By Screaming Trees, 2005

Thank heavens the Trees' remarkably cohesive and mature 1986 debut has finally been released on CD. The songs aren’t really "there" yet, but they would be with time. Few bands mixed psychedelic, hard rock and punk sounds in the mid '80s quite the way the Screaming Trees did.

They had contemporaries; the Flaming Lips had a similar mix of manic energy with acid-tinged vocals at the time, while Plan 9 were making a similarly keyboard-heavy psych-punk, and Australian act the Died Pretty also shared vocalist Mark Lanegan’s then very un-hip fascination with Jim Morrison. Clearly, this is music arrived at in a vacuum, out of the isolation, boredom, and desperation of life in a small logging town in the Pacific Northwest. Steve Fisk’s production may be a tad loop-happy and reverb-laden, but it’s far crisper and cleaner than most recordings of the era.

This album has aged remarkably well. --Mike McGonigal

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