Game Theory / The Loud Family

proceed, and keep us posted :)

Will do!

interbabe was my first and remains my favourite (inspired to check it out back in oh 1997 by Glenn Mcdonald’s review on TWAS), subject to never having been able to find plants and birds.

I think one of the things i love about scott’s work is that it doesn’t sound nearly as “smart” as you’d expect from reading about it.

By way of example, those long twisting rhyming couplets on “Screwed Over By Stylish Introverts” don’t ever sound laboured, it’s more like he just happens to think in metered rhyme.

Attractive Nuisance is almost as great as Interbabe. The run of tracks from...3 to 10? is peerless, amazing. Plus Blackness, Blackness sounds like he heard Smashing Pumpkins and decided he'd show these bozos how to do their own music, in the nicest possible way

Days For Days has some legit jams. Great production too.

Lolita Nation seems to be the critical favourite but Dead Center is my favourite Game Theory album

I hadn't gotten around to the 2 Steps from the Middle Ages reissue until today and the live tracks on it slay - killer "The Waist and the Knees" that's maximal VU freakout.

(inspired to check it out back in oh 1997 by Glenn Mcdonald’s review on TWAS)

Lol this is exactly how I found out about GT/LF

(today would've been Scott's birthday btw)

:(

the best band (Loud Family)

just constantly in my head

The "new" Game Theory album, Across the Barrier of Sound: Postscript is basically the demos for what would become the first Loud Family album, plus some covers (Beatles, Eno, Monkees, Big Star) and a few collaborations with Michael Querico of The Three O'Clock. I doubt I'll ever listen to it more than twice, but hearing how Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things might've turned out as a Game Theory record is tantalizing, and "Inverness" remains one of the most beautiful songs ever written in any form.

Pretty sure I prefer the LF musicians as well as the music but I may give this a listen. If the LF albums were put on Bandcamp I'd certainly buy most or all of them

interesting, though I can't abide Querico.

jajaja ¡que rico!

It's 'Quercio'

Reissue of the last Loud Family album

http://omnivorerecordings.com/shop/what-if-it-works/

The Scott Miller original songs on this are great, and the Anton Barbeau songs are fine. It's a shame it's padded out with covers, which Scott was never able to record convincingly. I sometimes think "Song About 'Rocks Off'" is his best song ever...but he precedes it on the album by covering "Rocks Off", when the whole point of the answer song is his distance from the Rolling Stones!

I see what you're saying about the placement of the "Rocks Off" cover. In this context it's kind of like a flashback with Scott donning unconvincing makeup to play his younger self. I think the Anton songs get progressively better as the album goes on and I actually really like "I've Been Craving Lately," but yeah, "Song About 'Rocks Off'" is the big highlight and the other Scott songs stand above everything else here.

I only got around to listening to Across the Barrier of Sound: Postscript a few weeks ago, but it's a very listenable compilation of his work between the era of the two bands. I could see someone becoming a fan and exploring further if it was the first thing of his that they heard, which wasn't the case with the scraps they had to use as bonus tracks on the previous Game Theory reissues.

Yeah, What if it Works is a bit of a grab bag, but the highs--"Song About Rocks Off," "Mavis of Maybelline Towers," "I've Been Craving Lately"--are very high.

The What if It Works reissue is out now (at least on Apple Music) and listening to it again for the first time in a while, I actually think its stronger than my previous post suggested, especially if you program out the covers (or even just "Rocks Off"). I haven't gotten to the bonus material yet, but I'm happy just to be discovering that I like this album more than I thought I did.

Listening to samples of the bonus tracks, it has hints that make me wish there was a little more wildness or experimentation on the record proper.
I think Scott regarded recording covers as a low-stress activity, but it would have been nice if he could have brought some of that casualness into his songwriting. By 2006, I think he was not only out of practice, there was a paralysis brought on by self-questioning about what was worth saying. You would hope that a collaborator and an album contract would have inspired him to produce with a little less self-consciousness, it could have freed him up.

can you blame him for giving up, he wrote three close to perfect albums in a row and nobody gave a shit

Sure, but then why do the What If It Works project at all? Why not just co-write a few songs with Anton Barbeau and let him record them?
The two "bonus" tracks at the end of the original CD only came about because the owners of 125 Records pressed them to come up with a couple more originals to make the record seem less flimsy. I'm sure they worked as hard on the album as they were able, but it might have been good for Scott to crank out two or three more songs in a week or so without worrying about e.g. whether the metaphor in the middle of the third verse was significant enough, and then record them with a similar lack of fuss.

