Things I Was Due to Forget
American Analog Set—Green, Green Grass (2005 / Drone Pop)
Hello internet pals of music. Today we’re kicking off 2024 with a Texas band that’s getting the Numero reissue treatment.
Note: I wrote this last spring, when I first heard about the Numero reissues, and never sent this. Also, was thinking about the recent passing of Craig Stewart (who put the first American Analog Set LP out on his Emperor Jones label). Anyway, new year housecleaning and all…
In 1993, Austin was still kind of weird.
As an example, my friends Chris and Ken lived in a small apartment complex just north of the University of Texas campus—the same campus infamous for, in 1966, becoming the site of the first modern mass shooting incident in the US.
Next door to them, in a similarly cramped two-bedroom apartment, lived their neighbor and her pet pig. She told us she’d bought the pig because it was supposed to be one of those teacup pigs that was never going to grow larger than a cat.
It weighed like 400 lbs. She used to walk it at night through the back parking lot. It was a hilarious site.
One night at Chris and Ken had a party and I met some kids that had just moved down from Dallas-Ft Worth. One of them, a blonde guy with a cheshire smile and mutton chops, got to talking with me on the stairs about himself, and then about his band. Having just started playing drums myself in a band with Chris and Ken, I was happy to meet another drummer, one that felt like a kindred spirit in the musical appreciation I was discovering.
I was also a little cocky, thought I was probably better, and wasn’t so sure that what he was saying was all that true. It may be a Houston—Dallas rivalry; being raised in Houston, I never really took Dallas without a bit of side-eye.
A few weeks later I was at a house in West Campus watching them practice. I wasn’t blown away. American Analog Set isn’t a band that blows you away. It was something else: a full awareness that this was a really good band. I also quickly realized I could only wish to be as steady and smooth a drummer as Mark, or in a band that good. Humbling. I used to love watching them play in those early, sweaty, mixed-up last weird days in Austin.
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Austin became something different after the milennium.
American Analog Set didn’t. They just kept shaving their wholly unique signature down. Like when you first start signing your name you’re trying to fit every letter in, and after years your name just becomes a refined line. Granted their sound changed with their lineup, to the slightest degree that a band like them changed. Which is fitting as the whole pleasure of listening to them is that slow unfolding of time and change.
Two things hold their sound, and albums, together— which happens to also be the two constants in the band—singer-guitarist Andrew Kenny and that cheshire cat drummer I mentioned, Mark Smith. For me, the touch they both play with is that sound, their sound is the beating heart. When I still played, I looked at Mark’s style of restraint and calm as something to strive for, but I think I was just too rigid.
By the late 90s my ear was taking me elsewhere, namely my turntables as I started getting into deejaying. But I did wind up with two of their later albums somehow and I liked them and was happy to hear they were still as good, and as interesting. I certainly never stopped listening to them1. Maybe, their music just unfolded over me in the same way their songs did, where it was, then wasn’t as much, but never fully gone.
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As an aside, I did a poster for (what was then to be) their last show and I can’t track down a digital copy to show you.