Makeup For The Silence

Spot - Moon June Spoon

Spot was neither the first nor the last band the Rueffer brothers would form, but it was certainly the only one to hit my radar, thanks to this oh-so-early-90s video* that ran a few times on 120 Minutes. “Moon June Spoon” is everything great about music in the Alternative Nation era — the bassline, the quiet-verse-loud-chorus dynamics, the jostling lyrics and their cynical/dry/somehow still melodic delivery, that perfect breakdown with the falsetto oh-oh-ohs into the raging final chorus.  Find me a more immaculately constructed song, I dare you.

While “Moon June Spoon” was released on the band’s self-titled (and only) full-length, it was also released by Ardent Records as the lead track on an EP titled AVCDEFG, which I plucked from Toones’ dollar bin once upon a time.  The AVCD was some sort of now-forgotten next wave media format which combined an audio CD with bonus CD-ROM content on one disc, but did it…differently than other mixed media discs?  Fuck if I know.  Supposedly this thing contains some videos and such; I never managed to get the damn thing to work right, so I can’t really confirm this.  As with much bleeding edge technology, it was clunky and fickle and is now resigned to history’s dustbin.  (That might actually be overstating it when it comes to AVCD; there seems to be hardly any trace of the format at all online).  Sometimes technology saves you from ever having to dig thru a dollar bin ever again; sometimes it’s the reason you end up there.

This might be my favorite “lost classic” from that era, but there’s a good 20 or 30 other tracks that could easily give it a run for its money. In the mid-to-late 90s, grunge/alternative cleaned up its sound, and most of the should-be-similarly-obscure big singles from that 96-to-99-or-so era are now fondly (or not-so-fondly) remembered as one hit wonders (Deep Blue Something and The Rembrandts, I’m looking at you), but there’s a ton of great stuff from just before then that seems to have been lost.  I used to have a playlist dedicated to just those; I should reconstruct it and put it up on here as a mix, or on Spotify or something.  In fact, I think it will be coming soon…

* Seriously, why did every vaguely-indie-alternative act in the early-to-mid 90s have the exact same music video?  As much as it was a golden age of great clips, there were ten times as many of these wobbly-camera silly-colored look-what-i-can-do-with-my-editing-machine visual turds.  One of my all-time-least-favorite aesthetics, and I’m almost hesitant to post the video instead of just the audio, because it detracts so much from such a truly fantastic song.

Also, this band seems so much cooler when you can’t actually see them.