Big Dipper again...just because it's so good

Big DipperSupercluster[The Big Dipper Anthology](Merge)US release date: 18 March 2008UK release date: 18 March 2008by Jennifer Kelly For a song to be beautiful ... the artist must be brave.The late 1980s and early 1990s will probably be remembered mostly as the onset of grunge, the years when Nirvana and Pearl Jam duked it out for the top of the alternative rock heap. And yet, there were alternatives, even to alternative rock, bands that never fit into the marketing categories well enough to make it big, and one of the best of these bands was Big Dipper. This three-CD set collects essentially all of the band’s recorded work, including its three Homestead releases, unreleased tracks and alternate takes, as well as the long unavailable material recorded for Epic and then never released. Formed in the late 1980s, and drawing members from Volcano Suns and the Embarrassment, Big Dipper hitched the jangly guitars and swooning harmonies of college rock (they sound like the dBs on their poppiest tracks) with the raucous rhythms and dissonant guitar interplay of post-punk. They were jokers too, writing slyly funny songs about UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster and Abraham Lincoln, thus upending any attempt to take them too seriously. The video for “Faith Healer”, shows them dancing spastically in someone’s living room, a stuffed bear looking on in mortification as the four principals writhe to jittery guitar riffs. Anticipating the indie boy look by at least a decade, the film catches band members in argyle sweaters and bowling shirts, skinny, rapt and absolutely unafraid to look silly. In the video, it is hard to tell whether they are serious or putting you on, and if you’re smart, you’ll get used to that feeling, because a good number of Big Dipper’s songs were bald-faced, brazen goofballisms, only a hint of over-enthusiasm giving away the joke. More here: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/music/reviews/55925/big-dipper-supercluster/ The “Faith Healer” video