3 out of 5

Label: Spongebath Records

Produced by: Matt Mahaffrey

Soul Coughing. It took me like 18 listens to Self’s Half-Baked Serenade – Matt Mahaffey’s mostly solo followup to Self’s boppy debut, Subliminal Plastic Motives – to figure out what its little downbeat pop riff reminded me of. Now that’s listening to this thing in 2023; I bet if I was listening to this in the late 90s, it would’ve come more immediately to mind. If you were a teen grunge kid back in that era, and erring towards the poppier stuff that was making its way onto the scene thanks to Nirvana allowing alternative music a giganto foothold on the airwaves, Self’s was absolutely on your radar, and alongside the Soul Coughing reference, Eels, and Cake, and Beck, and all of those tweaked popsters would’ve likely come to mind as well. …That’s a feeling I definitely remember, as Motives was always showing up as a recommendation via whatever avenues because it was “weird,” and maybe I wasn’t going towards the poppier stuff but instead the weirder stuff, but also I was an indie asshole who immediately ran the other way when you told me I’d like something.

Anyhow, things moved fast in music even back then: Half-Baked Serenade came out only a couple of years later, but from my perspective, the scenesters had moved on. I was allowed some peace and quiet.

Curious about Self these many decades later, I’m easily bopping along to this disc, but I also kind of get where old me was coming from. While my playlist was filling up with (okay, ska first, but then…) punk, then indie rock and hardcore, I still could appreciate the craft of those other bands I mentioned, while Self always felt a bit forced. Which is a shit thing to say, as Mahaffey (and his other bandmates, joining back in on later albums) is definitely a creative force, and I can now hear other power pop and classic influences that were outside of my narrow view of music back then, but still: Self is defined by being ephemeral. The later shtick of composing on toy instruments (album Gizmodgery) feels like an extension of that, as-is Serenade’s nibbing from the synth-pop of the time, and it’s sing-song lyrics: this is music that’s meant to sound pretty lively and head-bobby, but not stick around. Bubblegum pop for the 90s. The album title grabbed the grunge zeitgeist and cute-smirked at it and played a toy piano ditty about it.

Self obviously have their fans, but they’re still essentially underground. You see a lot of SPM or Breakfast With Girls in used bins. I have a couple Self discs in my collection and flip through them on occasion, thinking I’ll pick up the rest of their catalogue, but then a few songs later… the thought slips from my mind.

For me, it’s a pretty telling take on their sound in general, and the generalized quirky pop sound of this album.