"Unlistenable"

Claw Hammer (Interscope, 1994-1998)

While Green Day was obviously the big reason majors started paying attention to pop punk, they weren't the only ones to make it big early on. Bad Religion’s 1994 release Stranger Than Fiction netted them a hit on the charts with “Infected”, leading their label Atlantic to see if any bands they had worked with before had commercial potential. My first choice personally wouldn’t have been Claw Hammer, but their signing makes more sense when you look into who did it: Anna Statman, an Interscope A&R rep who had also scored the label Helmet, Cop Shoot Cop and Nine Inch Nails, and was more or less given freedom to sign whoever she liked as a result. That she signed a band with relations to a recent heavy-hitter was just a plus.
Having this support from within the label was beneficial to the group, as their specific brand of hyperactive noise-punk-blues carried by vocalist Jon Wahl’s cartoon squeals and croaks would have been difficult to market to any crowd, much less pop punk fans. (Statman would later call them “the least commercial band” the label had signed.) The group’s 1995 major debut Thank the Holder Uppers ended up feeling more like a leftover indie release than something catered to a mass audience, baffling critics and being widely ignored by consumers. But Statman liked them, and so they stuck around, making another label friend in Mudhoney’s manager Bob Whittaker, who took the band under his wing.
After a two-year period in which Interscope underwent a few regime shifts, the band released Hold Your Tongue (And Say Apple) in 1997. This time the band seemed to be somewhat trying to clean up their act, playing more blues than punk and recruiting classic rock producer Jim Dickinson to record the album, giving it more of a traditional rock sound, or at least as traditional as these guys could get. The label released a decent bit of promotional material mentioning this, seemingly trying to market the group to fans of roots rock groups like The Black Crowes despite their unchanged association with more rowdy punk groups. Despite the label’s increased promotion, including funding a music video for the band, reception was mostly the same; critics weren’t sure what to make of it, and the group’s fanbase remained scarce despite touring with larger groups like Mudhoney and The Geraldine Fibbers.
In 1998, Anna Statman left Interscope, which by this point was a completely different environment than it was when Claw Hammer had gotten signed. With her out the door, so was the group, having made not a ripple in the label’s lineup or the mainstream. The band found out they had been dropped the day after they had finished their album tour, to the relief of all members, who were more than eager to be out of the uber-professionalism that had metamorphosed within Interscope. While it’s easy to dismiss Claw Hammer due to their complete lack of mainstream attention or success, their story displays an interesting snapshot of the period where alternative rock fell out of fashion and in its wake labels became hyper-focused on pop potential rather than creative freedom.

Rollerskate Skinny (Atlantic, 1994; Warner Bros, 1994-1997)

Of all the distribution deals struck between majors and indies during this period, the about-two-year tenure (1993/94) when Atlantic and Beggars Banquet were working together might have been the strangest. The most successful group to come out of it was probably Rollerskate Skinny, if only because they had more than one album released through a major. Atlantic wanting to distribute this Irish shoegaze group wasn’t completely nonsensical: their debut EP Novice and album Shoulder Voices had both received ecstatic reviews from British publications, and they had a linking to a popular group through drummer Jimi Shields, the brother of Kevin from My Bloody Valentine. But the music on Shoulder Voices was a tad challenging to entry-level shoegaze fans, being a psychedelic whirlwind of layered, dreamy walls of noise drenched in layers of studio experimentation and driven by cryptic vocals. Despite this the band came stateside swinging, securing opening acts for such like-minded groups as Mercury Rev, Mazzy Star and The Smashing Pumpkins, and even securing a spot at Lollapalooza 1994. While their debut was released by a major in the States, the band hadn’t actually worked within one; that changed at the end of the year, when they signed a deal with Warner Bros.
The only release to come of this deal was 1996’s Horsedrawn Wishes, which saw the musical traits prevalent in their debut album pushed to their extreme. The album wasn’t released until nearly a year after it was recorded, and listening to it makes the reason why clear - each song is a dense, multi-layered sensory assault of multiple samples on multiple loops on multiple instruments, all put through multiple layers of post-production effects. The result is a nearly hour-long session of controlled chaos, creating a sound that goes beyond psychedelic and becomes alien, otherworldly. The album received a similar amount of critical acclaim and praise from fans, but overall sales were disappointing, as by the time of its release the British shoegaze revolution of the early 90s had been mostly overshadowed by the fast rise of Britpop acts like Oasis, Blur and Pulp.
Despite the band getting to work on a third album being recorded in 1996, nothing would come of it until the demos were leaked online in 2019, as the group disbanded acrimoniously in 1997. While the group has since put aside their differences and given their blessing to the leaked third album, they’ve said a reunion is unlikely. While their time in the limelight was short-lived, Rollerskate Skinny still retains a sizable cult following both in their native Ireland and among shoegaze fans, with Horsedrawn Wishes often being cited by multiple publications as both a “lost classic” of the genre and as one of the best albums to come out of Ireland.

