Engine

Songs:
1. Have a Safe Trip, Dear
2. June Miller
3. Pale Horse Sailor
4. Mindel
5. I Get My Kicks For You
6. Mooch
7. Take It With a Grain of Salt
8. Sink is Busted

Band:
Fred Erskine – bass
Sean Meadows – guitar, vocals
Jeff Mueller – guitar vocals
Doug Scharin – drums



Recorded by James Murphy 1994

Released by Quarterstick Records 1995

If you had good taste and were into heavy music in the early 90s you had to look around a bit to find the good stuff. The metal scene had become a ridiculous cartoon. Punk was dead to me and hardcore had been overrun by political bands that were increasingly fascinated with bouncy beats and the vocalists tended to rap too much or sing too much (I’m looking at you Revelation Records). Outside of all of that noise there were some shiny new subgenres that filled the void – you know, math rock, etc. And so June of 44 released Engine Takes To The Water which broke more than one boundary. They were post rock in the fashion of Slint (goddammit I swore I would not use that word in this review) but they were more ‘rock’ than they were ‘post’ as they made a lot of head nodding beats, dynamic songs that went somewhere and had a bit of screamy vocals to satisfy the rocker in you.

The album opener, 'Have a Safe Trip, Dear' let’s you know what you’re in for straight away and it guarantees their future popularity. Softly ringing guitar harmonics mixed with spoken vocals form the intro but the drama builds up fast. A mathy riff soon takes over and the vocals gear up to unpretentious yelling that fits perfectly with the sounds behind them that almost spiral away but keep coming back to a familiar melody. Then of course there is our friend, Doug Scharin, on drums pounding a ferocious but controlled rhythm that doesn’t allow the rest of the band to stray too far from the general rock formula. The energy goes up and down for about eight minutes, and I believe that anybody with good taste in music who heard this could not resist listening to the rest of the album. Everybody else probably just stopped it and put on their Rage Against the Machine album.

The second song is called ‘June Miller’ who was Henry Miller’s wife and who the band is named after. This is a nice satisfying number and pretty much pure math rock. The guitars are used to make a repetitive, energetic and oddly melodic riff. It sounds a little bit like a funky dance tune which, by the way, is the general direction that June of 44 ultimately went in their later years. This song made June of 44 fun – a word not usually associated with other similar bands. The nest song ‘Pale Horse Sailor’ goes in the opposite direction and heads into avant-garde territory to satisfy bespectacled fans of art rock. The band rambles around like they are improvising and the vocals speak and scream random shit with some kind of nautical theme. You could say that the song speaks to the alienation of bored kids suffering from ennui in the 90s but I won’t because that’s what disengaged critics say about this kind of song. It’s really just a noisy example of contemporary math rock. But next up is ‘Mindel’ which falls back into the band’s trademark groove. On this song, June of 44 proves once again that you can be a jam band without having any regard for the bullshit sounds of Phisch, et al. ‘I Get My Kicks for You’ sounds a lot like Slint (damnit!) with its slow pace and mumbled vocals and it’s topped off with a mellow trumpet melody. It degenerates into a long segment of nothing but mild feedback. They could have left this one off the album – but then they may not have grabbed all those Slint fans. Anyway, in those days it was pretty standard for songs to trail off into random sounds for an inordinately long period. I was so used to it back then that I hardly noticed this but it sounds fairly dated and pointless now. ‘Take it With a Grain of Salt’ is another classic June of 44 number. It rocks sort of like the late-80s post-hardcore bands did and it’s oh-so-satisfying. The album closes with the song ‘Sink is Busted’ which highlights the prettier side of the band. It’s math rock with softly and sweetly sung vocals and the whole song lingers cohesively in the air but still captivates.

Engine Takes To The Water is not June of 44’s best album but it’s their first and it began their tradition of making interesting, heavy math rock and packaging it with gorgeous album cover art. While my beloved underground American rock music got overrun by preachy, overproduced ‘hardcore’ and other heavy bands that wanted to jump on the breakbeat train, I feel indebted to June of 44 for giving the world intelligent rock music that went in a new direction but retained most of rock music’s fundamentals. Engine Takes To The Water rocks, grooves, and goes artsy, usually all at once, and it made the music world a better place in 1995.

June Miller


Take It With A Grain Of Salt