Flemish Altruism [Constituent Parts 1993-1996] [Remastered Version]

According to legend, the A Minor Forest song “Bill’s Mom Likes to Fuck”—a high point of the post-rock group’s 1996 debut album, Flemish Altruism—was swiped from an inside joke that had circulated for years among the punk kids of Rapid City, South Dakota. A Minor Forest wasn’t from Rapid City; they hailed from far-off San Francisco. But the band toured extensively throughout the country during its 90s-spanning existence, playing many of the same DIY venues that hosted the burgeoning post-hardcore and emo bands of that decade. If there’s one thing that brings people together, it’s cruel humor—and A Minor Forest, brooding and abrasive as well as downright delicate, knew a good joke when they heard it.

Flemish Altruism was reissued on vinyl for this year’s Record Store Day, alongside A Minor Forest’s other studio album, 1998’s Inindependence. The rollout has been humble one, and it can’t help but be compared to Slint’s deservedly lavish Spiderland box set this month. Slint blazed trails with its dour, eerie ominousness; A Minor Forest, on the other hand, neither innovated nor intimidated. That doesn’t make Flemish Altruism any less tense. The shadow of Slint—as well of Slint’s slower, icier cousin, Codeine—loom large over A Minor Forest’s distended syllables and dangling chords. The group had been honing that sound on singles and EPs since 1994, but Flemish Altruism tracks like “…But the Pants Stay On” and “Jacking Off George Lucas” groped for a new vocabulary out of the fragments laying around after post-rock’s early-90s Big Bang. What resulted was pidgin Slint—but in that process of restructuring, A Minor Forest came damn close to inventing post-post-rock, where the subgenre’s self-seriousness was wrestled with until it laughed, gasped, and collapsed.

Steve Albini and Bob Weston produced Flemish Altruism, and the nerve-tightening cello they’d previously captured on Nirvana’s In Utero feels almost deliberately evoked on the album’s most arresting song, “Perform the Critical Straw Transfer”. Singer/guitarist Erik Hoversten opens it with a deadpan punch line: “Guess you really lucked out…” he begins, his numb voice trailing off as bassist John Trevor Benson screams bestially yet faintly in the background, “…on this one.” Sarcasm never sounded so black. Beneath them, cellist Dominique Davison saws with quiet strength, as if mocking and apologizing at the same time. The screaming gets pushed to the fore on thoroughly non-dainty “Dainty Jack and His Amazing Technicolor Cloth Jacket”, an erratic spasm of dissonance that shows an affinity for San Diego screamo (A Minor Forest had previously recorded with Matt Anderson of Heroin), only broken up here and there with squibs of pinpoint jazziness. The balance is struck almost perfectly on “Bill’s Mom Likes to Fuck”, a 10-minute noise-cycle of mood swings, red herrings, and curdled blood.

The wiseass, scattershot racket of Flemish Altruism settles into a more predictable groove on Inindependence. Concise and controlled by comparison, A Minor Forest’s second and final album (not including their 1999 singles-and-EPs collection, …So, Were They in Some Sort of Fight?) drags more algebra into the rhythm and more calculation into the off-kilter melody. It wouldn’t be fair to say the band had begun to take itself either more or less seriously—but the music is more serious, and even the song titles are less crass. If “Erik’s Budding Romance” is to be taken at face value, that relationship flip-flopped randomly and often between coy, candlelit dinners and table-flipping eruptions of lust. Drummer Andee Connors, an unsung hero of his instrument and era, is in top form, coaxing every shade of texture, dynamic, and emotion out of the kit. There are honest, unabashed hooks on the deliciously brief (that is, under four minutes) centerpiece, “…It’s Salmon!!!”, as well as in “Michael Anthony”, which skips a sweet melody across a minefield of disjointed changes and chords. At the same time, the album’s 18-minute monster “The Smell of Hot” never fully jells; as A Minor Forest’s recording career drew to a halt, patience-testing jams occupied one extreme of their spectrum, while a hint of pleasing pop teased at the other.

A Minor Forest’s legacy is not a towering one. Most notably, Hoversten went on to play with Pinback, where he was able to indulge his love of angular melody much more avidly. The band never seemed to want to make bold statements, and it always punctured whatever atmosphere it crafted with wiry self-deprecation and perverse wit. When A Minor Forest reunited in 2013 after a 15-year hiatus, Hoversten said in a radio interview, “[This reunion is] sort of like, take an outfit you wore 15 years ago, then put it on today. Clearly you liked it at one point, but it’s not exactly the outfit you would have chosen today. That being said, it’s not like I’m being asked to put on a clown suit.” Despite their crank titles and in-jokes, A Minor Forest was never a funny band. But they had fun, and that fun seeped into their music. And that makes Flemish Altruism and Inindependence two of the most endlessly rewarding albums of the 90s post-rock boom, if never the most monolithic.