Game Theory / The Loud Family

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