Scott was famously (or as "famously" as he could be) meticulous, and did talk, during his life, about how slow the songwriting process was for him. There's an "Ask Scott" column on this that I would dig up for an exact quote right now if I weren't swamped with work right now.

Plenty of his songs were nominated for that <2 minutes poll, but surprisingly Rayon Drive wasn't - what a discovery, what a song! The single thing on Real Nighttime that most clearly points to what brilliance was to come imo

"Rayon Drive" is great, probably their most convincing rocker to that point. I actually find Real Nighttime less convincing as an album than Blaze of Glory, though it's a step-up in professionalism for sure (finally recording in a studio instead of Scott's bedroom!). Someone online called "Waltz the Halls Always" their best song, while for me it's quite possibly his worst original, a trebly mess.

their best song? christ that is a terrifyingly ignorant call, he was just getting started, just beginning to explore his powers

Holy shit, Wish I Could Stand Or Have. He's done it again! The undisputed master of the sub-2-minute song!

2 Steps From The Middle Ages is both a sign of songwriting greatness maturing and improving, but also a sign of a particular band that had run its course. Easy to say these things in hindsight, but you can absolutely hear what Miller was about to unleash, and why he had to shake up the people who were going to help him

There was an 89/90 Game Theory lineup with Michael Quercio, with Joe Becker as the common denominator with the first Loud Family.
According to the biography, the Lolita Nation/Two Steps lineup was wilder and fiercer onstage than you might think from the records.

Oh, the bonus tracks include some live stuff! A rollicking Baker Street on RN and a fearsome Waist + Knees on 2 Steps! So I can well believe it. But studio recordings were what he most believed in, I'd say

Is it a common sentiment among fans that Game Theory were great and Loud Family greater btw? Or is that just my own particular splitting of small differences?

The Loud Family records were recorded more professionally, with musicians of greater technical skill, but I don't really feel that Miller himself made any particular leap as a songwriter or record-maker between 1988 and 1993. I suspect, though that Game Theory accumulated more fans than Loud Family did - Lolita Nation made the top ten of the college charts, was the only Miller album reviewed in Spin (which is where I heard of them), etc. So there may be a sentimental attachment among many fans to the earlier band. I feel like his music "fit better" in the 80s context, for what that's worth, there wasn't quite the same generic niche for him to inhabit in the 90s.

Well, Lolita Nation is an event album - it sounds years ahead of its time, it's big and bold and mad - probably my overall 3rd-favourite of his and easy to see why it got more cred than anything else he did. 90s stuff pearls before critical swine

I think one mistake he might have made post-87 was to back away from making "boldly conceptual" records. I think he took particular umbrage at suggestions that his music was over-intellectualized, so he took pains to make the theoretical element of his work subtle, under the surface of a "rock record". Once someone suggested on their website that he should make a 69 Love Songs and his response was something like "great, another reason for people not to buy the records". But I think that a project like that could have helped him explore his ideas and given him a hook with potential listeners.

well i mean...he backed away from it for a while, but clearly eventually decided fuck it, they don't want straight rock records, have THIS

and out popped Interbabe Concern and Days For Days, which, fine, aren't quite 69 songs long, but which are utterly uncompromising, panoramic, totalised visions of his musical capabilities

and then he gave pure rock one last perfect bash and they didn't want that either. christ what bastards

little in music makes me more genuinely furious than the shunning of Scott Miller

I think a project like 69 Love Songs benefited from coming along at a time when the internet was well and truly established as a medium for communicating about popular music. It’s an album which makes more sense to read about than to hear random songs from out of context.

If Scott was still (perhaps correctly?) angling for college radio play during the nineties then from a certain angle it makes sense that even relatively fractured albums like Plants & Birds and Interbabe Concern try to have a bob each way.

So a song like “Such Little Nonbelievers” sounds like an appealing rock song designed for radio I guess, but then has lyrics like “ We're fighting smiling Irish / They say that we look good in uniform, and mais oui! / So good you couldn't pry the cold dead fingers / Of the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders free”.

But in the end it also makes sense that that very gambit saw the music kind of fall between two stools both commercially and critically.

which is a shame, because such a synthesis makes for incredible compelling art - as I often think about Miller, he thought in terms of a classical pop canon and his tastes were very orthodox in a lot of ways, but within that he was a remarkably experimental songwriter, a tension which brings his work to the level of alternative-pop brilliance

Is it a common sentiment among fans that Game Theory were great and Loud Family greater btw? Or is that just my own particular splitting of small differences?

With an album called "Didactic Debt Collectors", guess I shouldn't be surprised this reminds me of the Loud Family:

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

Full album here: https://finalhouse.bandcamp.com/album/didactic-debt-collectors