Bubble & Scrape

Sebadoh | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (April 23, 1993)
• Original Release Date: April 20, 1993
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Sub Pop
• ASIN: B0000035FO
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Audio Cassette  |  Vinyl  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #149,172 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars fantastic disaster., June 12, 2006

By 

Mike K. (Massachusetts, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bubble & Scrape (Audio CD)

This album kind of presents the band as three pretty different kinds of songwriters, which can make it feel frustratingly choppy and schizophrenic, but also makes it entertainingly unpredictable. Lou Barlow presents himself as the sensitive, heart-on-sleeve one, with melancholy melodies and emotionally direct lyrics like "guilt is a stupid thing, don't let it make you stay/ leave me if you're wanting someone else, I'll be okay". Though his lyrics occasionally approach lovelorn cliche, his sincere delivery mostly manages to make them believable and affecting, and he also provides most of the album's more immediate melodies. Jason Loewenstein is overall fairly compatible with Barlow; though his lyrics can be little more abstract and his material can get a little bit noisier, his songs are pretty sympathetic in tone to the Barlow ones. But then completely out of left field we have the oddball noise-punk of Eric Gaffney. While his contributions are pretty acquired taste, and usually don't end up making much musical sense, he always brings some interesting ideas to the table, and unlike the Barlow and Loewenstein numbers, I honestly haven't heard anything quite like them. There's a few clear traces of Minutemen and Sonic Youth influences, but he makes it fully his own with queasy chord changes, psychotic screaming, and unpredictable shifts in structure and even genre ("Fantastic Disaster" keeps jumping into bizarre out of tune harmonica/piano breaks, "Emma Get Wild" starts out as a surf/jazz instrumental before suddenly turning into a slightly unhinged Daydream Nation rocker, "No Way Out" fades out after about a minute, then devotes half of it's run time to a bizarre collage of unintelligible sped up voices and clips apparently taped off the radio). There seems to be an attempt to make it flow a little better by pairing off songs by whoever happens to be singing lead at the time, but in a way this emphasizes the differences in approach even more. Honestly it feels a little like listening to the a and b-sides of singles by three different bands that are only similar in that they all feature lo-fi production and ragged playing. Still, overall this is a pretty good listen for anyone exploring mid-90's underground rock.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars one of my favorite albums. lovely., September 16, 2005

By 

Bouqet for a Siren (Massachusetts, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bubble & Scrape (Audio CD)

sebadoh always rocks. always. and i would have to say that this is definitely their strongest album. the band demonstrates its versatility, executing tender love songs like "think (let tomorrow bee)", hard-rocking, balls to the walls tunes like "flood", and weird, dissonant, folkcore fests like "bouqet for a siren" and "elixir is zog" with equal ability. this is also one of sebadoh's finest line-ups, with lou barlow, jason loewenstein, and eric gaffney on drums. gaffney is a great drummer and he brings some strong material to the album. sadly, this is, as another reviewer noted, his swan song. bob fay, the drummer who succeeded him, just doesn't cut it.
bubble and scrape combines the discordant, lo-fi sounds of earlier albums like the freed weed (which is definitely less listener-friendly and requires a little patience to get used to) with the slicker production quality of later albums like the sebadoh. if you can own one sebadoh album, this is the one.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Gaffney's Swan Song, March 29, 2001

By 

godskidbrother "nanook339" (Pittsburgh, PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bubble & Scrape (Audio CD)

Lou once said in an interview that the majority of the Sebadoh fanbase holds one album way above the rest. This is understandable, because face it, their sound has been anything but consistent over the progression of their first four albums (not that this is a bad thing) For me, this record is where Eric's songwriting truly shines, the way Jason's does on bakesale. Bouquet for a Siren blew me away the first time i heard it and after seven years it hasn't grown stale yet. Granted, it may take a while to grow on you, but the tension that underlies Gaffney's songs brings ENERGY, and makes for fun listening. I am a freed weed and III nut, but there are undeniable glimpses of beauty on B&S and Bakesale, the majority coming from Eric and Jason respectively. I don't think Gaffney gets the respect that his work on Freed Weed, III and B&S deserves, and that's a shame. After B&S, I think that Lou's best stuff is on Take A Look Inside (Folk Implosion) and some Sentridoh stuff. Harmacy and The Seb didn't really do anything for me. But hey, I've never even written one song close to the quality of Lou Barlow, have you?