Various Artists
Casual Victim Pile
Rating: 3.0/5.0
Label: Matador Records
As a teenager growing up during the initial cultural explosion and resulting paradigm shift of Nirvana, any record associated with Seattle was automatically worth a listen. The late ’80s and early ’90s Pacific Northwest scene, in the mind of this youngster, was an artistically pure place; a region where, organically, a bunch of like-minded, hip slackers were able to be themselves and, in the process, get famous, make cool music and make a bunch of money doing it. I cherished CDs like Sub Pop 200- already old hat by the time I’d found it- that presented this idealized city as a place infinitely cooler than the suburb I knew, since it boasted the likes of an unwieldy, early Soundgarden, the clamorous Screaming Trees, the incredibly fun Fastbacks and even the bizarre Steven Jesse Bernstein.
With the internet’s ability to theoretically put anyone’s bedroom recordings into the iPods of anyone else with an internet connection, the playing field has been leveled and it’s unlikely that pop music will have another city’s scene reaching critical mass and becoming something the entire nation can get invested in. The closest we’ve come since has been Austin; an oasis of liberal, urbane quirk in a sea of red Texas.
So, here we have Matador’s Gerard Cosloy curating Casual Victim Pile, a collection of “what [he] liked” in Austin, circa 2008-2009. An anagram of the city’s nickname, “live music capital,” the disc has 19 tracks that don’t even begin to serve the listener by offering an accurate cross-section of rock music in Austin. There aren’t nationally known names here, and none of the bands are that disparate from one another, as heard in the frantic musicianship of White Denim or the solemn drone-stomp of the Black Angels, two Austin acts on our radar. Instead, Cosloy’s collection tends toward perfectly listenable garagey rock that ranges from forlorn and moody to the vampy and rollicking.
The highlight, hands-down, is “Hoboken Snow,” from the Kingdom of Suicide Lovers. Sounding like a younger, less-manic version of Dead Moon or a more psychedelic X, Paul Streckfus and Kelsey Wickliffe mew lyrics like Beat poetry while, in the background, amplifiers promise menace like rolling thunderheads. If you ever wondered what Mission of Burma might sound like with a female vocalist, Follow That Bird!’s “The Ghosts That Wake You” mercifully provides your answer, and the Golden Boys’ “Older Than You” is just one more piece of evidence proving that organs belong in rock bands- and that howling, yearning guitar solo ain’t bad either.
It’s when things get same-y that Cosloy fails us here; Love Collector, Bad Sports and Wild America are all back-to-back and blur into one big three-chord track. I’m still convinced that every garage rock band has at least one amazing track in them; those songs belonging to these three aren’t on Casual Victim Pile. While this collection in no way is a succinct summation of what’s happening in Austin, perhaps, none can be on a single disc. Instead, Casual Victim Pile plays like a decent jukebox at a dive rock ‘n’ roll bar; one in an alternate universe where “Don’t Stop Believin’” never existed.
by Chris Middleman
