Day 9: “Throw Aggi off the Bridge” by Black Tambourine

Liner notes for compilation albums are always good places to find hyperbole.  Did you know, for instance, that the Vaselines’ Dum-Dum sums up “everything great about pop music…in just over half-an-hour”?  (That quote is taken from Everett True’s liner notes to the Vaselines retrospective Enter the Vaselines.)  Well, no, Mr. Everett True, that’s simply not the case.  But can one reasonably expect otherwise?  You can’t very well write liner notes for a career retrospective of a band and come off lukewarm about their sole LP.  Part of the job of the liner notes for a compilation is to justify the existence of the compilation, and that usually leads to some inflation of the band’s importance and skill by the liner notes author.  (One amusing exception: in his liner notes for the Orange Juice compilation The Glasgow School, music journalist and former Orange Juice drummer Steven Daly repeatedly points out his former band’s musical limitations and inability to fully realize the vision of main Orange Juice songwriter Edwyn Collins.  When he does praise the band, he’s remarkably restrained and modest; not coincidentally, those liner notes are among the finest I’ve seen for a compilation album.)

One of the worst cases of this sort of puffery can be found in the liner notes for the compilation of the band Black Tambourine’s music.  These liner notes were written by Tim Sendra, one of the former members of a band that was one of Black Tambourine’s peers in the Silver Spring, MD music scene of the late ’80s/early ’90s—in other words, by someone who was there to see it, but who wasn’t there to make it.  There’s nothing wrong in general about such a person writing liner notes for a compilation—after all, he saw and heard a lot of interesting things firsthand—but Mr. Sendra seems to have been entirely too enamored of BT in its time, and his ardor has not faded very much with time.  In fact, the ensuing years seem to have brought no perspective at all to Mr. Sendra: he describes BT as “legendary” and promises that “in the underground and alternative (in the real sense of the word) history of pop music Black Tambourine will go down as one of the all-time greats.”  Uh, really?  I mean, everyone’s entitled to his or her own opinion, but that seems like too heavy a crown for a band whose entire output consists of 16 tracks.

Mr. Sendra does get one thing right in his liner notes, though: “Throw Aggi Off the Bridge” is BT’s finest moment.  A demented love song directed to Pastels frontman Stephen Pastel, “Aggi” is all poppy melody and distorted guitars, a sunnier version of the shoegaze of My Bloody Valentine and their peers.  If most BT songs were this good, and if there were (a lot) more than 16 of them, Mr. Sendra might have a point with all that “legendary” talk.

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