Customer Reviews

Love Tara

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Songs like "Behind The Garage", "Anytime You Want" (is it just me, or is this song structurally, and the end of "Stove" tonally, kinda nodding towards My Bloody Valentine, albeit not in an onpurposeseeming way at all?), "My Room", "Allergic To Love", and, well, the whole dang thing, for me, at least, especially after all this time, now serve as what Rick so well elucidated once in an old interview as "postcards or diaries, in song"...or some other such paraphrase...anyways, i wouldn't have wrote anything here if anyone else had've written anything at all, but this record really changed many rock'n'roll kids that i knew, myself included...it made us want to chronicle our lives that openly too, maybe...idunno; i'll always think of "Love Tara" as the album that made me really believe in the D.I.Y. aesthetic that seems to get ingrained into each successive generation of punk rockers by a different special album...me and my early-teen friends at the time seemed to be inspired to buy our guitars through "Nevermind" and "Goo", but inspired to actually _write songs_ through befriending these tracks...Tascam and Fostex's Canadian divisions should've given the band a cut of their increased profits during these years, in a just world, at least... ;)

I picked this one up on cassette after seeing the truly odd video for "Stove" on TV. I also read a brief interview with one of the members of Eric's Trip where they talked about dirt-biking in Moncton. Anyway, after I bought the cassette, I have listened to it countless times. For a while it remained in the tape deck of my '86 Pontiac Parisienne for weeks. The lo-fi home recording esthetics make you feel like you've been pulled into the room with Eric's Trip as they were recording the album. You feel like you're living next door to them. This is one of my favorite albums to listen to on a cold winter's day when it's too cold to go outside.

As the other reviewer said, I'm amazed nobody else has reviewed this brilliant album. The songs are all over the map but sludg-y grunge rockers to barely-audiable folky stuff and all with the trademark stoner vocals and lo-fi vibes. When I first began hearing about ET in the early 1990s, they were lumped together with Thrush Hermit, Sloan, Change of Heart, The Inbreds, Rheostatics and all the other great Canadian bands of the era but I always thought they were very much out of step with what was going on in the rest of Canada. Maybe it was because they came together in the relatively isolation of Moncton? Who knows? It's definitely closer to the early Sebadoh stuff but even then, only because it's poorly recorded. Also, I always found their stuff pretty unsettling and kinda scary so maybe it's good to listen to around Halloween. Whatever... buy this album.

Eric's Trip Love Tara is one of my all time favorite CDs. It simultaneously triggers nostalgia for the summer before college in 1991 and explosively emotional and experimental college years up to 1996. For me their music captured the zeitgeist. I could listen to Love Tara every day and not get sick of it.