5 out of 5

Label: Not on label (?)

Produced by: Lynn Bridges (recorded by)

Another blast of Fuck-like rock… only even less Fuck-like and more rock, and just as good / greater / unfortunately just as short as before.

Staff – I think this was a slightly earlier iteration of the group – are maybe Tim Prudhomme and Geoff Soule and others – play a fun form of raw, indie rock, informed by the slapdash nature of something like poppier GBV or squelchy Quasi or jangly Pavement but looking forward to the more radio-ready stuff we’d see from Merge and the like as we moved into the mid-00s… which I guess sounds like this covers a bit of everything, including a nonsense Casio instrumental, but all of the songs are contained within the clever/cute Fuck umbrella of Pruhomme’s / Soule’s, and also the songwriters keen sense of song: all of it has a place, stays around long enough to matter, but not long enough to grow tiresome. And because, unlike the other EP, ‘Staff’ starts in familiar territory but then branches outward – George W. Hitler always had remnants of Fuck-ness to it – this comes across as the stronger of the two, although they’re both an incredible joy to listen to.