June Of 44, for me, can possibly be labelled as a combination of post-rock and post-hardcore, with a number of bands moving into doing experiments in that style sometime in the mid-90s — taking some subtle inspiration from early leaders in the genre, such as the now seminal midwest band Slint. June Of 44 has also been labelled as an underground “supergroup” of sorts, pulling in members from notable other bands from the early 90s post-hardcore scene including Hoover and Rodan (the members of the latter taking acting roles in the DIY 90s “on the road” band film Half Cocked).
I picked up the second June Of 44 album, Tropics & Meridians released in 1996, when I was a teenager and at a time when I was rabidly expanding my record collection. The band had always combined some noisy, complicated riffage with a masterful hand with quieter, minimal, and more atmospheric pieces — always anchored by the tight rhythm section of drummer Doug Scharin and bass player Fred Erskine (of both Hoover and The Crownhate Ruin), who is arguably one of my favourite bass players in the general post-punk/post-hardcore genre — so much so that there’s an old Soft Riot cover of Hoover‘s “Electrolux” written about here from the 2011 release No Longer Stranger.
While the style was hinted at in Erskine’s earlier, “punk”-ier bands, the influence of dub really starts to come out in his bass playing with June Of 44. And despite the members of this band being scattered mostly across the eastern seaboard of the US, their sound seemed to align more with what was going on in Chicago at the time: post-rock and more experimental, free-style playing.* The band released most of their 90s output on the label Quarterstick, which was an imprint label of the far more well known “parent” label, Chicago-based Touch And Go.
There’s probably more thoughts that I could write here regarding this supergroup but any further elaboration in that direction would likely result in some sort of aimless ramble, so therefore we move on…
Four Great Points, the band’s third album, came out in 1998 — within a year of myself moving over to the “big city” of Vancouver BC. I remember there was a lot of anticipation for it with members of the band I was playing in at the time, The Measure. I acquired a copy myself shortly after it was released in one of the many fine indie record stores we had in Vancity at the time. I managed to catch a live show of theirs in Vancouver in late spring of 1998 when they were touring this album.
Even to this day I’ll give their records a spin once in a while, and such was the case recently with Four Great Points. Closing out side A of the vinyl LP is a track called “Doomsday”, which to many listeners would be a track that far more closely follows the dub/bass genre — something the band was pushing even more with this album. It’s mostly based on one riff that builds up and then moves along with dub-inflected shuffle with layers of loose percussion sprinkled in the top end, along with the sparse guitar passages of Sean Meadows and Jeff Mueller playing around with harmonics and vibrato effects.
The interesting details of this track for me however have always been held with the rhythm section of Scharin and Erskine. If one listens carefully there’s some really complicated 1/16th note triplet action going on. Erskine’s relatively simple 3-note bassline shows off some speedy fingerwork, injecting 1/16th note triplets subtly popping out of the mix. Also as impressive is Scharin’s drum pattern, which on the surface sounds like a simple beat that lands on the 1/8th notes (with the snare on the third, as the usual rock standard) but if one listens carefully — or indeed has seen them live or watched videos of this track played live — Scharin’s right hand is filling in the second and third notes of each triplet lightly on the snare drum in some sort of demented, high-paced shuffle. With my skills of playing a drum kit being pretty meager at best, I can’t even calculate the mental gymnastics involved, let alone the physical discipline, to pull off anything remotely close to that calibre of drumming finesse. Slight yet complex.
June Of 44 initially broke up some short time after their 1999 album Anahata and then came back together again in the mid-2010s, playing out on tours here and there. I suspect getting the band going again was likely due to the joy of playing music together more than anything else. They in turn released 2020’s Revisionist: Adaptations & Future Histories In The Time Of Love And Survival which you can find, along with all of their albums, on their BandCamp store.
* As an aside, the book You’re With Stupid by Bruce Adams is a really interesting book covering the Chicago underground in the 1990s, which Adam’s involvement being one half of the creative force behind Kranky Records — a label that had some impact on me back in the day with its emphasis on artists more subtle and ambient-inflected approach to underground experimental music.