Album: Foxheads Stalk This Land
Year: 1988.
One of my favorite running Twitter jokes is to take a random phrase that someone has just tweeted and use it as a band name. The usual construction is something like “I saw Fake Dead Girlfriend open for the Pixies at the i-Beam in 1991.”
The reason, of course, that this joke works is that there are real-life bands with names like “Close Lobsters.” It’s a name that makes no godsdamned sense, and it might even be just weird enough to be off-putting, which I guess is part of the point.
This is too damn bad, because Scotland’s Close Lobsters released two excellent albums (and an EP) of amazing jangly guitar rock in the late 1980s. If the top tier consisted of R.E.M., The Smiths and The Church, then Close Lobsters were just a skosh below. So it’s a shame that they never broke anywhere.
“A Prophecy” starts off with a long, expansive guitar hook (not so far off from what Real Estate is doing these days) that returns after lead singer Andrew Burnett sings the chorus:
‘Cause you don’t know
Where you’re going
It’s not surprising since
You don’t know where to go
Of course, this isn’t really a band where you worry about the words: you listen for all of the cool little guitar hooks — especially when they break out into a twin guitar solo — the harmonies that suddenly just show up, and that strange bit near the end where the drummer speeds up just a tad and the rest of the band comes along for the ride.
Fan-made video for “A Prophecy”