Long Hair In Three Stages vinyl

The debut LP from Chicago's U.S. Maple still lands like a collapsing scaffold-planned, chaotic, deeply physical. Emerging in 1995 with help from producer Jim O'Rourke, the band's line-up of twin guitars, drums and mangled voice created a kind of reverse-engineered rock: distorted, slippery, hard to hold. 'Hey King' flails out of the gate with wheezing noise and dislocated rhythm, while 'Letter To ZZ Top' drags itself forward in weird blues contortions. There's no bass, just a tangle of frets and gaps, offset by spasmic drums and Al Johnson's fractured, Costner-bro drawl. 'Home-Made Stuff' and 'The State Is Bad' stretch their grooves to breaking point, while 'Aplomado' barely survives its own twitching, skeletal motion. At times ('You Know What... Will Get You You Know Where', 'Northwad'), it almost sounds like classic rock on Dadaist terms-just enough hooks to betray the ruin beneath. This new edition includes redesigned packaging and rare ephemera, a neat counterpoint to a record that still sounds gloriously wrong. Few bands ever sounded like this again, not even them. A necessary reminder that rock can still be a very unserious thing.