Metroland (Albany)
"Indie Living"
by John Rodat

"We don't have any gimmicks", says Mac McCaughan good-naturedly. "We've been around for a long time, and we're not going to start looking for gimmicks now" The guitarist-vocalist of North Carolina's Superchunk slates his case without a trace of indier-than-thou-smugness-he isn't merely mouthing a rote "Corporate Rock Sucks" mantra-and immediately acknowledges the downside of an anti-image image.

"In some ways that's made our career as a rock band a little difficult," McCaughan says, "because, especially after 10 years into your career, people want to know, 'What's the hook with this band?' Well, if the hook is that you write really good songs, sometimes it's hard to get people interested in that. It doesn't make them want to put you on the cover of magazines."

Which isn't to say that Superchunk have gone entirely unnoticed in the years since McCaughan and bassist Laura Balance and two since-departed friends (roles now played by guitarist Jim Wilbur and drummer Jon Wurster) formed the band in '89. Their catalog of five albums (as well as two full length singles compilations) has received consistently positive critical response and spawned, in conjunction with their Herculean touring schedules, a significant and loyal fan base. The fact that Superchunk became dormitory, rather than household, name in the early '90s has less to do with the quality of their product than it does with the band's unwillingness to be treated as a product.

"We would love to sell a million records," he says. "It'd be great But the way the industry operates now, it's just not going to happen. And when you try to force it to happen, all you end up doing is spending lots of money and doing things you don't really want to do."

You can imagine worse fates than having a major label bury you in cash advances, right? Well, of course you can; but keep this in mind as McCaughan pragmatically points out:

"This is why people's careers are ruined. If you spend enough money it might happen. It's fine for Warner Brothers to spend $300,000 promoting your record, until you realize that's $300,000 you owe the label. The label just moves onto the next big thing. It's no big deal to them."

So Superchunk have turned down one major label suitor after another and continue to produce uncompromising albums for a comparatively small, though steadfast community of indie-rock cognoscenti. The band's current and most accessible release, Indoor Living, may throw that community for a bit of a loop. The intensity of previous Superchunk albums-an intensity fueled by an unwavering and often merciless self-examination housed in a hornet's nest of pissed-off guitars-is mitigated by subtle changes in instrumentation ( I'd swear I heard a keyboard riff swiped from Asia) and a lyrical turn for the , well, goofy.

 McCaughan attributes the album's turn for the offbeat to a more collaborative, jamming songwriting approach. "We would just start with nothing and start playing in the practice place-basically, whatever we were comfortable with on the spur of the moment. And it worked out really well, because we would end up with just a lot stranger parts than if you were just sitting around in your house and you came up with something totally weird and you're like, 'Well, that's never going to work.'"

The result is an album that hops comfortably and convincingly from the bubble-gum flightiness of "Martinis On The Roof" to the alternatingly sweet and spiky irony of "The Popular Music". This is an album that could tear up the airwaves this summer, but with characteristic reservation, McCaughan indicates that he's not holding his breath.

"When you listen to these stations and watch MTV and take a look at what you're semi-attempting to become a part of, it's kind of depressing ," he chuckles. "And then you sort of think, 'God, maybe we should feel good about the fact that we're not."

C 1997 Metroland