4 out of 5

Produced by: Eli Janney

Label: Selfless Records

Desperate for more Marshes – something, anything! – I started tracking the members to their other projects from before and after.  Drummer Colin Sears has been in a billion and two things, so ‘anything!’ was reconsidered in that regard; Steven Wardlaw didn’t get around that much as far as I can tell, though I see him attached on the studio side of things to an act I’m digging.  Emil – that distinct singing voice and slightly off-timed playing style – Emil’s been here and there, and one of those ‘theres’ was Rumblepuppy.  Which, hey, also featured Colin.  Might this be a prototypical marshes?

Might it!

But maybe not at first!

With multiple songs stretching past five minutes, a much more 80s bent to the punkness – much closer to forebearers Dag Nasty than Marshes – and that clean, Discord-y guitar sound, captured by Mr. Eli Janney, the musicians these dudes would eventually morph into aren’t immediately apparent.  Songs function on a sort of delayed release that also downplays riffs; the urgency the propels most of the Marshes output could thus said to be missing, and without it, well, I’ll be frank: I started to lose interest.

But Jeez-Ooze is one of those experiences, where it suddenly just clicks.  It happened to me when returning to the disc after a long pause, so perhaps diminished expectations had something to so with it.  Regardless: the album came alive.  I relished that the songs were so long, toiling in a groove for multiple minutes before briefly powering back up for acatchy refrain, my foot coerced to tap and my head to bob the whole while.  The lyrics are a bit generic but not dumb, and though Emil is singing -i.e. he hadn’t yet adopted his off-key Marshes talk-sing – there’s an emotion to the delivery that helps immensely in surging the momentum, and melds well with the ongoing beat.

After the disc’s middle, some filler emerges – less confident, more open-ended – but Jeez-Ooze recovers in time for its vicious closer, Retreat.

The Marshes have a very notable, grabbing sound and Rumbelpuppy do not.  But they earn your attention the old fashioned way, through diligence and patience, delivering the goods until it inevitably starts to make sense.  And then you can start to hear the Marshes in snippets – there’s a Lovecraft song; that rolling drumming is familiar – and your goal of adding to your Marshes back catalogue has been successfully achieved.