4 out of 5

Label: Touch and Go

Produced by: John Schmersal (mixed by)

From the liner notes, if I’m following, Attic Tapes are the John Schmersal-compiled recordings of gone-too-soon Brainiac lead Tim Taylor, culled from recordings made in the attic of his mother’s house. Whether or not he had accompaniment on some of these recordings (it sounds like John was maybe allowed some input at some points), the majority are solo Tim affairs, though done on a four-track with guitars and keys and whatnot. And if you had any doubt as to whether or not Brainiac was a studio production, something crafted into weirdness around normal hooks, I promise you that these raw takes are plenty weird on their own.

That, as a Brainiac fan – presumably the target audience of a collection like this – is the most satisfying thing about this set, besides its archival nature: recognizing how everything that made the band unique (still to this day!) is absolutely wrought through to its core, and started with Tim.

While some of these tracks are more simple than others, the depth of experimentation committed to tape – noise manipulations from Bonsai Superstar, for example, pretty much wholly, noisily intact in this raw form – is insane, as-is how many of these 37 songs kick ass as semi-complete ideas, sounding good with some basic drums and squiggly guitar and Tim’s hootin’ and hollerin’.

But to be clear, this stuff is still essentially a collection of demos. Schmersal has done a fine job of cleaning it up (you can definitely hear the cassette source / 4-track nature, but it’s only really rough on one or two tracks, with the rest mixed crisply, such that the sound could pass as being by design), and also sequencing such that more structured tracks and sketches and experimental stuff is shuffled around well; the album has flow. Excepting a smaller handful of tracks, though – they are demos all the same, just topping a minute or so, with a riff and a concept recorded before moving on. So admittedly as an album, it’s not something I’ll return to fully that often, but I would take that small handful of exceptions as an EP.

We needed this, though. We needed to hear what we’d always known: that this wasn’t a band cut down in its prime, but a band that was sitting on so, so much potential, represented by this (presumably partial) cache of really fascinating ideas.

If you need a sounds-like reference, I’d say the majority of the material here either sounds like Bonzai Superstar stuff, sometimes containing snippets that were repurposed on the album, up to sometimes being whole songs from that album, if slightly different. A couple tracks sound like Smack Bunny Baby guitar jams; nothing exactly sounds like their latter-day electro phase – this is all guitars and synths – but I think you can hear some melodies that could track to that style. The remaining fourth or so is like nothing else we’ve heard: cleaner, poppier jams, or some really funky stuff that could be, like, Nikka Costa. (For real.)

The extensive narrative-style liner notes from John are really informative, setting a tone for the recordings, and putting us in the time of Brainiac’s heydays. It would be nice if we got some further details on when these were recorded exactly, but maybe that info doesn’t / didn’t exist.

All in all, for any Brainiac fan who’s been back and forth through their recordings, forever wondering the What Ifs, this peek behind the creative curtain is not a disappointment. How often you return to this may depend on your taste for demos, but it’s absolutely worth at least a listen, and will likely stick a few tracks in your head that demand to be on a constant playlist.