Career retrospectives tend to coincide with a period in which their subjects have become newly influential or relevant, or a moment when shifting tastes have made them ripe for rediscovery. That’s not the case with 90 Day Men, the Chicago art rockers whose three albums drew from turn-of-the-century underground rock’s most obscure corners, and sound even more arcane two decades later. Nothing in the air suggests the time is right for a 90 Day Men reappraisal; you’d be hard pressed to find a contemporary band that cites them as an inspiration. Perhaps the best argument for Numero Group releasing a career box set now is that there might never be a right time.
Numero’s 5xLP set We Blame Chicago compiles all the group’s studio albums, along with singles, EPs, and unreleased material, chronicling 90 Day Men’s evolution from a math-rock band straining for originality into a jazzier, more cryptic outfit that eventually found it. For all its promise, their 2000 debut album (Is (It) Is) Critical Band couldn’t quite crack the puzzle of finding coherent common ground between math rock, modernist post-hardcore, and jagged post-punk. The band’s most avant hallmarks were there from the beginning—long, digressive songs; whiplash turns; almost free-form instrumental interplay—but the presentation was off. An air of artifice hangs over the record, especially the performances of singer Brian Case, who sang mostly in either a hectoring torrent of exclamations (“This is from one primadonna to another!”) or in droll spoken monologues. Even by the standards of music that never cared much about likability, he could be a gratingly confrontational frontman, either so overbearing he was barely tolerable or so checked out he was barely there. It didn’t help, either, that the album’s central pairing of sardonic post-punk a la Gang of Four and the Fall and stern, serious Louisville-style math rock clashed on a conceptual level. Even on a song that grappled with the dichotomies of seeking and knowing, faith and uncertainty, “Exploration vs. Solution, Baby,” the glibness is right there in the title, like a shrug emoji saying, “Take this seriously, or don’t.” You’d imagine Slint’s Spiderland would lose something, too, if that album broke its unflinching intensity every couple of minutes to tell you it was just pulling your leg.
To 90 Day Men’s credit, they course-corrected quickly. By their 2002 follow-up, To Everybody, their first album written entirely after their relocation from St. Louis to Chicago, they’d landed on a far richer, much more singular muse. The instrumental “We Blame Chicago” nods to the influence of their new home city on their sound, with the kind of mosaic of post-rock, jazz, and dub most commonly found on a Tortoise record. Meanwhile, keyboardist Andy Lansangan, a late addition to the group, had stepped up as a creative engine, and his stately pianos emerged as a go-to lead instrument for the group. With those pianos easing some of the demands on their frontman to command attention, Case relaxed into himself, and his vocals grew more assured, more subdued, more vulnerable.Other circumstances conspired to lend a crucial element of fragility to their sound. The group recorded in the days immediately after 9/11, when rescue crews were still scouring the wreckage for survivors, and horror and confusion remained thick in the air. In the extensive oral history that accompanies the box set, producer John Congelton recalls, “That strange nihilism everyone was feeling at the time made us like, ‘Fuck it. Let’s make a strange record.’” Congleton’s twitchy fingerprints are all over the album, most prominently in the crude, percussive tape manipulations of “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life,” the mesh of pianos and electronics that most exemplifies the album’s mournful, haunted air. It’s fascinating how a band with no apparent debt to Radiohead independently arrived at so many of the same moods and ideas as Amnesiac. The group’s final album, 2004’s Panda Park, was even more of a showcase for Congleton’s adventurous production—outside of Congleton’s own records with the Paper Chase, none of his other work from the era showcases his use of the studio quite as fearlessly. Some of the confidence and grace of To Everybody carries over, especially in the wintery ivories and beautiful despair of single “Too Late or Too Dead,” but to the extent the record isn’t as successful as its predecessor, it’s because it tries to do so much more. It’s a brief record, just 35 minutes, but with its vast busyness it feels longer. Closer “Night Birds” throws down eight and a half disorienting minutes of prog and skronk, never settling on a throughline to make its many moving parts cohere. The box set’s rare material underscores just how far this band had to climb to find its voice. A bonus cassette of the group’s earliest recordings plays like the kind of demo Dischord must have received in the mail all the time, a spirited but very raw stab at the arty post-hardcore that proliferated on the label in the late ’90s. By a 2001 John Peel session, they’d switched from an inherited language to one they seemed to be inventing on the fly, opening up their songs to breathe and highlighting the intricate dialogue between their instruments over any driving component. It’s a glimpse at what an exceptional live band they must have been at their peak. By a few years later, they were burned out. The warm reception to Panda Park opened up bigger touring opportunities, but the pressures of trying to make ends meet on the road took a toll. In the oral history, Case recalls thinking, “The only way we can live is if we’re in this fucking van all the time?” Revisiting 90 Day Men’s records with the benefit of hindsight, you can hear long-shot opportunities for them to grow their audience, if they’d wanted to compromise a bit. They could have easily leaned more into dance punk, for instance, and owned some of the Rapture/Liars market. With a little restraint and polish they could have positioned themselves as a better Cold War Kids. They also would have made an absolutely killer jam band. But in truth they never had the instincts of a group that was destined for big things. 90 Day Men were one of those bittersweet cases where their most fulfilling path was always the one with the lowest ceiling.\
