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Dare to be Surprised (Joyful Noise Recordings)
Add date: 3.25.2025
Release date: 3.21.2025
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I recently found myself trying to explain to some younger friends who weren’t fully conscious for them just how deeply weird the ’90s were.
On a global scale, you had the collapse of the Soviet Union (Sputnik's down!), and with it, in addition to hundreds of millions of people thrown to the wolves of economic chaos and misery , the end of the Cold War that had provided the defining framework for understanding the world over the previous half century, leaving hapless theorists to speculate about “the end of history,” even. Confusing!
At the local level, local to me specifically, it was a time when one could sit down with one’s father as he watched NASCAR on TV and hear “Natural One” by The Folk Implosion — a band consisting of two guys I’d met and hung out with, who’d performed their first show just a few years earlier, opening for a little-known band I was playing with on my first-ever tour (!) — employed as bumper music before the next commercial break. I was 25 years old and these were my underground music friends and suddenly their song was inescapable. Also confusing!
I get the sense it was a little confusing for John and Lou, too. They were in the middle of recording the follow-up to their 1994 debut album, Take A Look Inside, when it happened. The KIDS stuff — the handful of songs and instrumental tracks they’d contributed to the soundtrack of the now infamous Harmony Korine/Larry Clark film — had been something of a lark, but it was while recording it at Boston’s venerable Fort Apache that they met Wally Gagel. A happy accident: Gagel happened to be the house engineer on duty the day they showed up, but they found in him someone whose general sensibilities, and, critically, enthusiasm for new wave, matched their own.
The results marked a shift from earlier Folk Implosion efforts. The partnership between Lou Barlow, already an indie-rock veteran with two of the era’s most influential bands in Dinosaur Jr. and Sebadoh amongst his credits, and John Davis, the erstwhile librarian whose skeletal solo work paired elliptical guitar figures with lyrics that evoked the language poets, seemed at first like an opportunity to get silly with it in ways that wouldn’t have sat quite right with their other projects. The name itself was a piss-take inversion of Jon Spencer’s Blues Explosion, whose full-spectrum dominance of the indie sphere at the time has been sadly lost to the intervening decades; but musically it shared a similarly playful spirit, alternating between slapstick boogie (“Slap Me,” “Shake A Little Heaven”) and outright anarchy (“Hey, You Don’t Say,” the uproariously unhinged “Whole Hog” — Deluxx Folk Implosion reunion/reissue when?).
What came out of Fort Apache was something else entirely. Mannered, moody, dubby even (they sampled Erik Satie, for crying out loud!). The freak success of “Natural One” still lay in the future, but a corner had been turned already. Lacking the budget to go back to the proper studio that the KIDS gig had afforded them, the Folk Implosion settled instead on Gagel’s small recording space in Boston’s South End, sandwiched between grubby rehearsal studios and the city’s last gay bathhouse, the Safari Club, to begin work on Dare to Be Surprised.
There were rules, rules born from frank conversations. No power chords. No riffs. No indie rock! They whiled away afternoons in the park writing lyrics, trading lines. And over a year of episodic sessions, a weekend here, a few days there, an album came together. When “Natural One” blew up it could’ve changed the calculus — the opportunity was there to scrap what they’d been working on and start over with major-label money — but they elected instead to stay the course, confident in the process.
For the first twenty seconds of the opening “Pole Position,” a characteristically angular, slightly atonal John Davis guitar phrase backed by a rare Lou Barlow drum feature, Dare to Be Surprised doesn’t sound dramatically different from what came before it. But then a four-count drops us into something sleek and sinewy, and the following “Wide Web” doubles down on the mood with its spare, motorik pulse. By the time we get to “Insinuation” we are in uncharted territory: live drums layered over programmed beats; taut, sinuous bass lines; tense, time-keeping guitar; brooding strings. “Checking In” and “Burning Paper” follow a similar template, but the degree to which they might echo one another is dwarfed by how little they sound like anything we’ve heard from either of their authors up until now. The closing “River Devotion” takes the same elements but transposes the vibe from one of somber melancholy to something more wistful, even sweet.
It seems a bit of a shame from this remove that Dare to Be Surprised was destined to live in the shadow of the KIDS soundtrack’s success, but like I say, the ’90s were a weird time, and it was sometimes hard to recognize things for what they were. What this was, it’s clear now, is the sound of a band truly finding its feet, and forging something genuinely new in the process. They joked at the time about how they’d one day look back on the experience, like a couple fondly recalling long-ago adventures: “Wasn’t that vacation on the lake wonderful?”
When asked if there’s anything they’d like listeners to think about when revisiting the album, Lou responds with an impatience that betrays his love for it: “I just wish people could hear what I hear when I listen to those songs.” John singles out “Pole Position,” “Wide Web,” and “River Devotion” as particular favorites, and Lou concurs.
They weren’t thinking about their audience or anyone else when they made them. “It was for me,” Lou says. “It was for me and John.”
