The 1990s gave rise to many things, but one element that’s been partly overlooked is thrift-store culture. A nation of kids who first saw Molly Ringwald turn a Salvation Army dress into a Cinderella gown—and Jon Cryer claim the Boomer music of Otis Redding for the fledgling Generation X—had grown out of the '80s and into connoisseurs of secondhand chic. Naturally there was irony involved—this was the '90s—and during one of the most prosperous decades America had ever known, slumming it became an archly conspicuous statement. But an aesthetic doesn’t need to be entirely ironic or entirely earnest, and such was the case with thrift. Yard-sale artifacts were throwaways, true, but they were also beautiful: emblems and totems of those who’d owned them, a transmutation of the mass-produced into the personal.
So it would be unfair to dismiss the Aislers Set’s three-album discography—1998’s Terrible Things Happen, 2000’s The Last Match, and 2003’s How I Learned to Write Backwards—as a manifestation of “One demographic’s trash is another demographic’s treasure.” If anything, the recently reunited San Francisco indie-pop group embodied the demise of thrift-store culture as it existed then, straddling the movement’s '90s peak and its gradual decline in the new millennium, when people began cherry-picking their castoffs for Craigslist or eBay—or repurposing them for Etsy—instead of hauling them wholesale to Goodwill. More conceptual bands like Stereolab and Pram, clear influences on the Aislers Set, had already mixed upscale Midcentury and high-brow hi-fi into their bric-a-brac collage. The Aislers Set, on the other hand, had no hope of unearthing Neu! or Astrud Gilberto at their local thrift store—just Wendy Carlos and the Archies.
That’s not to say the Aislers Set’s debut album, Terrible Things Happen, isn’t sophisticated. The outfit’s mastermind, Amy Linton, had previously fronted Henry’s Dress, a cornerstone of Slumberland Records’ early roster and a bridge between Britain’s bygone C86 glory and the U.S. indie-pop scene that exploded in the '90s. Terrible Things Happen, like the remainder of the Aislers Set’s full-lengths, came out on Slumberland as well, and it marked a sea change. Up to that point, punky jangle had been the order of the day, a singsong, buzzsaw whirlwind that Henry’s Dress exemplified. Linton tried new things on Terrible Things Happen: layered harmonies, dynamic shifts between distorted riffs and acoustic strumming, adventurous arrangements, and dreamy, chanson ambience straight out of a David Lynch roadhouse. For every speedy, noisy, birthday-cake splattered track like “Holiday Gone Well”, there’s a lost-astronaut lullaby like “Alicia’s Song”, which even playfully swipes the intro/outro drumbeat of David Bowie’s “Five Years”.
Where Terrible Things Happen dips its toe, The Last Match dives right in. By then, Linton’s project had assumed a more solid lineup, and with it came a shag-carpet kind of luxuriousness. Hints of Saint Etienne and Belle and Sebastian's precious pop abound—Linton’s voice is a burst of minty-fresh breathiness, and there’s a cellophane-crisp shimmer to the production—but it’s the '60s influences that have taken hold. The instrumental “Christmas Song” nods to the sauntering hook from “Time Is Tight” by Booker T. & the MG’s, and accordingly, the entire album uses vintage organs as a gluey connective tissue. “Hit the Snow” is the album’s standout moment, a confection of Brian Wilson ba-ba-bas and finger-snapping, go-go pep. Granted, these signifiers—even the organs—were all easily found in thrift stores in the '90s. The Last Match is the Aislers Set’s near-perfect unpacking of them; listening to the album is like popping bubble wrap, and just as satisfyingly addictive.
How I Learned to Write Backwards sharpened the Aislers Set’s fuzziness, but something small was lost in that precision. The songs themselves are Linton’s most assured, and her self-observational lyrics about pensive days and sleepless nights circumvent the band’s carefully constructed cuteness and slip straight into the heart. There’s also more space and abstraction to the album; “Melody Not Malaise” not only injects a hazy jazziness into the song’s swirly pop, but also implies the chords rather than states them. A snotty-sweet punk interlude (“The Train #2”) and a sumptuously sad, piano-led ballad (“Sara’s Song”) are strong evidence that Linton and crew were only hitting their stride. At the same time, there’s a deflated ennui to How I Learned to Write Backwards. Sleigh bells are shaken tiredly, as if they suddenly weigh a ton; emptiness takes the place of texture. The neo-mod anthem “Attraction Action Reaction”, rather than being a Vespa-revving rave-up, is a subtle, muted homage to the melancholy side of '60s girl-group verve—a tune for the chill-out room at the house party in Quadrophenia.
The Aislers Set came to a halt in 2003, soon after the release of How I Learned to Write Backwards. By then, the indie landscape was practically unrecognizable from what it had been when the band formed. The Shins—a band the Aislers Set toured with—were part of a wave of groups that hit the sweet-tooth of the public at large, and indie’s quick climb to the mainstream had begun in earnest. The kaleidoscope of secondhand sounds and styles that the Aislers Set gleefully hoarded might have been too scattered and fractured for your average kid who just picked up Is This It, especially at a time when America didn’t seem to have much of a taste for deconstruction. But with the reissue of these three chiming, chillingly exquisite records, it’s clear that their obsolescence—like that of the thrift-store heirlooms that make up their DNA—was merely temporary.
