Liquid Three - The Shadow Cabinet (1996)

I am fairly confident you wont be able to find The Shadow Cabinet if you tried. It took me about a year to find it in Dallas where Liquid Three hailed from, well Coppell (NW Dallas) to be more accurate. And a google, bing, or wiki search for Liquid Three leads you no where valuable. I'd like to think I love this record solely on its sound, but the fact that it's rare, local and unlabelled gives it so much more merit.

I heard Plastic Cross (linked here) on The Adventure Club with Josh and Kevin Sunday nights from 7-10pm on 94.5 the Edge (largely responsible for turning me on to the best of what was out there). I added Liquid Three to the post-it I kept in my wallet of artists to look for next time I visited one of the many record stores in Dallas that my friends and I frequented. This list became important as I had a terrible problem forgetting all the bands I wanted to investigate as soon as I walked into a record store, only to remember them as I walked out. I asked just about every store if they had Liquid Three and got funny looks each time. It wasn't until I went to Bill's Records and Tapes on Spring Valley that I found it. Part of the reason I found it was that Josh worked at Bill's and I made it a point to track him down to help me find it, although I knew it was not one of his picks to play, but rather Kevin's.

(Side Note: If you ever listened to The Adventure Club you would understand the mutual dislike Josh and Kevin had for each other's contributions to the weekly show. Josh pushed bands like Oasis, Suede, James, Gene and Elastica (yes all UK bands) where Kevin spun more of what spoke to me - Guided by Voices, Pavement, Sunny Day Real Estate - stuff that would stay with me forever).

Easy-to-sing-with vocals, blasting drums, and gritty guitars made this record burst from my speakers. The liner notes featured a rustily cropped candid photo (left) of the three, who deserved to be mentioned - Glen Reynolds on vocals+guitar, Jim Thomas on bass+vocals, Pete Young on drums. The playfulness of the two heads chopped off, 3D glasses and dogface elevated the mystique of this band for me as it represented a hidden, unheard scene in my hometown that I longed to explore deeper. Grand Spunk Medallion was the last track and served as a funky outlier to all that preceded it with a closing line of "mmm, smells like peanut butter, I can smell the sex, word up..."

I never saw Liquid Three live, but still daydream about what a show must have been like: Rick's Place in Denton, three grundgers on stage, fifteen of their friends at the show and an impossibly unavoidable smile that would creep through everyone at the scene with each halfway headbanging number. I am not good at describing music, so I will stop trying, but it was a quality rock record that was ahead of its time and went largely unnoticed. This is exactly the kind of record I wanted to revisit when I dreamed up The Textbook Committee blog as it went from the back, dusty corner of my cd rack to front and center of my memory.

"On a lonely twisted day/When your friend are all so bored/You don't have to feel this way/Look your screams are not ignored." - Plastic Cross