(M50) Number One Cup, Wrecked By Lions

Number One Cup

Wrecked By Lions (Flydaddy, 1997)

I expected to start writing this series in November, and I just kept second-guessing myself. Over and over and over I’d be like, I’m not sure about my list, I’m not sure about my format, blah blah blah.

So on a recent afternoon I wandered into the office and looked for an album to play. I’ve got this old CD tower with 10 rows of discs, divided into three columns, with each cell on the order of 30 discs. And I had no preconceived notion, but I’d been thinking about the META-SPIEL backlog, and my eyes wandered around, and in the left column on row six, I noticed this album, and I started playing it, and a few realizations came to me.

Let’s start by saying that Wrecked By Lions isn’t in my confusing spreadsheet as an album I was considering for this series. Weirdly, you won’t even find it on Spotify (but it’s there on Bandcamp!) It’s kind of a bizarre place to start this series, and I’m only adding to the bizarreness by being three paragraphs in and not having said anything about the album itself.

Here’s the deal: I don’t know if there’s a single album I own which is a better distillation of the kind of thing I’m really into. My tastes run a lot of different directions, but when push comes to shove, there’s an amalgam of indie-rock, power-pop, some bombast and a lot of hooks and a goodly amount of feedback, an album with killer songs but which holds up as an actual album… something I can hand to somebody and say, yeah, I like music that sounds like this, and you should too. It’s the sound I want to hear when I turn on the radio, the sound of big fuzzy guitars, a band that can clearly play LOUD, but with pop sensibility and a certain everyman appeal. It is also a pinnacle oh-wow-spring-is-here album, perfect for this day that I’m publishing, when it’s 72 and sunny and all of the windows are finally open.

This album came out in the middle of my time as a college radio music director, when I was a sponge, but at core still an ultra-indie-rocker. I was nurtured by R.E.M., I lived on Pavement, I fed on Guided By Voices, and whether I fully appreciated it or not, the true archetype was Cheap Trick, a big loud rock band that at its core is a pop band. And for all of the great rock and roll whih poured out of the region in the mid-90s, I don’t think any other band was more in this pocket than Number One Cup, a Chicago band with real pop sensibility in the heart of the golden era of indie-rock.

The album opener, “Ease Back Down”, establishes the template. It starts tentatively, then gets fuzzy, and then an actual countdown of 1-2-3-4 leads to a big guitar crunch. The song oozes pop hooks and melodies, the production lets the instruments crackle, the guys in the band can actually sing… basically, it’s everything commercial radio tried to jam down our throats with Better Than Ezra, except that it actually rules.

One of the band’s strengths was that the songwriting and singing duties were distributed. They were one of the first bands I saw where the drummer was set up off to the side and would sing as frequently as any guitar player. In this respect they were a lot like Sloan - multiple distinct voices, but everyone capable of pulling out a fresh hook. Unlike a lot of contemporary albums at the time, this allows Wrecked By Lions to keep sounding fresh throughout its long runtime. (Because the album credits don’t speak to it, and various websites don’t speak to it, I can’t tell you for sure who was singing which song.)

A prime example of how the variation works is “Astronaut”, which is a little more direct, a sharp pop-rock song which sounds like it could have been an MTV buzz bin staple if given the chance. Songs like this are surrounded by some which feel less like singles but which provide album balance and coherence, like “Bright Orange Fireball Sun”.

The album’s big payoff may be “Malcolm’s X-Ray Picnic”, complete with “la la la”s, layered distortion, rocking bridges in lieu of a proper chorus, a brilliant interplay of fuzz and crunch, and in less than three minutes you’re gone: a perfect radio song for the era that never got the chance. It’s the song that got the video treatment at the time (though for some reason the video is two minutes longer than the song!?):

A lot of why this sounds so properly on-the-mark for its time is because it was recorded by Brad Wood at Idful in Chicago. For context, here are some of Brad Wood’s best known recordings:

• Liz Phair, Exile in Guyville

• Veruca Salt, American Thighs

• Sunny Day Real Estate, Diary

In other words, a guy who knew what he was doing, who knew how to give a band a big fuzzy sound while spotlighting their talents. And how would he understand such a thing? Well, here’s the first sentence from his bio on his web site:

I grew up in Rockford, Illinois, the home of Cheap Trick- the greatest band alive.

Number One Cup, for their part, found each other in Chicago during the very fertile early 90s, which in retrospect must have been as exciting a time and place to come together and make music as there ever was. I think Wrecked By Lions epitomizes the time as there were all kinds of records sort of like this that came through WESN, bands with an exuberance of ideas who churned out some great albums… and yet, harshly, just two years later, the band was done. Their final show was February 20, 1999 at Lounge Ax:

The guys from the band went on to other projects and other things entirely. Seth and Michael still collaborate, it seems, and have a lot of other stuff going on as well:

Seth Kim-Cohen’s website

Michael Lenzi’s website

In total Number One Cup released three albums, an EP, several singles… but got burned because their label, Flydaddy, completely went under, and as best as I can tell, Wrecked By Lions has never been reissued in any form. It’s available digitally on Bandcamp though, and on the page, it’s described this way: “The more muscular, less sophomoric sophomore album, honed during extensive touring. More bombast, but still some bare lightbulb sincerity.” Sounds right to me.

More than once in this series I’m going to return to 1997. I may be the only person you know who will stand on a table and adamantly tell you that 1997 was the greatest year ever for rock and roll. This is not because of how important the albums were but rather because there was simply so much great music produced right in this pocket of time. And so many of those bands, like Number One Cup, showed up on the scene, rode the circuit, got signed to a mid-tier indie, put out a great record, and a couple of years later, it all fell apart.

I was fortunate to see Number One Cup twice, 4/16/98 at the old Blind Pig in Champaign on a bill with Promise Ring and Jimmy Eat World, and 1/19/99 at Bernie’s in Columbus, weeks before their final show. They were a great live band too.

So what justifies this album’s inclusion in the META-FIFTY? While I have a lot more to say about a lot of other albums, what makes Wrecked By Lions such a good choice in my mind is that it lets me talk a little about my tastes, lets me introduce something which I dare say almost none of you have heard, and which I would legitimately be happy about keeping if I was told I had to throw everything out and only keep 50 albums. The likelihood is that this list is going to wind up larger than 50 when it’s all done, and that’s fine, because, my list, my rules, right?

And hey, I finally wrote one of these, and I think it helped that it was for an album I didn’t have to overthink. Wrecked By Lions is simply a great pop-rock album that a lot more people should have gotten a chance to hear. Spread this around and maybe, three decades after the fact, that’ll happen.