Review Revue: Swallow - Sourpuss

Welcome to Review Revue, where every Thursday I dig through the KEXP stacks to share DJ reviews and comments written on the covers of LPs (and occasionally CDs) in the ’80s and ’90s, when the station was called KCMU, the DJs were volunteers, and people shared their opinions on little white labels instead of the internet.

This week we have yet another Seattle band I clearly should have already heard of, and another nod to the wonderful, informative (if occasionally misinformative) blogs of the first decade of the 21st century. I figured a band called Swallow would be nigh-impossible to find online, but actually I got a few helpful hits pretty quickly (including our old friends at Lamestain, who were so informative last week).This time, though, there's even a very long Allmusic entry, which details the ups and downs of this early grunge band's saga. From what I can tell, Swallow has disbanded and reunited a number of times over the decades, and baced on their Facebook page, they seem to have developed a habit of popping their heads up about once a year or so - most recently last summer in a SubPop-30-affiliated show at the Parliament with Blood Circus and The Derelicts, which must have been a blast. So keep your eyes on that Facebook feed . . . you never know when the next Swallow sighting will happen!

But I'm not here just to send you to other web sites. Let's see what the KCMU DJs had to say about the band's second album, which was not exactly widely promoted in the states (as far as I can tell it was only released as an import, which, if you weren't paying attention to music in the 20th century, made it really hard to actually hear something).