A couple years after the release of an expanded version of
the Garbage & the Flowers' legendarily rare late-'90s album
Eyes Rind as If Beggars by the
Bo'Weavil label,
Grapefruit released
The Deep Niche, an album's worth of recordings done by the band before the sessions that made up
Eyes Rind. The eight songs here capture the lo-fi sound of the band in all its innocent glory, touching on
Velvet Underground-inspired weirdness, extended gentle noise freakouts, twisted children's folk, and delicate bedroom pop. The main duo of vocalist/violist
Helen Johnstone and songwriter/guitarist
Yuri Frusin were joined by
Paul Yates and
Torben Tilly for these sessions, and the noise they made together was unschooled, sometime unsteady, and always captivating.
Johnstone's pleading voice and scraping viola are the main focus, but
Frusin's simple, torn-from-the-heart songs and ramshackle guitar rambles are impressive too. Anyone who fell under the band's spell thanks to the reissue of
Eyes Rind will be overjoyed that this music has been unearthed. It provides another key piece of proof that there was something really interesting and important going with the band, something that none of the big indie rock labels at the time, like
Flying Nun and
Xpressway, were quite able to figure out. ~ Tim Sendra
