Sebadoh 'The Freed Man' (Domino)

It’s hard to believe that these recordings were made almost 20 years ago, that the initial rush of what came to be known as ‘lo-fi’ started out nearly two decades back. The origins of the whole wretched ‘Emo’ thing could probably be traced back to early Sebadoh, as well as the mid nineties Canadian rock explosion. Moncton, New Brunswick noiseniks Eric’s Trip took a great deal of their early cues from Barlow, Gaffney and (on later records) Lowenstein alongside a myriad of North American acts who drank from the Sebadoh well.
So in the cold light of the later part of the first decade of a new century how do the 4-track doodlings of two (then) twenty something proto-slackers shape up? Well, surprisingly well, is the answer I wasn’t expecting to be able to give.
My main problem with Sebadoh had always been Eric Gaffney, their drummer/multi-instrumentalist who insisted on ruining huge chunks of ‘Sebadoh III’ with his oblique punk experiments. Where Barlow and Lowenstein would supply folk-pop gem after folk-pop gem Gaffney would simply dick about with screaming and tuneless rubbish, giving the impression that his ’songs’ were included merely to push a good EP up to the length of an album.
On the ‘The Freed Man’ this expectation is turned on its head, where once one would see the writing credit ‘Gaffney’ coming up and shudder now it’s possible to actually look forward to his songs. And songs they are, acoustic and semi fuzzy vignettes quickly committed to cassette via the (then) magic of Tascam. Occasionally the hideous wrongness that dominated his later output on Sebadoh rears up, ‘McKinley’s Lament’ is the kind of tuneless space filling that took up most of his time on later releases, but for the bulk of this 52 track extended edition a very different Gaffney is revealed.
This has the added bonus of breaking up what can become a grey monotony if only Barlow’s songs are present, his solo ‘Lou Barlow’s Acoustic Sentridoh’ collection suffered a great deal from being a relentless procession of self-pitying whining (though we can be grateful that it didn’t feature ‘The Freed Man’s ‘Lou Rap’, where Barlow showcases worse ‘flow’ than even the infamous Louis Theroux ‘Six foot two in a hatchback, but it’s not wack, the seats go back’ number).
If Sebadoh had stopped immediately after finishing ‘The Freed Man’ then this release would have represented a perfect snapshot of a brief period of time when the two protagonists were at a creative peak. As it stands they went on, and this is good in some ways (’Soul and Fire’, ‘Gimme Indie Rock’, their influence on bands that turned out to be far greater than them) and very very bad in others (pretty much everything Gaffney did after ‘The Freed Man’*, the whole sorry influencing of a generation of sadsack ‘emo’ losers).
‘The Freed Man’ – overlong? Definitely. Typical Sebadoh? Absolutely. Any good? Surprisingly so.

*It has to be said that his post-Sebadoh ‘Fields of Gaffney’ project is far better that one would expect.