4 out of 5

Label: Underground, Inc.

Produced by: The Brothers Brooks, Theresa Brooks

B-sides what?  Demos what?  The CD / DVD collection Optics & Sonics would purport to be an odds and sods collection – and it is, with its various rarities, alternates, demos, and heretofore unknowns – but it’s also pretty much its own album, as even the demo / reduxes are stitched together like they were always meant to be neighbors, and though the DNA of later and greater Tub Ring is heard throughout, that doesn’t lessen the fun of these tracks.  If anything, this feels like the slightly less heady version of what would become Drake Equation: take the sci-fi bent to that disc and give it a more sneering, snarking college-kid vibe, and you’ve arrived at Sonics’ 12 tracks of genre mash-ups and digital deconstructions.  Perhaps that makes it all sound a bit childish, and that’s certainly there, along with the lyrics not quite hitting the quirky blend of aggressive and incisive as presented on later albums, but if this is ‘proto’ Tub Ring, they would have been that local band you went to see of which you were extremely jealous: these guys commit to jazzy kitsch of Farnsworth Road, offer up a badass Wayne Kemp cover, hit some emotions on The Dockyard, and the get still get punky, Primus-y crazy on the woefully named Bustin’ a Nutt.

As mentioned, some of this forms a kind of baseline take on the group’s style, sharpened later on, and despite the tracks flowing from one to the next well, the disc’s brevity and lack of a theme do make it less impactful than their other offerings, but neither of these points make it something skippable: it’s a must for fans, not even taking into account its bevy of DVD goodies.