The Well: The Independent Project Records Collection II
Independent Project Records
The curator of The Well: The Independent Project Records Collection II has been working overtime. Diving deep into the archives, only now coming up for air, Independent Project Records founder and co-owner Bruce Licher has artfully assembled an engrossing two-disc, 41-song compilation of rarities and unreleased tracks — plus newer material predicting the path forward for IPR — from an eclectic and visionary array of underground artists who strayed far from convention and never wanted to go back. The label’s given these misfits a good home.
All it needs is a gallery for displaying their diverse wares, which is where The Well comes in. Championing their bold originality and experimental zeal in IPR’s distinctively lavish letterpress packaging, the special edition double CD version is elegantly augmented with a colorful booklet of photos and illuminating briefings on each handpicked track. Licher’s discerning ear and sense of historical significance yields an extraordinarily diverse collection, The Well winging its way through revelatory exhibits of unexpected beauty and inspired creativity.
An early Camper Van Beethoven demo, the excitable and irreverent “Vegetables” is a quirky and still volatile piece of foundational folk-punk glory, valuable as a blueprint for the stylistic Tower of Babel of weird Americana they would go on to build. On the other end of the spectrum, Driveway Ceiling is IPR’s latest discovery, their lush, ‘70s psych-pop buoyancy and indie-rock aesthetics coloring the flowing “Mr. Walden.”
Everything in between is carefully sequenced, the darkly gothic “Midnight Chapel” from the reunited Shiva Burlesque — Jeffrey Clark and Grant Lee-Phillips slowly burning piano with acoustic strum and biblically poetic, Nick Cave-like gravitas — taking the baton from the ominous, mind-bending groove and sleigh bell shake of Leslie Medford’s “Leslie’s Dream” and leading into the plush bass and elongated, swirling electronica of Greg Lisher’s “Zen and the Art of Long Distance Driving.” Pairing the dream-pop reveries of Half String’s breathtaking “Honeycut” and Jeffrey Runnings’ enveloping “Heretofore,” The Well sets the stage for “The Valley” from a witchy Alison Clancy, the creepy, organ-driven “Halloween” conjured by mesmerizing cult favorites Fourwaycross, and Kommunity FK’s post-punk uprising “Anti-Pop.”
While the first disc opens with the bounding, angular menace of Afterimage’s “Afterimage,” a classic, vertiginous drop of brooding new wave/post-punk desperation, the second is introduced by the ghostly, motorik flash and murky drone of Savage Republic’s intensely visceral “Archetype.” It’s followed by the misty folk of Barry Craig’s “I Woke Up Dreaming” and David J’s “No One Looks Like Christopher Walken,” where the Bauhaus and Love and Rockets founder channels Jonathan Richman. Doubled vocal blurring and metallic shimmer make for a disorienting, yet utterly captivating, experience with Torn Boys’ aptly named “Mystery,” and the otherworldly “Raintree Road” — living in the dreamier end of shoegazer abstraction, one of three tracks here from Scenic — is the calm after the slashing punk storm of “Politic (Body and Soul)” from Middle Class. The genre-defying Woo, a jazzy, psychedelic enigma, is represented twice, with the astonishing “Tibetan Trains” landing on Disc 2, joining mid-’90s dream weavers The Sunflower Conspiracy’s “Spacetime,” from a self-released, cassette-only effort, and Lanterna’s undulating and mystical “Aegean.”
Amid all the trance and ambient, even liminal, immersion, the punk and post-punk anxiety and edge, the kaleidoscopic wonder, and bruised, ethereal hues of The Well, there’s also warm jazz complexity, too, from Jazz Bedouins’ “Mingus Mountains” and lithe, cloud-bursting, Beatlesque pop from Springhouse’s “Sea and Rain.” Licher’s “Tundra” is here, too, strumming away in a wash of noir, running on divergent tracks.
IPR’s past, decades of it represented here, is or at least was prologue, as The Well teases some of what’s to come from the label. Chances are, it won’t be boring.
