Brick Layer Cake - Call It A Day - Eye For An Eye Tooth For A Tooth

Label: Touch And Go
Year: 1991

First order of business: I am going on vacation tomorrow. Spring Break 2012! Wooo-woooo!
Second order of business: When did the term "college rock" fall out of favor? When I was growing up, there was a genre of music referred to as College Rock, and quite frankly, Brick Layer Cake would have been right in there. It predates "alternative", which predated "indie", but was oft times mistakenly confused with "import" (as it was generally assumed any mopey white dudes with guitars and messed up hair were going to be from England, and thus their music imported to the United States [the rest of Europe, Canada, and Australia also counted as England at that point]). To me, Brick Layer Cake seemed English, bad teeth and all.
Third order of business: Brick Layer Cake was not, is not, and was never actually English (or European, or Canadian, or Australian), they (he) was from the American midwest. They (he) was Todd Trainer, the drummer in Rifle Sport, Breaking Circus, and Shellac, writing songs, arranging the instrumentation himself, and asking his bros to help out for live shows and some recordings (Steve Albini played drums, and Brian Paulson [of Man Sized Action, but more notably the guy who recorded Slint, Bastro, Polvo, Archers Of Loaf, Dinosaur Jr, Son Volt, etc.], and Gerard Boissy [also of Rifle Sport] helped out too). They (he) played great, somber, unadorned music, not too far off from a band like Codeine.
Fourth order of business: Steve Albini described Brick Layer Cake as "think Nick Drake on downers fronting Black Sabbath, if Black Sabbath played only the good parts of their songs". That's a terrible description as there are no "bad" parts of any Black Sabbath songs, and is obviously some sort of trickery on the part of Mr. Albini.

DL