you can have me for an hour

Between catching up with four days of work and the hellish ninety-minute (usually accomplished inside twenty) commute home, I just don’t have the energy or desire to put together today’s originally planned post.

I guess we’ll just have to settle for a couple of tracks by Satisfact, one of a handful of mid-90’s American bands (along with the Pulsars and Servotron) who tried their hand at 80’s revivalism and were rewarded with the resounding apathy of the record buying public. (If they had debuted a decade later, it might have been a different story.)

Satisfact’s sound is a mélange of 80’s alt-rock influences, worn perhaps a bit too proudly on the band’s collective sleeve. Listening to the band’s first album, the presciently-titled The Unwanted Sounds of Satisfact, one can clearly pick out clear traces and snatches “borrowed” from the Cure, the Smiths, OMD, Bauhaus, and Joy Division. (In a bit of hubris that just begs for divine retribution, the album’s cover shamelessly mimics that of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures LP.)

It’s certainly listenable and, for less dogmatic fans of the source material, fairly enjoyable stuff, but it too often feels as if one is listening to an 80’s alt-gloom cover band that got it in their heads to record an album of “original” material. Allmusic.com gave it a glowing review, but it also used the word “doon” while doing so and thus cannot be trusted.

From The Unwanted Sounds of Satisfact (1996):

Satisfact – Dysfunction

Satisfact - Oscillator