Thinking Fellers Union Local 282

***First time reissue. Has been out of print for over 30 years! Original release on Matador Records (1991). Audio remaster from original master tapes. 'The Thinking Fellers' third LP, the second released on vinyl, the first released on Matador Records, the first to include former Glorious Din guitarist and World of Pooh drummer Jay Paget (if only on the opening track), the first to showcase Mark Davies' baritone horn and Brian Hageman's viola, and the first where the band's live and recorded sound sharply diverged, Lovelyville is transitional in just about every sense and yet somehow feels like their most characteristic work. It's also perhaps the tightest and tensest of all their albums. For all its energy it feels constrained, like a clock wound almost to the point where its spring comes undone. Unusually for a big-label debut, Lovelyville concedes nothing to anything or anybody outside the band's collective sensorium. Where less gloriously self-directed artists might've written a series of variations on Tangle's college-radio showpiece 'Sister Hell,' the Fellers pushed further in the direction of perplexing audio obstacle courses like 'What Time Is It?' and 'Sports Car'; even ostensible pop songs like 'Nail in the Head' have more in common with Piero Umiliani, Ennio Morricone and 1960s easy listening than they ever did with anyone's concept of 'indie rock.' That's also largely true of the album's production. More so than on previous releases, the studio is a tool that the band and their many-tentacled engineer and producer Greg Freemen pushed to its limits and, whenever it declined to keep up, cajoled or bludgeoned into a sort of meta-instrument. Compared to their live shows, the result is a bit like standing with your ear to a hornet's nest rather than being trapped inside one, or listening to a recording of Niagara Falls on an AM radio rather than tumbling over them in a barrel. But where's the harm in that? Far from getting in their way, the difficulties entailed in recording the Fellers' material moved them even further beyond just about everyone else. As unexpected limitations, absurd workarounds, and the increasing need to define instruments via extreme EQ shifts became more integral to their studio sound, this naturally influenced their songwriting and live sound. It's also here that the band's home-recorded tracks — cutely termed 'Feller filler' by absolute fucking idiots — become more meticulously integrated into the album's flow; they are less interludes or introductions than continuations, commentaries and overdetermined explanations exemplifying the dialectic of unified purpose and free-range individual quirks that fueled their compositional process. Lovelyville is also a veritable whispering gallery of taped voices like those of squabbling drunks Pete and Ray and grandiloquent sleeptalker Dion McGregor (the source of the album's title). Like bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope, all these elements form complex patterns that don't feel like the result of the uncanny effort and vision they required. There's nothing so forlorn as a rock critic without a handy pigeonhole, so it's no shock that a record as lacking in commonplace influences as Lovelyville tended to be sledgehammered resentfully into a very narrow one labeled 'Sonic Youth.' At the time, guitarist Brian Hageman had the perfect response: 'If you've only heard 10 bands, we're going to sound like one of them.' As we can appreciate anew, thanks to Bulbous Monocle's diligent excavation and remastering of the Fellers' back catalog, there was never a stage of their development where they sounded like anyone but themselves. But particularly in 1990-91, almost no one else was making — or, more to the point, was capable of making — albums as painstakingly and recklessly inventive as Lovelyville. It's not so much an era-defining release as an era-redeeming one." —Brandan Kearney (World of Pooh/Nuf Sed)