The only thing surprising about Sebadoh’s new album Act Surprised is just how well the 21st century suits the indie-rock legends. They’ve been standard-bearers for lo-fi home recording, kings of early-’90s underground cassette culture and alt-rock underdogs, but the Sebadoh of 2019 sounds as vital and energetic as ever. Act Surprised has all the skewed hooks and sideways riffs that made Sebadoh essential listening in the Clinton era. What’s new is a surety and confidence that came only from surviving the lean years after the post-grunge gold rush ran dry.
“People that sort of discovered us the first time around for some reason are coming back to the shows,” Sebadoh leader Lou Barlow — whom you’ll also likely know as the bassman for Dinosaur Jr. — tells the Scene. “They kind of weren’t around for a while.”
It should be noted here just how hard and how quickly rock took a turn for the worse at the end of the 20th century. In 1999, Sebadoh released The Sebadoh, the band’s seventh full-length of the decade. By then, the wild, anything-goes-approach to radio programming that had opened the airwaves early in the decade had been drowned in a wash of corporate consolidation. Following the deregulation precipitating from the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Clear Channel grew into a leviathan, with its holdings rising to more than 800 radio stations after a 1999 deal. The company, which later rebranded as iHeartMedia, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2018, but fearful programmers circa Y2K doubled down on the shitty bro bands — Creed, Kid Rock, Limp Bizkit — to save their jobs. The era of Landfill Indie and its horde of interchangeable post-Strokes poppy guitar bands too boring to remember was just a twitch in an Apple exec’s pants, but shit was already bleak.
“There was a long period of time when we were playing — I don’t want to use negative terms to describe the audience that stuck with us — but we were kind of dealing with the remnants of the ’90s, and really diminished audiences,” says Barlow. “It was humbling, you know. It was a very humbling kind of — depending on the night — depressing experience.”
Sebadoh has earned the right to coast on nostalgia. The 1991 single “Gimme Indie Rock” alone is a perfect, canon-defining slice of snark that kicked off a decade-long run of unrivaled quality. 2013’s Defend Yourself broke a 14-year hiatus after The Sebadoh, and Act Surprised proves that the band — whose current recording and touring incarnation is the trio of Barlow on guitar with longtime associates Jason Loewenstein on bass and Bob D’Amico on drums — is at its best when moving forward. And word from the first leg of the tour is that live shows are just as powerful as they’ve always been, and the crowd is responding in kind.
“I sell our T-shirts every night, so I go out and sit behind the merch booth and sell stuff and talk to people,” Barlow says. “There were just so many people that I talked to that had seen us in, like, ’93 or ’94, and the last album they liked was Bakesale. And I would talk to them and they would be like, ‘Oh my kids are finally out of the house.’ It’s nice that not only are the bands of our vintage doing good stuff, but the audience of our vintage is also kind of coming back a little bit. They’re coming back. Maybe they’ve come to a period in their lives where they’re like, ‘Wow, geez, I think I can stay out till 10 o’clock tonight.’ ”
Even though we’re in an era when you can see Sebadoh at a parent-friendly hour of night, Act Surprised rumbles and thumps as hard as anything in American music in 2019. The maturity comes through in the fuzz — there’s a hard-earned wisdom in the richness of these tones. But peel the label off and you’ve got a fiery, youthful band. Put Act Surprised in a blind taste test against the rest of my inbox, and this will rank as one of the best indie-rock records of the year, by any band, of any age.
“I guess I had some conditions that I wanted to meet in order to make the new record,” Barlow says. “One of them was that I wanted to spend a week before we went into the studio tossing ideas around and making demos. … Back in the day, you used to play your songs live, and then you get an opportunity to go to the studio and you play your live set — and that would be the record. So knowing that we can’t do it that way, because of the time constraints and things, I was like, ‘Well, I want at least four or five days of poking around and throwing ideas at each other.’ ”
This newfound focus opens up the songs to some beautiful and surprising moments. The middle section in “Leap Year,” the way the groove frays on “Sunshine,” the way the propulsion builds and dissipates on “Medicate” — they all fit into the classic Sebadoh sound. But they feel like a continuation of early experiments, rather than a rehash of former glories. Barlow seems to agree.
“It was just wonderful. The focus that we all brought to it was pretty amazing, and if it took us this long to actually come to that sort of focus, so be it. I’m glad that we took the time.”
