Zucker

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Zucker album cover
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Total Tracks: 14   Total Length: 33:18

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Douglas Wolk

eMusic Contributor

Douglas Wolk writes about pop music and comic books for Time, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Wired and elsewhere. He's the author of Reading Comics: How Gra...more »

03.15.10
Twisty, melodically tricky songs with full-tilt punk rock velocity
Label: Sub Pop Records

Fastbacks spent most of their 20-year existence as the Seattle institution whose passionate fans were baffled that they weren't famous; Kurt Bloch's lyrics on this 33-minute firecracker-string of an album are stunningly bitter and full of grinding despair, although you'd never know it from Kim Warnick's giddy chirp and the band's speed-demon performances. Built around the axis of guitarist Bloch, singer/bassist Warnick (who was also Sub Pop's receptionist for many years) and singer/guitarist Lulu Gargiulo, Fastbacks were basically a power-pop band that played their twisty, melodically tricky songs with full-tilt punk rock velocity and body English. Their secret was that their heart was in an even older mode of pop: Zücker's single, "Gone to the Moon," is a kind of riposte to Jonathan King's 1965 waltz "Everyone's Gone to the Moon," and "Please Read Me" is an early Bee Gees cover whose sentiment is in the same mode as Bloch's.

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Gone To The Moon

pocaroba

Guitar tone? Whatever. This album is all sorts of awesome. If you can download "Gone To The Moon" and "Parts" and then not download this whole album then you and I could not be friends. This is great 90's Seattle pop-punk.

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Sorry...

austinaudiophile

...they might be Seattle royalty but dudes guitar tone has not aged real well.

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Sub Pop was a 'zine before it was a label, and its area of coverage was implied in its original name: "Subterranean Pop." Launched in the late '80s by Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman, the label at first specialized in the loud, hairy, messy music that underground rock bands in the Pacific Northwest were making in those days. When that sound broke into the pop mainstream a few years later, Sub Pop broadened its mission. For… more »

They Say All Music Guide

After the compilation The Question Is No catapulted them from their lowly status as a local cult item to their new role as a national cult item, Fastbacks sounded a good bit more cheerful and a lot more confident on their third proper album, Zucker. Roaring right out of the box with three hooky classics in a row (“Believe Me Never,” “Gone to the Moon,” and “Hung on a Bad Peg,” Zucker manages to be one of Fastbacks’ most rocking and most pop-influenced albums at once; “When I’m Old” is a lovely bit of mid-tempo contemplation replete with acoustic guitars, and Fastbacks even cover a Bee Gees tune (don’t fret, “Please Read Me” dates from the Gibbs’ Brit-pop period rather than the disco era). And if Kurt Bloch still sounds a bit uncertain about the world around him, he and his partners Kim Warnick, Lulu Gargiulo, and drummer of the moment Rusty Willoughby sound energetic enough to roar right over the bad times. Witty, muscular, and packed with great songs, Zucker ranks with Fastbacks’ very best work. – Mark Deming

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