Another almost lost "classic" from the early 90s that I've been heavy dosing on lately is Three Mile Pilot's excellent and hard banging second album The Chief Assassin to the Sinister. I'd been trying to find it for a long time, but all you can usually get is the original indie version that came out on Headhunter before their short trip to the majors. And I already knew from listening to some of the songs online that I "needed" the Geffen version, which adds 3 songs and drops one from the original release. Apparently the story goes that they put out this album on the cheap back in '93 and then Geffen caught wind of them and signed them up and they remastered the album and added some really good songs, in fact one of them is my favorite, and reissued it in '95 for a short while until dropping them. So now all that's available is the original Headhunter release. This one sounds pretty nice. Great bass but not all punched up. Still really have to crank the volume which is the way I like it. A little bit like that mid 90s version of Girls Against Boys with the hard hitting bass sound. Very heavy and kind of dark. Really sounds kind of like a combo of the two bands it spawned, Black Heart Procession and Pinback, but heavier than both combined. Really curious to hear what they are gonna do for the upcoming Three Mile Pilot "reunion" album since they're all apparently still good friends and really only split up because they weren't making money as TMP. Great bands in those two. This one even reminds me a little of Slint at times, but with more of that Pinback melodic sound. Kind of Television sounding. Very cool. Post-rock meets pre-punk.

Yes, this is a good album, definitely. "Aqua-Magnetic" is my favorite...

Davey,

Based on your descriptions I'd really like to hear some of these lost classics, this one being no exception.

are you guys into Frodus' "and we washed our weapons in the sea" album?

Yeah, there's a million of them out there that get overlooked for one reason or another, especially in the early to mid 90s when artists were being shuffled in and out of the majors in the blink of an eye. Note that I did put the word classics in parenthesis. I really enjoy these guys in all their incarnations, but it's not a "real" classic in the sense it will have a lasting impact far into the future or continually be rediscoverd by music junkies or has near universal acclaim. It barely had any impact in its day and I'd never know them if I hadn't become such a big Black Heart Procession fan, something oddly enough that was triggered in the late 90s because of my love for the music of PJ Harvey, but that's another story

The last couple years I've been trying to go back and give a listen to some of those bands that I've wanted to hear for a long time, but just never got around to because of too much new music. So I've been laying off the new stuff and discovering some I missed along the way. It's often a lot more rewarding than the latest buzz.

Ya know, based on what I knew and had heard of Frodus, my tendency would've been to say thanks, but no thanks, but I just went to AMG to read about this album and it does sound very good. Tell us more.