The Garbage & The Flowers - The Deep Niche (2016)

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.