Merge Records has endured by staying the same. Founded in 1989 in Chapel Hill, N.C., by Superchunk’s Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance, the label always stuck to a simple philosophy: they signed bands they liked and tried not to spend unrealistic amounts of money. And sure, eventually, it helped that they happened to like Arcade Fire (whose debut Merge released in 2004). This strategy worked in the early 1990s, helping McCaughan and Ballance resist the major-label feeding frenzy set off by Nirvana, which felled so many of their peers. And it works in 2017, when an old-school label rooted in evenhanded curation has an undeniable appeal, both for listeners who grew up with indie music before the internet—when musical diets relied more heavily on competent stewards with broad but clearly defined tastes—and for many young bands whom Superchunk inspired, such as Merge signee Waxahatchee. Especially if you lived in Chapel Hill or an outpost-y town like it, it’s hard to overstate how important Superchunk was in indie rock’s self-reliant creation myth.
In a way, Superchunk has also weathered the past 28 years as a band by staying the same. After driving one industry sea change, they waited out the next, and stayed put in North Carolina issuing other people’s records. A nine-year gap preceded 2010’s Majesty Shredding, but then Superchunk reemerged fully formed into the digital era and never desperately reinvented itself. They never squandered goodwill on an aughties electro-pop reinvention. They’ve issued a new, age-shaded variation on their signature power-pop-punk every year or two. Given this long and steady arc, it’s easy to think of Superchunk in terms of workmanlike consistency. So it’s a blast to remember how versatile they are, hearing all their embryonic styles at once on their exuberant, awkward, and utterly alive 1990 debut LP, now being reissued on vinyl by Merge.
Even if your Superchunk knowledge goes as far back as 1995’s Here’s Where the Strings Come in, when they started becoming a long-hauling pop-rock band in earnest, you might not be prepared for the debut. If Merge and Superchunk populated a new cosmos, then Superchunk, recorded at Duck-Kee Studios in Raleigh and released on Matador in 1990, is the Big Bang. In one explosive half-hour, it trots out most of the styles and moods that Superchunk would then spend decades diligently exploring. The reissue’s supplement, Clambakes Vol. 9: Other Music From Unshowered Grumblers—Live in NYC 1990, a live set recorded at CBGB four days after the original album’s release, is for deep fans and archivists only—the sound and playing aren’t great. But the remastered original disc is only enriched by, not reliant on, historical context. In and of itself, it rips.
The one-two knockout of opening tracks “Sick to Move” and “My Noise” sets the poles of melodic hardcore and melodic noise-rock. The former, with SST Records-style sludge up to its buckling knees, starts with an electrifying cri de coeur: “Finger on my pulse/I’ve got my finger in the socket/Why build a cradle/If you don’t plan to rock it?” (That’s surely a sly reference to Cat’s Cradle, Chapel Hill’s testing ground for the new, weird rock.) The latter, chugging at a comfortable tempo and breaking down into lazy Pavement-like squiggles, is also contiguous with the shambolic post-rock of Slint. The lyrics anatomize the self-conscious jadedness then fashionable in Chapel Hill music circles—“It’s my life/It is my voice/It is stupid/It is my noise”—as well as the bursts of desperate conviction, with a ragged surge on the word “noise.”
“Swinging” introduces Superchunk’s pop-punk side, all basic bounce and elastic tempo, while “Slow” is a lofting, detuned dream-pop classic in which the band forgets it’s disaffected and exults in the sound. “Half a Life” could pass for Jawbreaker, a reminder of how much sonic crossover Superchunk at first had with West Coast emo-core bands, whose passionate ideology is thought of as so separate from indie rock’s slacker affectations. Of course, the flipside of a band exploring its capacities is a band still figuring out what it’s good at. The tuneless singing style of “Binding” would ultimately be better left to Archers of Loaf’s Eric Bachmann, whose gruff resonance carried it better than McCaughan’s high, thin sneer. Still, the licky little lead is the kind of perfect detail that distinguishes Superchunk from so many peers and followers.
Superchunk’s early influences were the classic rock of their childhoods, the all-ages punk shows of their teens, and the weird mishmash they were discovering on college radio. They entered music when the central North Carolina hype was just glimmering into being, when you might catch a writeup of a local band in SPIN, Rolling Stone, or even Entertainment Weekly. “It gave people around here some kind of pride in the ability of these small cities to produce a lot of great music,” McCaughan has said. Ballance had just learned to play bass when Superchunk coalesced from house party pick-up bands with names like Quit Shovin’. “I was basically having panic attacks up there,” she recalls. “I would have tunnel vision and feel like I was hyperventilating.”
Merge, with typical caution, warmed up by putting out seven-inch singles before venturing into LPs, which is why the band’s first three albums came out on Matador. But Superchunk did self-release their first official single, “Slack Motherfucker,” which anchors the debut LP, with original drummer Chuck Garrison and original guitarist Jack McCook (later replaced by the enduring roster of Jon Wurster and Jim Wilbur). “Slack Motherfucker” is a perfect time capsule of how it felt to be young and annoyingly comfortable in a sleepy college town before the internet. The riff is both urgent and plodding, almost stagnant, even as it blows up in your face. McCaughan sings in the persona of a budding workaholic who’s tired of seeing the same people everywhere, bored, smoking in bars, and looking at bands.
The alarm is sounded again on the ultra-snotty “Down the Hall”: “I don’t see anyone/Tying you down/There are no chains/So what’s keeping you around?” This tension between a tendency to stay and an anxiousness to move has guided Superchunk well through the past quarter-century. Here at the beginning, they had no sense that they were going to change the scope of what was possible for indie bands, no ambition to. It seems they just wanted to do more than the people lolling around them—do something. They were a kicky little college band that tried to strike a slack pose but accidentally played like their lives depended on it, which, in a meaningful way, turned out to be true. In 2017, Superchunk is inevitably an artifact, a voyager from another time. But the raw, frustrated energy of comfortable kids in uncomfortable skins, marooned after punk and before broadband, is undimmed.
