“Jack O Lantern”
“In a Sweet Song”
“Jack Smith”
SUPREME DICKS
Breathing and Not Breathing
(Jagjaguwar)
1/2 (out of 5)
Lesser-known members of the late-’80s/early-’90s loose-fit, volume-friendly rock system—think Superchunk, Archers of Loaf, Pavement, and Dinosaur Jr. (Lou Barlow was an on-and-off member)—the Supreme Dicks traipsed about with gloomy, aimless, shoot-from-the-hip rock-instrument disjointed pop/folk. Never heard of them? Lucky for us newcomers, Jagjaguwar had the good sense to reissue a bunch of their work in the vessel of Breathing and Not Breathing, a glorious four-CD box set spanning one of Massachusetts’s gloomiest-ever bodies of work. Listen to “Jack-O-Lantern” and try to deny it doesn’t rival Pavement in the birth of that sound. “Garden of Your Past” suggests everyone in the lineup is playing a different song, but you still won’t want them to stop.
This story has been updated since its original publication.
