These unearthed treasures originally lost in the indie janglings of the pre-grunge years are re-set for reappraisal in our re-issue mad times. However, in UT’s case it’s not before time. Rather it’s around and above time. ‘Trout Mask Replica’ time. Spanning the eighties, they toured with The Birthday Party and The Fall in the fractured post-punk years which gives just a gaunt glimmer of what’s involved here. That they’re New Yorkers like Sonic Youth gives another whilst neither is a given.

Sharing a surplus of idiosyncracies isn’t sufficient to slot them neatly in with such bands although the lumbering, fatalistically freeform flow of the songs and their scratchy post-apocalypso subterranean-isms make it easy to do so. In the main there’s a unique warmth and affecting grace below the surface of such barren music, which isn’t solely reliable on their being female. For all intents and purposes the songs work by miracles and are an urgent display of dissonance, dread and desire. Convention is, welcomely, given scant regard and allows the songs to journey on a boneshaking jalopy ride the way that real emotions do, falling in around you like slate roof tiles in a surprise storm.

Being all singing (yup, the veritable anti-Bangles) the split between the two main voices of Sally Young (Patti Smith with Chrissie Hynde’s humanity and candour) and Jacqui Ham (astounding - like Kat Bjellands angry Aunt) adds for some dramatic diversions, only upping the bi-polar breakdown and tensile torment within.

The Steve Albini harnessed ‘Griller’, from 1989, is by far the better album overall, which says more for the strength of ‘Griller’ than it does for ‘In Gut’s House’ weaknesses. A run of songs – ‘How it Goes’, ‘Canker’, ‘Rummy’, ‘Posse Necks’, ‘Fuel’ – prove to be some of the most vital, vitriolic slices of post-coital caustic chastisements anywhere. Loose and flowing like a turbulent river wild, touching on Patti Smiths ‘Horses’ except with passion where there was poetical pretension prior and signposting Babes In Toylands anguish so ferile it almost forced the songs under. ‘Posse Necks’ (sung by Ham) would have been safely ensconced under the velvet cloak of Nikki Sudden’s ‘Texas’ album but for a few years and y chromosomes, but as it is is possibly the most startling track here, with a rawness that is revelatory.

Both albums, though, are more than worth the outlay as investments in some essential history. Well-preserved products of their time, pounding displays of brittle paranoia from under the veneer of the wasted wealth and wantonness the eighties has been remembered for but also from a time when the underground really undulated and reverberated. So underground as to be utterly unknown – but undeniably this is undeservedly so. __________________________________________________

- Stu Gibson