Steel Pole Bath Tub (Slash/London, 1994-1996)

(I’m kind of cheating by putting these guys here as they only had one album on a major, but they almost had two. Almost! It’s the principle of the thing or whatever!)
Steel Pole Bath Tub built up a name for themselves in the early 90s for their frantic, frenzied sound and heavy reliance on samples from movies and shows. While it may not have seemed like a recipe for commercial success, the band gained attention through being a touring powerhouse, opening for and playing with groups like The Flaming Lips, Sonic Youth, Jawbreaker, Mudhoney, Melvins, Neurosis and Ethyl Meatplow, netting them attention from fans of noise rock, emo, grunge, metal and industrial music alike. With this much reach, maybe it was only inevitable that the band would sign with a major, making a deal with both Warner Bros. subsidiary Slash and distributor London Records in late 1994.
The result was 1995’s Scars from Falling Down, a marked departure in sound. While the group was still as manic as ever, concerns from Slash’s legal department meant the band had a limit on the amount of samples they could use, removing a large part of the band’s sound and leaving their songs noticeably more minimalist. While sales were middling despite the group securing multiple shows as the opening act for Faith No More, the album still received a warm reception from critics, keeping the group in Slash’s good graces.
Until the next year, at least. For their follow-up, Steel Pole Bath Tub wanted to record a noisy, experimental cover album of The Cars’ debut, which Slash nipped in the bud. The band went back and recorded fifteen new songs (alongside three Cars covers still in there, because of course) for a hypothetical follow-up, only for those to get rejected too, with label execs calling the album “unlistenable.” Having been rejected twice and refused permission to release the songs elsewhere, Steel Pole Bath Tub broke up almost on the spot.
The band was finally able to secure the rejected songs from Slash in 2002, at which point they released them on their own label under the name christened by a former exec: Unlistenable. (That’s also where the name of the site came from - yes, I am pointing this out in the least subtle way I can.) Upon listening to it, it’s not hard to understand their sentiment. The album would’ve easily been the group’s noisiest and most experimental, with songs ranging from atmospheric soundtrack-esque pieces to fragmented, piercingly noisy musical assaults, all mixed in an extremely harsh, lo-fi way that seems to directly challenge the listener. This all serves to create an experience that feels disjointed and disorienting to say the least, and would have been completely bizarre on any label in 1996, much less a major one.
While the band has remained split apart from a few one-off reunion shows, the three members still work together on occasional musical projects. Of particular note is frontman Mike Morasky, who found much greater success in the 2000s as an in-house composer for video game company Valve, composing the soundtracks for such heavy-hitters as Left 4 Dead 2, Counter-Strike 2, both Portal games and Team Fortress 2. While label disagreements may have brought Steel Pole Bath Tub to an unceremonious end, all its members remain active in the music scene and seem to have found greater peace of mind since their time in the band, if not greater success.

Moonshake (Atlantic, 1993; American, 1995)

Of the four artists from UK label Too Pure to reach American shores in 1992-93, Moonshake was easily the strangest. Compared to the bluesy indie-punk of PJ Harvey and the noisy kraut-pop of Th’ Faith Healers and Stereolab, Moonshake seemed almost threatening with their dark, experimental combo of discordant shoegaze guitars, dub reggae-inspired basslines, psychedelic hip-hop drums and squealing brass instruments in a sea of miscellaneous layered noises. Combine all this with dual vocalists David Callahan’s nasal, bitter sneering and Margaret Fiedler’s near-inaudible mumbling, and it makes sense that majors weren’t really biting… at first.
In early 1993 Moonshake scored a US deal with up-and-coming indie label Matador, who had recently found success with soon-to-be iconic indie rock group Pavement. However, the success of that group put Matador firmly in the spotlight, resulting in them signing a deal with Atlantic that would last until 1995. While this collaboration mainly saw Atlantic promoting Matador’s more radio-friendly groups like The Fall, Pizzicato Five and Yo La Tengo, Moonshake’s debut album Eva Luna was among the first releases to result from the partnership, exposing their cacophonous genre mashing to a wide audience. Despite being warmly received by publications in the group’s native UK, the release was mostly ignored stateside by both critics and consumers, leading Matador to release the follow-up EP Big Good Angel themselves rather than going through Atlantic.
Moonshake was dropped from Matador in 1994 after Fiedler and bassist John Frenett left to form trip-hop group Laika, who would find much greater success later in the decade after signing with Sire. But their time on major labels was not over yet, as American’s partnership with Too Pure in 1995 meant Moonshake’s second album The Sound Your Eyes Can Follow was coming stateside. Promoting itself as “guaranteed guitar-free”, this incarnation of the band was clearly a different beast than the one previously documented, trading the noisy guitars for a full brass section and fully integrating a dark, surreal jazz sound in between the rest of their genre collage. Despite the album featuring vocal contributions from more-popular labelmates Katherine Gifford of Stereolab and PJ Harvey, critical and commercial attention remained scarce, though the band managed to net a spot at Lollapalooza ‘96 before falling apart in 1997, leaving their third album unreleased stateside.
While Moonshake’s genre gumbo was near-impossible to classify during their lifespan, their music, along with that of most of their Too Pure labelmates, has since been reclassified as an early example of the genre post-rock. Post-rock is classified by its cribbing from more classical styles of music and emphasis on timbre and atmosphere, all to deliberately challenge the pre-established structures of traditional rock music. Much like Kyuss with stoner metal, Moonshake has since been reclaimed as an essential group to the foundation of post-rock, with this historical importance giving them a larger audience than major label distribution ever did.