Green Green (Lion Productions)
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I won’t pretend to know what Prozac had to do with anything in ’86, and it was never exactly dangerous to play pop in Chicago, but Green was in fact a breath of fresh air: at the time the city’s underground rock scene was pretty underwhelming, with the notable exceptions of the Big Black/Naked Raygun noisy postpunk axis, the art-damaged post-Bauhaus sounds nurtured by the Wax Trax store, and stray prodigies like Eleventh Dream Day. Successful in its day, especially for a self-released album—Lescher jokes that the band “rocketed instantly into obscurity”—Green deserves better than a one-way trip down the memory hole. Now, after many years out of print, it’s back in circulation thanks to Lion Productions, a superb label from Geneva, Illinois, that specializes in psych reissues from all over the world. The new edition includes the album plus the band’s first seven-inch (super-raw early versions of four songs that were all rerecorded for the full-length) and three other rarities.
Produced in part by the late Iain Burgess, Green is a decidedly lo-fi, no-frills affair—Lescher’s electric guitar sounds impossibly brittle—but the band makes a virtue of it. They go for broke, for example, on the urgent chorus of “Gotta Getta Record Out,” leaning into howled ah-ooh-ooh backup vocals reminiscent of the Fab Four in their mop-top Cavern Club days. Lescher’s singing is all over the place, swinging wildly from a piercing, nasal falsetto to a sandpapery sneer to unhinged growls and screams (by the early 90s, when I last saw Green, he’d reined himself in a bit), but he fits this unwieldy instrument neatly into songs as varied as the Yardbirds-style rave-up “If You Love Me” and the primitive country ballad “For You.” When I got this reissue I probably hadn’t heard Green in two decades, but I recognized every tune. They sound just as good today as they did back then.
