Pitchfork

Swell Maps have an unfortunately limited official discography-- just a couple of albums and handful of singles-- but they made a lasting imprint with their distinctively chaotic brand of genuinely do-it-yourself music. Just ask Pavement. While Swell Maps didn't go about releasing anything until 1977, when they self-issued their brilliant debut single "Read About Seymour" (available on International Rescue), brothers Nikki Sudden and Epic Soundtracks had been fiddling about with music together with David "Phones" Barrington since 1972.

Recording conditions were desperately primitive in the band's early days, but then so were the instruments they played (biscuit tins were not uncommonly used as drums) and the songs they were writing. Much of the music they laid to tape in these formative years were improvised sketches involving whatever noise-making gewgaws they could get their hands on. Wastrels & Whippersnappers collects 23 early recordings, almost none of which have been heard by the public. Honestly, there's probably a reason some of them had been kept in the vault, but the barrel scrape turns up enough inspired lunacy to please the band's fans, who today probably number two or three hundred times the band's following when it actually existed.

Fidelity is pretty universally low here, but that doesn't dampen the spirit of this music one iota. It even adds to it in some cases-- when the vocals go woefully out of tune, for instance, it helps that all the sounds are running together anyway. "Harmony in Your Bathroom" and "Vertical Slumber (prototype take 1)" will be slightly familiar to fans of the band's first album, A Trip to Marineville, but they're definitely embryos in these recordings, if not zygotes. "Full Moon-Blam-Full Moon" is the most fully fledged song here, a rough-hewn punk rampage that presages the exhilaration of "Ripped & Torn" a few years later. "Sweet & Sour" opens with a rather pretty piano part, jumps to a gentle guitar phrase and then makes a final leap into charging fuzz riffs and hard rock drumming in a pure distillation of the psychedelic era that had recently sputtered to a close.

Other stuff is really just floor sweepings, like the smear of noise that comprises "Gramafonica" or the 30-second version of "God Save the Queen," which segues directly to a version of Neal Hefti's "Batman Theme", but in a sense these little flakes of debris complement the more developed pieces and give them needed context. This is still a fans-only joint, though, and with the band's two albums properly reissued with great sound and most of their best odds & sods out on International Rescue, there's no need to rush into Wastrels & Whippersnappers. If you like what you've heard on those discs, though, this one is mighty entertaining.