US Maple - Acre Thrills: eagle, birdy, par, bogey, or double-bogey?

Sometimes Talker and Sang Phat Editor come close, but "Open A Rose" seals the deal and puts Acre Thrills on top.

acre thrills actually has "songs" with "parts" where they play "together"...that really felt like a big deal when i first heard it.

acre thrills, sang phat, and talker are a three way tie for first. long hair a close second. still haven't heard purple on time.

US Maple is pretty much a flawless band.

I agree with this. I would choose purple on time. before long hair...

one could make the argument, IMO.

"Purple On Time" I have tried to get into several times, there are some good songs, but overall that record doesn't do as much for me. However, the live vers of the songs are great...

this thread seems like the only place where I could say that & have anybody know what I'm talking about so umm there y'go

Maple could really piss people off in a profound way....

I have the brushed aluminum version of "Long Hair"

sweet!

i hate you.

here, let me make it worse: I got it for free when I worked at Touch & Go

(ok actually now that I think of it we may have had to pay for that one)

Kept thinking - before it came out - that Purple On Time would be their "Evol" and breakthrough, but after months and months of trying, I can't hear it as anything but 3-4 great songs (esp. Tan Loves Blue) attached to some semi-interesting filler. Like many, I blame the drummer, possibly incorrectly. Always hated Steve Shelley too, but it took him three albums to really ruin Sonic Youth.

(Incidentally, emusic has a post-POT live album, but it's kind of meh.)

i really really miss us maple :(

i had a dream last nite where i was gonna give this album to thurston moore, to show him actually interesting guitar rock. in order to curb his hackneyed-ass trajectory. he was like, in town, riding bicycles around with my parents.

caused by hearing "the best day" in a tobacco shop last night, on the local radio. and google image searching the cover for acre thrills right before bed

Unfortunately they seem a case of an act quietly coming to end of a natural life (for the members I suppose at least)

what?

nm

vg+

listening to Acre Thrills right now, this rules so much

I've been an ILM lurker for so long now, I can't even remember, but it must've been more than a decade –– the recent appearance of a thread on The Fall, to paraphrase: 'Their Post-2010 LPs': are they any good?' neatly dovetailed with my own slow but steady re-evaluation of the 21st-century Fall (I maintained a hard-core refusal to accept post-'98 Fall as legit in any way at all, despite the number of folk at The Fall Online forum that could run up to 50 pages of intense discussion praising each new 21st-century Fall recorda.) But I arrive at this US Maple thread first because the discussion on the aforementioned Fall thread was at such a high level of intelligence –– I've been reassessing (slowly) those records –– and the general ideas RE the 'good ones', what makes a good 21-c Fall LP, etcetera, were so close to mine, that I wanted to jump right into the discussion, but the number of points that I felt worth making was overwhelming. So instead I've turned up on this revived US Maple 'Acre Thrills' thread because one of the big effects of endless scrolling through ILM for more than a decade has been the huge number of rock bands (and pop artists) whose names made an impression on me in the 80s-90s while I never actually heard them. Because it always came down to seeing that category of band LIVE. opening for bands i DID KNOW, and/or being gifted promo copis by music biz friends, since paying for the music I was already following an expensive problem already (esp since the early 90s was the period when hip-hop, house, & drums n bass 12-inches, compilations, and events suddenly appeared on my radar.) --- anyhow RE US Maple, the relatively-recent reissue on vinyl of their three Drag City records has been a gigantic discovery for me; various ILM threads prodded me and guided me into checking out a band that I might even have seen opening on some '90s bills, but if I did, I have no recollection at all. I definitely heard their name invoked (regularly)with the utmost respect, and often with unrestrained excitement during their heyday. Anyhow: 'Acre Thrills' and 'Talker' are nearly tied for me, but my first dive into US Maple's idiosyncratic world was via 'Acre Thrills', so it remains my favorite for that reason. The cover art is strikingly beautiful (I'm told that the Drag City reissues have been immaculate recreations of the originals.) 'Acre Thrills' is packaged in a similar high-gloss sleeve showcasing barely 'scrutable' content, an irresistible combination to me since I first saw Henry Cow's 'Unrest'. And the band simply doesn't sound like anybody else (Al Johnson is right to be slightly mystified/annoyed by the Beefheart comparisons, at least from a vocalist's p.o.v. --- guitarist Rittman and Shippy might have heard 'Lick my Decals Off ...' a couple of times, but they took it in some other direction, by way of Webern and ZZ Top.) Also, SO few rock groups of the mid 90s- mid '00s were capable of hacking away at the unnecessary elements of their material, and did it so mercilessly that they released albums with running times of 40 minutes or under (in the days of 79-minute CDs) ... US Maple's five LPs are a seriously impressive boudy of 'art rock' (but they made such playful and witty music!) It's great that there is so much live footage online, it appears that you had to see them to really truly 'get them' and, thankfully, that's possible via YouTube concert and recording studio footage --- and just to derail this thread even further, but very quickly, and I AM sticking to my initial 'Hello ILM' thesis: I have to mention band whose unforgettable name I certainly heard in the 90s, but whose music I never saw or listened to: that'd be Prolapse. Many thanks to the ILM'ers that contributed to that massive Prolapse thread that was so hilarious that the group became absolutely irresistible. And thanks to Bandcamp, I succumbed totally to the God-Like Genius of Prolapse. Their recordings (like US Maple's) are easily heard nowadays -- and it's so gratifying that they've turned out among the rare 20th-century bands that reformed and put out 21st-century records that require no special pleading. They appear to be just as 'on their game' and 'off the rails' as they were the first time around. That's just two examples of older artists I've recently discovered thanks to the level of discourse at ILM. I've still got a lot of thinking to do about the post-1998 Fall before my thoughts are organized enough to add a few meager observations to that 'Rate the 2010s Fall' thread, tho its nice to see some of my nascent and shaky thoughts about particular records pre-confirmed by that thread. Oh, and also: Sky Ferreira! I want a new record!

thanks for that post, i'm so glad you've found a way into Maple, such a rewarding body of work

Great post, marjory :)