Biography
Not so much a classic, rather a classic example of an album lost to the limits of DIY distribution and homegrown record labels. Until I found this album online sometime in the very late '90s, my affiliation with these Jersey bar-rockers was solely through a grainy video for this album's brilliant "Time Walks Away," which aired on MTVs 120 Minutes, dare I say in 1990-91(?). To my memory, no album or label information was provided with the usual "ID" info, but in years to come, I would learn that then 120 Minutes host, the infamously gravel-throated, Matt Pinfield was keenly familiar with the Blases, so no great mystery there as to why the video was sandwiched between Jesus & Mary Chain and Julian Cope clips at 1:30 AM.
Despite my eventual absorption of the Blases record, and even with the ever expanding "information highway" at my fingertips I have unsuccessfully learned much about the band, with the exception of reading of a one-off reunion show in recent years. The Blases is no magnum-opus, and is probably what Soul Asylum would have amounted to had they pursued the gin-mills and nothing else. However the song that lured me in the first place, the aforementioned "Time Walks Away," is stunning, due in part to it's relatable 'one-that-got-away' motif, and an incessantly, jangle-ridden hook. Side two's "Wasting My Dreams to Sleep," comes in at a fairly close second, and although the nine-song collection is more than listenable, great swaths of it don't particularly stick.
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