My man Jeff Mueller has had three seminal bands that were/are all vastly unappreciated: Rodan, June of 44, and the still-active Shipping News.  Each of these groups had their own individual sound, but in a way one can trace the evolution of common member Mueller from one to the next.

Save Everything, Shipping News’ excellent 1998 debut album, seemed to culminate and refine the angular indie-aggressive sound the two bands before had begun in various rawer forms.  You can almost hear Mueller growing up from one outfit to the next.  How quaint.

Shipping News’ latest album One Less Heartless to Fear was released a couple of weeks ago; here’s the press description:

This is the band s first new full-length album since Flies
The Fields, and a helluva lot has happened in the last
five years two weddings, fatherhood, serious illness,
a presidential election, multiple wars, city moves, two
Batman films, and lots of time with friends playing songs.
These things seem to have inspired the band to make their
most aggressive and adolescent album to date. Shipping
News has jettisoned the long songs (and glacial tempos)
of the past to concentrate on energetic blasts of noisy
rock with a little gallows humor thrown in. While slipping
into a slightly more sympathetic mood once or twice, the
new songs are stripped down and pretty much nasty.

Woof.

-KW

Okay so I’m a little jealous of Axl and Vince manning up and scalping CL tix to go see the always-magnificent TOOL play later today in smelly Jersey…..fumes/Aquanet/festival crowds aside, that shiz is clearly gonna rip.

And in reminiscing back to when that particular band started, I can’t help but think about some other under-the-radar groups that began in the early 90s, and unfortunately didn’t last nearly long enough.

One such act was undoubtedly the extremely artful and powerful underground unit known to those who know as RODAN.

Thankfully bandleader Jeff Mueller has graced our ears over the years with a couple more truly amazing bands, June of 44 and Shipping News (for more mp3s check out my Sunday Spotlight on the man behind the bands here), the latter of which is still active and releasing wonderful albums/touring from time to time…..but there was something about the innate raw energy of Rodan that cemented their sound as seminal to so many fans of the aggressive post-rock scene.

And this track is a perfect example of the runaway freight train meets laid-back dining car melange that the band employed so well.

‘Nuff respect due!

RODAN — “The Everyday World of Bodies”, from Rusty (1994)

-KW

So this guy Jeff Mueller, and the three seminal bands he formed over the last ten + years, Rodan, June of 44, and Shipping News, has/have greatly influenced the stark, melodic guitar-heavy drone meets aggressive post-rock world, and truly spoken to this guy right here.

I wish I could say I was one of the kids back in the day who really appreciated these forward thinking, understated bands like June of 44 or Slint, but to be honest, at the time, in addition to grungetronica, I was pretty preoccupied with bands like this and a dude they will forever call the G-father. It took me many years before I discovered the abundant fruits of the post-post scene, which often admittedly sound like something coming out of some random basement as you walk by a paint-chipped house in some random city like Portland or Milwakee, but herein lies the charm as well…in this case Louisville is the home of the sound (as well as the birthplace of Slint), and my prolific man Mueller has outdone himself with these three bands.

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