Apple Music
Bandcamp
Joyful Noise Recordings
Spotify
Tidal
YouTube
I recently found myself trying to explain to some younger friends who weren’t fully conscious for them just how deeply weird the ’90s were.
On a global scale, you had the collapse of the Soviet Union (Sputnik's down!), and with it, in addition to hundreds of millions of people thrown to the wolves of economic chaos and misery , the end of the Cold War that had provided the defining framework for understanding the world over the previous half century, leaving hapless theorists to speculate about “the end of history,” even. Confusing!
At the local level, local to me specifically, it was a time when one could sit down with one’s father as he watched NASCAR on TV and hear “Natural One” by The Folk Implosion — a band consisting of two guys I’d met and hung out with, who’d performed their first show just a few years earlier, opening for a little-known band I was playing with on my first-ever tour (!) — employed as bumper music before the next commercial break. I was 25 years old and these were my underground music friends and suddenly their song was inescapable. Also confusing!
I get the sense it was a little confusing for John and Lou, too. They were in the middle of recording the follow-up to their 1994 debut album, Take A Look Inside, when it happened. The KIDS stuff — the handful of songs and instrumental tracks they’d contributed to the soundtrack of the now infamous Harmony Korine/Larry Clark film — had been something of a lark, but it was while recording it at Boston’s venerable Fort Apache that they met Wally Gagel. A happy accident: Gagel happened to be the house engineer on duty the day they showed up, but they found in him someone whose general sensibilities, and, critically, enthusiasm for new wave, matched their own.
The results marked a shift from earlier Folk Implosion efforts. The partnership between Lou Barlow, already an indie-rock veteran with two of the era’s most influential bands in Dinosaur Jr. and Sebadoh amongst his credits, and John Davis, the erstwhile librarian whose skeletal solo work paired elliptical guitar figures with lyrics that evoked the language poets, seemed at first like an opportunity to get silly with it in ways that wouldn’t have sat quite right with their other projects. The name itself was a piss-take inversion of Jon Spencer’s Blues Explosion, whose full-spectrum dominance of the indie sphere at the time has been sadly lost to the intervening decades; but musically it shared a similarly playful spirit, alternating between slapstick boogie (“Slap Me,” “Shake A Little Heaven”) and outright anarchy (“Hey, You Don’t Say,” the uproariously unhinged “Whole Hog” — Deluxx Folk Implosion reunion/reissue when?).
What came out of Fort Apache was something else entirely. Mannered, moody, dubby even (they sampled Erik Satie, for crying out loud!). The freak success of “Natural One” still lay in the future, but a corner had been turned already. Lacking the budget to go back to the proper studio that the KIDS gig had afforded them, the Folk Implosion settled instead on Gagel’s small recording space in Boston’s South End, sandwiched between grubby rehearsal studios and the city’s last gay bathhouse, the Safari Club, to begin work on Dare to Be Surprised.
There were rules, rules born from frank conversations. No power chords. No riffs. No indie rock! They whiled away afternoons in the park writing lyrics, trading lines. And over a year of episodic sessions, a weekend here, a few days there, an album came together. When “Natural One” blew up it could’ve changed the calculus — the opportunity was there to scrap what they’d been working on and start over with major-label money — but they elected instead to stay the course, confident in the process.
For the first twenty seconds of the opening “Pole Position,” a characteristically angular, slightly atonal John Davis guitar phrase backed by a rare Lou Barlow drum feature, Dare to Be Surprised doesn’t sound dramatically different from what came before it. But then a four-count drops us into something sleek and sinewy, and the following “Wide Web” doubles down on the mood with its spare, motorik pulse. By the time we get to “Insinuation” we are in uncharted territory: live drums layered over programmed beats; taut, sinuous bass lines; tense, time-keeping guitar; brooding strings. “Checking In” and “Burning Paper” follow a similar template, but the degree to which they might echo one another is dwarfed by how little they sound like anything we’ve heard from either of their authors up until now. The closing “River Devotion” takes the same elements but transposes the vibe from one of somber melancholy to something more wistful, even sweet.
It seems a bit of a shame from this remove that Dare to Be Surprised was destined to live in the shadow of the KIDS soundtrack’s success, but like I say, the ’90s were a weird time, and it was sometimes hard to recognize things for what they were. What this was, it’s clear now, is the sound of a band truly finding its feet, and forging something genuinely new in the process. They joked at the time about how they’d one day look back on the experience, like a couple fondly recalling long-ago adventures: “Wasn’t that vacation on the lake wonderful?”
When asked if there’s anything they’d like listeners to think about when revisiting the album, Lou responds with an impatience that betrays his love for it: “I just wish people could hear what I hear when I listen to those songs.” John singles out “Pole Position,” “Wide Web,” and “River Devotion” as particular favorites, and Lou concurs.
They weren’t thinking about their audience or anyone else when they made them. “It was for me,” Lou says. “It was for me and John.”