“Very few bands make even one great album. Silkworm made several, and this is the first.” – Steve Albini
Comedy Minus One announces a long-overdue deluxe reissue of Silkworm’s out-of-print 1994 album “Libertine” (cmo019), the third and final full-length record by the band as a quartet.
This is a double 12″ pressing with a supplementary CD including “The Marco Collins Sessions” as well as two additional recordings from the band’s time at Pachyderm Studio.
Includes all-new artwork throughout (the revised cover is pictured at the top of this post) plus a full color insert with liner notes by Silkworm’s Tim Midyett.
Mastered from the original 1/2″ tapes by Bob Weston at Chicago Mastering Service.
Photographs by Mike Hoffman, Jr.
Layout and design by David Babbitt.
Pressed on 150 gram 45 rpm vinyl at Gotta Groove Records.
Preorders are available NOW and will be available until June 11.
Details on all three preorder tiers are below.
In stores May 5, 2014.
Silkworm really piss me off. For nigh 20 years now, I’ve tried to explain what it is they do (not “did”-this band lives), and I have failed. I have used dumb phrases like “post-punk in a world where punk never happened.” Also: “music redolent of the new weird America.” I have said these things to friends and strangers, and sometimes even typed them for others to read. All I’ve ever wanted is to figure out is how it is that this music sounds like nothing else, while somehow sounding like everything else-a rock band that has soaked up the past without resorting to pastiche, the bane of so many of their compatriots.
Now, it’s possible I just did it again there, but bear with me-because in order to fully process Libertine you have to understand how strange it sounded in context. Not just odd-but out-of-place, as befits a band that crawled out of Missoula, Montana and drove the wrong direction on I-90, staking a claim in the Pacific Northwest, instead of the Lake Michigan-ic Midwest, where their music would eventually find a more hospitable environment. I mean, can you imagine what it must have been like to be these guys in ’90s Seattle? You know those Charles Peterson live band photos that captured the unbridled intensity and connection between musician and audience, awash in a sea of hair and sweat? I wonder if he’s got one in a drawer somewhere, Silkworm in the natty suits they sometimes wore back then, Andy Cohen placidly crowd-surfing…
But I digress.
Triple-threat songwriting, two cagey guitars circling the drain but never going under, a bassist whose axe looks like an oar and sounds like the metal cable of a suspension bridge, anchored by a drummer clad in little more than gardening gloves whose kick drum (I am told) is the oversize kind favored by marching bands-all in all, a combination as heady as it was brainy. You can hear the rooted rootlessness of the big sky country they left, the austere grandeur of the city where they eventually ended up-and, while they were stuck where they were stuck, a sublimely cerebral version of the stop-start loud-soft dynamics that inexplicably (alright, explicably) put their interregnum city on the global musical map while they were consigned to the margins.
From the dread-beat-and-blood of “There Is a Party In Warsaw Tonight” to the undertow of “Bloody Eyes,” these songs dart in and out of focus, each doing what it sets out to do before yielding the floor. Cohen’s “Grotto of Miracles” crawls like a king snake, with lyrics about smirking at worms and fearing credit reports. Tim Midyett’s “Couldn’t You Wait?” spins riff and wordplay in a way that is somehow heartbreaking. And how exactly Joel Phelps can balance such Iris-Dement-ed vocals over the bounce of “The Cigarette Lighters” is a riddle that will never be solved.
That goes for this whole album. You can’t solve Libertine. That’s its genius. And these guys knew it even if most of the world didn’t. In the maelstrom of the last song, Tim tips this band’s hand: “the dream is a lie.” Too late-we’re dreaming.
Why didn’t he tell us earlier?
Why did he have to wait?
Greg Milner is a writer, journalist and the author of Perfecting Sound Forever.
2×12″/CD TRACKS
01 There Is A Party In Warsaw Tonight
02 Grotto Of Miracles
03 Cotton Girl
04 Yen + Janet Forever
05 Oh How We Laughed
06 The Cigarette Lighters
07 Couldn’t You Wait?
08 A Tunnel
09 Written On The Wind
10 Wild In My Day
11 Bloody Eyes
CD ONLY
12 Insider
13 Grotto Of Miracles (alternate)
14. Couldn’t You Wait?*
15. Scruffy Tumor*
16. Cotton Girl*
17. Raised By Tigers*
*Marco Collins Sessions
This project is the most expensive/expansive release Comedy Minus One has done to-date, an opportunity to present a definitive edition of one of our all-time favorite albums. The following two month preorder will help gauge exactly how many copies of the “Libertine” reissue realistically need to be manufactured. It will also help fund this substantial undertaking.
The items offered via preorder will, with the exception of “Libertine” itself, not be available in stores.
The record is also being sold here for less than the targeted list price.
There are three preorder options.
JUST THE RECORD
“Libertine” 2×12″ + CD
$20 + shipping. – ORDER HERE
RECORD + SHIRT COMBO
“Libertine” 2×12″ + CD + distressed look SKWM t-shirt
$40 + shipping.
This shirt, printed by Commonwealth Press in Pittsburgh, will not be available elsewhere. It was recreated from a well-worn, much-loved garment taken off the back of a fine Canadian. Displays the classic “SKWM” band logo in red ink on a pre-shrunk heather dark grey Anvil 980 shirt.
Please make sure you indicate what size shirt you require!
RECORD, SHIRT, BONUS 12″, BOOTLEG AUDIO + PHOTO PRINT
In addition to the 2×12″ + CD + t-shirt you will receive a “bootleg” .zip containing nearly two hours of previously unheard high quality live renditions of “Libertine”-era songs from the quartet, a frame-able print of an image (seen below) from the same Mike Hoffman, Jr. photo session that yielded the new album art and a bonus white label 12″ of tracks 12-17 listed above.
There will also be a sticker.
$75 + shipping
All preorders will be sent well in advance of availability in stores.
COMEDY MINUS ONE THANKS
Thank you to Aadam Jacobs for access to his archive of live recordings and to Liz Bustamante for swiftly digitizing said cassettes.
Thank you to Daniel Jurnove for entrusting his collection of Silkworm rarities with me.
Thank you to Seth Pomeroy and all others who felt comfortable sharing their recordings.
Thank you as well to Scott August and Braden Barclay for providing and scanning the shirt art.
Thank you to Jodi Shapiro, Chris Rasmussen, Matthew Barnhart and Issac Turner for serving as amiable sounding boards through this project’s development and completion.