The Dentists - Heads and How to Read Them (1990)

The Dentists were the local big deal when I first moved to Kent, or at least they were the local big deal which didn't involve Billy Childish. Once they began to enjoy success further afield, local goth types of my acquaintance took to a degree of sneering, therefore requiring that I venture a little way outside my limited social comfort zone in order to hear the music of the Dentists and decide for myself, and once I did, I quickly realised that they were popular for a reason; the reason being that they were fucking great.

Later they apparently became associated with something called C86, which was something to do with an NME compilation tape and has been retroactively declared a movement, specifically a movement of mostly jangly sixties-inspired bands. I still don't quite see this, being as most of the C86 bands were - excepting Josef K and maybe two or three others - fucking atrocious. Never mind.

Anyway, I vaguely knew the Dentists, seeing as how they were local lads. I once spent a boozy afternoon around Mick Murphy's house; Mark Matthews put out the first ever fanzine to feature something I had drawn; and I knew Alun, their second drummer, fairly well. Indeed, I vaguely recall the grumbling amongst members of Apricot Brigade when Alun jumped ship to tap the skins for what was frankly a much better band - following Ian, the Dentists' original drummer, having been temporarily inconvenienced. Grousing accompanied the release of Down and Out in Paris and Chatham, the first record to feature Alun but I went out and bought it anyway, and actually it was a magnificent record.

Since then I've tended to regard the difference between those first two incarnations of the Dentists as a sort of Beatles-Stones thing, with softer, poppier songs giving away to something more raw, as characterised by You Took Me By Surprise - which I've only just noticed almost borrows from The Word by the Beatles; and listening to Heads and How to Read Them, I notice my Beatles then Stones equation doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. Heads is a different beast to Some People, but is great for similar reasons, and is by no means a lesser record. For the uninitiated, the Dentists did that pure pop thing like a distant cousin to the Smiths but without the burden of Morrissey, having some of that breezy quality of the Monkees without it being some cheesy fresh-faced sales pitch - just consistently great songs with hidden depths and of such quality that the usual labels seem a bit pointless. This second album is notable for the peculiar key change - or whatever the technical term may be - during the chorus of House the Size of Mars, and the infectious waltz of Crocodile Tears, amongst other things.

There were a couple of later records, and whilst there's nothing specifically lacking in what I've heard of them, there seems to be a faint major label sheen, something suggesting some A&R twat may have been drooling over the possibility of selling the boys to all those Ravey Daveys who thought the first Stone Roses album was the greatest record of all time; when actually it was the wrong way round, and the Dentists were always the superior group, which goes for those Smiths comparisons too.

Expandobrain - Mother of God! It's Expandobrain! (1986)

Here's a bit of an oddity, I suppose. Amongst a few tracks I taped off a John Peel show broadcast sometime in 1987 was Thyroid by Expandobrain. Peel didn't seem to know much about them, and I never heard their name again, which seemed a shame because Thyroid is a face-punchingly great song. Many centuries later I live in America and have somehow survived for three years without a turntable - or record player as is the correct terminology - due to the complications of stuffing my entire life into boxes and shipping it to another country; but now, at last I am fully equipped and once more spinning the living shit out of my beloved vinyl collection, and someone has invented the internet since I last considered Expandobrain. Sadly it transpires that they really were as obscure as I imagined, so there's not a lot out there, although I now at least have a means of getting hold of the album from which Peel played a few tracks. It's taken one hell of a long time, but it's been worth the wait.

I can't even remember what else was going on back in 1986 when this was recorded, and certainly not in terms of Americans with guitars. I was only ever an infrequent listener to John Peel's show, and I never really liked Sonic Youth, and I'm not sure I've ever actually heard any Hüsker Dü. The cover - very much resembling something scribbled on the back of an exercise book at school - namechecks Minutemen, Meat Puppets, Live Skull, Swans, and Moving Targets, regarding which I've heard one Meat Puppets track and have a stack of Swans albums which sound nothing like this. I suppose Dinosaur Jr. - another band to which I've never really taken - were around by then. I don't know where Expandobrain fitted in, but I suppose it doesn't matter.

I was anticipating Thyroid and a load of tragic b-sides, partially based on how good an album is likely to be when you've waited this long to hear it, but incredibly this one turns out to be good right through to the last track. Expandobrain - actually Expando Brain which looks wrong to me because I've thought of the name as a single word for nearly three decades - were your basic guitar, bass and drums in some guy's garage, fast and punky but tuneful, the sort of thing that Steve Albini might have ended up producing had they lasted, although for all the twangy angst and pounding tension, there's something wonderfully upbeat in here - reminding me a hell of a lot of the more recent Parquet Courts, maybe some sort of happy medium between the Monkees and a less wanky Sonic Youth with a touch of an angrier, more sarcastic REM before they became an international chemical processing franchise.

I don't know. The review is in there somewhere. Just pick out the bits you like. As I already said, Mother of God! has been worth the wait, and as a lost or potentially forgotten gem - which it really, really is - you might be advised to hunt it down now before obscurity and collector mania pushes the price up through the roof.