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Lou's Blues

After being infamously booted out of Dinosaur Jr, Lou Barlow took to his tape-recorder to vent. Recording, initially, under the deliberately-confusing, alternating names Sebadoh and Sentridoh, he wrote songs loaded with confession and emotion.

The subjects were, essentially, two-fold: heartbroken laments and nasty swipes at his former (and future!) Dinosaur band-mate, J Mascis. The music, captured in glorious lo-fidelity, veered wildly, in such, between gently-strummed ballads and blistering, overdriven blasts of wild, ugly noise.


By 1994, Barlow had settled on the name Sebadoh, found a sense of focus with mercurial co-founder Eric Gaffney having departed the project, and delivered a pair of impressive, beloved, 'classic' indie-rock LPs, 1991's Sebadoh III and 1993's Bubble and Scrape. He was in peak form; no longer just a lo-fi sage pouring it out into a four-track, but a songwriter penning pop-songs with aplomb. And, his magnum opus beckoned.

Isn't Lonely Lovely?

Bakesale arrived in 1994, with the alternative assault on the mainstream in full bloom. It was easily the band's most accessible, polished work; with Barlow handling the majority of the songs.

His writing was especially strong: "Magnet's Coil" and "Rebound" ring out with anthemic chords and sharp verse/chorus structure. "Skull" sounds like a love-song pure and true, all sweetly vocal and romantic overtones, but —in the Kurt/Trainspotting era, no less— it's actually about taking heroin; the dragons to be chased, here, having nothing to do with childhood dreaming.

It's in his bruised, bloodletting balladry that Barlow seems most at home. Though they're given indie-rock-ish treatment, with klanging guitars and rickety drums scattered about, cuts like "Not A Friend" and "Together or Alone" sound stark-naked; taking listeners into the fraught thoughts and uneasy feelings defining Barlow's heart.

"I'm not afraid of being alone," he sings, as Bakesale rings to a close, and the line sounds out. Though flirting with bona fide indie-rock celebrity and finding success with his own songs, Barlow was —in relationships, in his band, in his mind— still all alone.

Record Label: Sub Pop
Release Date: August 23, 1994