My Top 1000 Songs #619: Bitter

So, it's early 1994. I'm still living in San Francisco, renting the ground floor of an old, drafty Victorian in Noe Valley, shortly before my wife and I buy a house down the Peninsula to split up our commutes a little more evenly, the same suburban home where we live today. My brother back home in Chicago tells me to check this local band he's into, Certain Distant Suns. The last Chicago artist he'd talked up, Liz Phair, turned out to be pretty good, so I snag Happy On The Inside, a collection of their early EPs, at the record store on 24th Street. 

It's pretty decent, not necessarily breaking new ground, but fits into that post-Pavement, slightly grunge- and shoegaze-adjacent early 90s indie rock mold I was into, though with a bit more of a dance groove, maybe most analogous to San Francisco's own Creeper Lagoon. Still, a couple songs stood out, most notably "Bitter," which was a boomy, room-filling tune, some goth-like darkness and angst, and sounded great bouncing off the walls of that high-ceilinged Victorian.

I still crank it up now and then. I miss San Francisco, and that point in the mid-90s before suburbia and parenthood, and this one brings it back.

Alternate video:

Live in Chicago 1997 (at the 5-minute mark):