guitar tracks:
1) there's the up-stroke beeping pulse
2) then there's 2 (reversed?) kinda "glide-guitar" (to borrow a name for a technique that would show up a year or two later on MBV's Isn't Anything).
3) once Bob's vox come in there's this strong, deep drone descending from C#m-B-A-E pedaling over the chiming open b-e strings.

It's one of the more psychedelic & noisy moments on the record and I'm trying to draw parallels to earlier predecessors like the 2nd half of Wire's "The 15th" but "No Reservations" is far more blurry & hazy. What other art-rock has a similar feel or plays in a similar space?

I missed this one but I probably would have picked "Ice Cold Ice" even though the live version on The Living End is better than the version on the album.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHoYXSdhjAQ

XP - Perhaps the (unjustly) forgotten about live record from Rain Parade, Beyond The Sunset, may have similar things going on?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slNikQBXKCA

What an album. Bed of Nails is the only dud. Bob should've let Grant have another one in its place.

This album weirdly presages not just (aspects of) shoe gaze, but also the all-treble sound of a lot of '90s Brit rock.

That section *does* sound a lot like parts of Isn't Anything. I listened to Warehouse a lot right when it came out and very little since. Spot's production never bothered me, but these interesting bits wash out on the late records. I only tenuously heard a HU-MBV connection by the time the time MBV came on my radar a year after HD was kaput. If Isn't Anything pulls a lot from Husker Du sonics, it also lets go of traditional Beatles/Buzzcocks song conventions, which Mould and Hart kept emphasizing more and more. Like, "Feed Me with Your Kiss" is easy to imagine as a late Du track, with the storm of fuzz and drawled vocals, but what sets it free is the conceptual bit with the incrementing count of blam-blam-blams. "From the Gut" Huskers might have done something like that, but not the final stage of the band.

I always thought this captured something of shoe gaze:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzzP29fw930

fwiw "Psychocandy" came out two months later.

What other art-rock has a similar feel or plays in a similar space?

Maybe some of the songs with layered guitar segments on third and fourth Camper Van Beethoven albums?

(The self-titled one and Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart)

Very overdue, but thanks for all your replies (esp. bendy, Josh, tim). I realized in retrospect that Bob came back to this proto-shoegaze sound for Sugar (post-shoegaze?) which is kinda awkward.... yet I think the moments on the Sugar records that get psych-gaze are not sloppy enough for me to love, which is why I keep coming back to "No Reservations".

Ok hold on a second!

From a Kevin Shields interview on how he created the MBV "glide-guitar" sound:

So I'd been playing the song 'Slow', and previously I'd been using this reverse reverb which I'd read about in a Bob Mould interview

https://thequietus.com/articles/08745-kevin-shields-interview-mbv-my-bloody-valentine

lol, Josh in Chicago from 4 years ago upthread:

Apparently Mould was also doing proto MBV stuff (slowing guitars down, blending them) pretty early, which maybe in those days accounted for his stun guitar sound. I know Shields has cited a Mould interview for giving him the idea of using reverse reverb. Billy Corgan cites Mould, too.

― Josh in Chicago, Monday, August 8, 2016 7:59 AM (four years ago)

I seem to remember reading in Tape Op or somewhere that it was a rackmount fx unit, Alesis Midiverb II that had a short reverse reverb setting that inspired the glide guitar sound.

Any deep Husker fans know of any earlier reverse reverb examples prior to "No Reservations"?

And what the hell is "stun guitar" anyway? The only other place I've seen it referenced is on Blue Oyster Cult album credits.

There's a guitar part during the intro to Eiffel Tower High that sounds a bit reverse reverbish

Also Don't Know Yet off Flip Your Wig has a lot of backwards guitar but whether or not that's rev reverb I don't know. They obv played the tape backwards for the cymbals though