The Comedy of Errors: Seaweed - Recall (1 May 1992)

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Listening to Seaweed’s debut album, Weak, alongside Love Battery’s Dayglo album, it becomes touching just how much Sub Pop were hawking out acts in 1992 as potential new Nirvanas to follow in Kurt and Co’s path to mainstream success.
Weak was no  Nevermind, but then very few things are.  However, it certainly didn’t take a leap of imagination to hear tracks from it booming out on daytime radio and enjoying mainstream popularity.  A decade on from Weak’s release, the Seaweed sound was smoothed down and given a bland production makeover in order to create hits for many of the tedious American nu-metal bands that stank out the charts in the early to mid Noughties.  They could appropriate parts of the sound, but Seaweed’s work cut a little deeper.
In terms of the Peel show, Recall makes for an interesting tails to the heads of Pacifier by Circus Lupus, broadcast on the same night as this track was. While Pacifier sounded like it was being directly broadcast from the maelstrom of a tempestuously failing relationship; Recall is the sound of a man reflecting on where things went wrong and casting around for consolatory memories, but still too rawly affected by the relationship to be at peace.  Whatever Aaron Stauffer is singing about has still left marks on his psyche.  Indeed the sense of trying to make sense of the past and letting it cloud your present relationship is a bit of a theme running through the best tracks on Weak.  I only hope Peel’s playlists for May/June 1992 allow a chance to share more of their tracks from the album as there is a lot to enjoy in tracks like Baggage, New Tools and Clean Slate.

Video courtesy of Mike Vince