LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Husker Du
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Husker Du's final outing as a band before a personality implosion is this immense double record called Warehouse: Songs and Stories, which is an apt name as it seems to have a warehouse feel to the material. With an abundance of songs - twenty total - there tends to be more filler material than one might consider necessary for the band. However, when taken into consideration that the band did not survive long beyond the release of this record, the wealth of songs turns out to be a good thing. Warehouse is fraught with some problems, such as a power sapping production from Bob Mould and Grant Hart that puts the instruments into tidy compartments and takes away their innate power. The drums are too friendly for their own good and the guitar sound is too compacted, instead of the sleetstorm of distortion one expects from Bob Mould. But on the other hand, the good songs throughout this record make it a good epilogue to the band's recording career.
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Bob Mould, the bulky singer-guitarist with US thrash giants, Husker Du, is on-line from Minneapolis. Even accounting for the eroding qualities of long-distance static, his voice is very straightforward and matter-of-fact, a surprising Joe Average sound - "Hi, how’ya doin’, sorry I missed you the other day, I was outside shovelling snow, didn’t hear the phone" - compared to the holocaust wail with which he renders his songs.
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In 1982, Husker Du recorded a great punk rock/hardcore album called Everything Falls Apart. 12 songs in 19 minutes, it was recorded in a studio and demonstrates exactly how manic and amazing the band really was when you could make out what they were playing. Bob Mould's guitar tone revealed itself as a sparkling, warm fuzzy orange blast of brushy wirey warm-to-screaming swishy chorusy ringing mesmerizing bottomless "RAAAAAAAAHHHH!" Grant Hart suddenly showed himself to be one of the most on-the-ball punk rock drummers in the Universe, locking with amazing fury and rigidity onto his bandmates' herky-jerky adrenaline-defying riff changes and making them into even more than they could or should be -- by his sheer smarts, speed and strength (The Three "R"'s!). For examples, check out his military chug-a-long in "From The Gut" -- dude, he IS the song! The other guys almost just support HIM in this great tune!
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Husker Du's influence on nearly everyone who listened is well documented. Their musical output went from the extremes of lightning speed hardcore to beautiful and haunting love/hate songs. Their music was rooted more in folk than "anyone can play" 3-chord punk. The songs were precise yet didn't sound forced. They proved to the listener that speed for speed's sake doesn't equal power and intensity in music. Dual songrwriter/Vocalists Grant Hart and Bob Mould became increasingly bitter towards one another and it shows in their later work which is arguably their finest and most emotionally gut wrenching.
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This 1990 EP release is a combination of two Husker Du singles: "Eight Miles High" from 1984 and "Makes No Sense At All" from 1985. The first b-side is a live rendition of "Masochism World" that has Jack Nothing on the ultra-aggressive studio version, but does at least prove that they took care to recreate the "extra-dragged-out beat at the end of each line" gimmick during live performance. The second b-side is an adorable singalong-pop cover of the theme from the Mary Tyler Moore show, perhaps influenced by Jello Biafra's now-legendary on-stage taunt, "We'll play the theme from the Dinah Shore Show. Who wants to be Dinah Shore? Whose altar ego is Dinah Shore? Oh, his fists didn't go up so quickly this time!"
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Husker Du