A few months ago, Spotify did their little decade wrap-up thing where they could tell each user what music they listened to the most over the last 10 years. And I was completely unsurprised when Superchunk came up as my #1 artist. They also came up as my favorite album act of the 1990s when I added up all my lists for that decade. So I've loved this band for a long time, maybe more than ever the last few years, and while they're between projects right now, their debut album will be turning 30 in September.

Superchunk deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. For Tension
2. Skip Steps 1 & 3
3. Iron On
4. Like A Fool
5. Bad Choices
6. Detroit Has A Skyline
7. Why Do You Have To Put A Date On Everything
8. Breaking Down
9. European Medicine
10. My Noise
11. Here's Where The Strings Come In
12. Out On The Wing
13. So Convinced
14. From The Curve
15. My Gap Feels Weird
16. Kicked In
17. Punch Me Harder
18. Marquee
19. Dead Photographers
20. Everything At Once
21. Cast Iron
22. Pink Clouds

Track 10 from Superchunk (1990)
Tracks 2, 17 and 21 from No Pocky For Kitty (1991)
Tracks 1 and 14 from On The Mouth (1993)
Tracks 4, 7 and 16 from Foolish (1994)
Tracks 3, 6 and 11 from Here's Where The Strings Come In (1995)
Tracks 9 and 18 from Indoor Living (1997)
Tracks 13 and 22 from Come Pick Me Up (1999)
Track 12 from Here's To Shutting Up (2001)
Tracks 15 and 20 from Majesty Shredding (2010)
Track 8 from I Hate Music (2013)
Tracks 5 and 19 from What A Time To Be Alive (2018)

Once on here I did a little 'box set' of Superchunk playlists so for this I used a lot of the same songs as the 2nd and 3rd playlists there. But if you're not too familiar with the band, I would recommend the first playlist on there as a crash course in some of their best known songs. I stuck to the proper albums here, but Superchunk's three compilations of non-album tracks contain a lot of my favorite songs as well.

Superchunk got their name from original drummer Chuck Garrison (whose name was misspelled 'Chunk' in the phone book), but he only played on the first two albums. His replacement, Jon Wurster, is one of my favorite drummers of all time, so I rate the debut a little lower than most of their albums, but "My Noise" has always been a favorite, I enjoyed the acoustic version Ben Lee did on his '90s covers album Quarter Century Classix last year.

Foolish is probably the consensus pick for Superchunk's best album at this point, and the acoustic re-recording they did last year for its 25th anniversary was pretty enjoyable. But I've always been partial to that album's follow-up, Here's Where The Strings Come In, which just has that amazing huge Fort Apache Studios sound and far more great songs than just the 3 I used here.

On The Mouth is my favorite of the early albums, and Come Pick Me Up was a really cool, underrated reinvention of their sound. It's fun to be able to put a Steve Albini-produced track next to a Jim O'Rourke-produced track and have the full range of this band represented. And their 3 latest albums after returning from a hiatus were all excellent, the most recent one What A Time To Be Alive was really great, I can't think of many bands who were still that good on their 11th album.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 27, 2020 at 10:07 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.