My Top 1000 Songs #702: Sunshine Soul

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.] 

Back in the late 90s, I was deep into online music trading. Well, semi-online: I and other music collectors would post lists of our bootleg collections on clunky GeoCities sites, and then swap tapes (and later CDRs) via snail mail. At some point, I received a cassette full of lo-fi home recordings from the then-nascent Elephant 6 indie scene. I'd probably just gotten acquainted with the records of the Apples in Stereo, Olivia Tremor Control, and Neutral Milk Hotel, but I recall the cassette including some of these bands' rough early recordings, as well as various other related acts like Of Montreal and Elf Power.

One of my favorite songs on the tape was "Sunshine Soul," by a band called The Gerbils, fronted by musician Scott Spillane (who also provided the horns for Neutral Milk Hotel). It was pretty rough, the vocals a little child-like and silly, but something about the loopy guitar hook and nasally unpracticed vocals captured my imagination. It just felt like... well, sunshine, as filtered through some kids trying to make music without much regard for what music was supposed to sound like or how to properly record it. The song's magic was undeniably aided by its inclusion on a mix full of wonderful, varied, yet similarly naive home-brewed recordings. 

I later picked up the band's sole LP, 1998's Are You Sleepy--a fun little record that may lack the chops of other E6 mainstays but has a cheerfully fizzy, lo-fi pop sound with hooks emerging from the din--reminds me a lot of the work of Chris Knox/Tall Dwarfs from New Zealand's like-minded Flying Nun collective.

Live 2006: