Fall In Love 1992-93 sounds less like an archival excavation than somebody suddenly opening a door into a Seattle practice room in 1992. The GORLS existed briefly, released only a handful of songs while they were active, and then vanished before there was ever anything resembling a proper album. Nearly three decades later, HoZac discovered that singer Dawn Johnson had been sitting on enough recordings for one all along. Eight of the twelve tracks on this 2020 collection had never been released. That long delay gives the record historical interest, but the real pleasure is how quickly the history disappears once it starts playing. These are not tentative demos begging to be treated gently because of their age. They are short, raw, funny, immediate garage-punk songs that sound perfectly comfortable being dirty.
The GORLS were Johnson on vocals and percussion, Rob Vasquez on guitar, Dylan Maiden on bass and Donnie Hilstadt on drums, a lineup connected to an entire little web of Pacific Northwest bands including the Night Kings, Man Tee Mans, Flathead and the Statics. They formed around 1992, created their own DOPE Records imprint, put out a split 7" and a three-song EP, then were essentially gone. That brevity is part of what makes Fall In Love so satisfying. There was never enough time for the band to become polished, self-conscious or concerned about preserving a legacy. The recordings retain the sensation of people making songs because they wanted to make songs right then.
The sound is gloriously primitive. Guitar, bass and drums arrive in a rough mono-like clump rather than occupying beautifully separated studio space. The guitar can scrape and buzz, the drums hit with the uncomplicated force of a room recording, and Johnson’s voice sits above the mess without trying to dominate it through volume. Maximum Rocknroll singled out her singing for good reason. Her delivery is unusually relaxed for music moving this quickly: deadpan, slightly detached, conversational and melodic at the same time. Instead of screaming over the band, she can sound almost amused by it. That gives the GORLS a personality that separates them from a generic early-’90s garage-punk photograph.
“He Don’t Understand” sets up the basic economy immediately. There is no elaborate introduction and no reason for one. The songs throughout Fall In Love rarely hang around longer than three minutes, and several barely make it past two. “Bongo Beat” is under two minutes, “Planet Vator” is under two, and the fast version of “TV’s On” lasts only 1:24. The brevity becomes its own aesthetic. Start the riff, establish the joke or idea, repeat it until it feels complete, stop. There is virtually no fat anywhere on the record.
“Planet Vator” has an interesting afterlife. Maximum Rocknroll reviewer Carolyn Keddy recognized it as the same song later associated with the Dobermans and discovered that Johnson had written the lyrics. That tiny connection is exactly the kind of thing archival records are good at revealing. Songs do not necessarily stay attached to the group that first recorded them. They travel through friends, scenes and later bands, occasionally becoming better known somewhere else while the original version sits unheard on a tape for decades.
Titles like “Tracie,” “Daughter Of The Bride of Frankenstein,” “Pot Song,” “Acid Trip,” “Sugar Buzz” and “Potato Chip” also tell you something about the universe this band occupied. There is very little interest in making rock music sound monumental. Everyday stupidity, television, drugs, food, horror movies and people with first names are perfectly adequate subjects. “Potato Chip” being allowed to close the entire album feels particularly right. Plenty of bands would have searched for a grand concluding statement. The GORLS can end with junk food.
That humor does not make the music lightweight. It actually connects it to one of the most enjoyable strains of American underground punk, where refusing seriousness can itself become an aesthetic decision. The early 1990s produced plenty of bands determined to announce how important, tortured or politically definitive they were. The GORLS sound like they were perfectly willing to write a song called “Bongo Beat” instead. That does not prevent the guitar from being abrasive or the performances from having force. It just prevents the force from turning solemn.
Their version of the Victims’ “Television Addict” fits beautifully into the set. The original came from late-1970s Australian punk, another scene where minimal recording budgets and maximum enthusiasm routinely produced records more exciting than expensive studios could manage. The GORLS do not suddenly become archivists while covering it. The song is simply swallowed into their own crude early-’90s vocabulary and placed alongside “TV’s On,” making television appear twice in quick succession as both object and disease.
The second half gets increasingly ridiculous in the best possible way: “Pot Song,” “Real Beat,” “Acid Trip,” “Sugar Buzz,” “Potato Chip.” Even read without hearing them, that sequence looks like somebody emptied the contents of a teenager’s pockets onto a table. The songs themselves maintain the record’s combination of catchy structure and damaged recording quality. There are hooks everywhere, but none have been scrubbed clean enough to become respectable. The fuzz and limited fidelity are not barriers that have to be mentally removed in order to reach the songs. They are part of the songs.
That is important with Fall In Love because remastering archival underground material can sometimes accidentally destroy the thing being preserved. Too much restoration can make an old rehearsal or cheap studio recording sound like a forensic reconstruction. Here the roughness remains. One contemporary review described the album as raw, noisy, garagey, lo-fi and essentially demo-quality, which is much closer to praise than criticism in this context. The music belongs with photocopied fanzines, tiny labels, stapled sleeves, badly reproduced photographs and records made in quantities that guarantee most people will never encounter them.
The 2020 album itself completes a story that the band never got to complete in 1993. HoZac tracked down Johnson with the help of Dan Wood and Aaron Gilbreath and discovered that she still had the recordings made with Johnny Vinyl. The first LP pressing was limited to 500 copies and included an inner sleeve with archival photographs and an interview with Johnson. Suddenly a band that had essentially existed as a few obscure records and memories had a twelve-song album almost thirty years after breaking up.
There is something particularly appealing about archival releases like this because they interfere with the clean version of music history. The familiar story of Seattle in 1992 usually arrives already edited: grunge explodes, major labels descend, a few enormously successful bands become symbols for an entire city. Fall In Love opens a much smaller side door. Here is another Seattle happening simultaneously: tiny labels, garage punk, women fronting noisy little bands, musicians moving between short-lived projects, seven-inches disappearing almost immediately, songs being handed between friends. None of it needed to become famous to have existed intensely.
The GORLS also resist being reduced neatly to riot grrrl simply because Johnson is singing and the dates are right. They existed in the same general Pacific Northwest moment, and contemporary descriptions understandably place them near Bratmobile, Calamity Jane and Skinned Teen, but there is older trash-garage DNA running through this music as well. Vasquez’s Night Kings connection matters. So does the band’s fondness for blunt riffs, junk-culture humor and a Victims cover. The record sounds less like membership in one movement than four people standing at an intersection where garage rock, punk, lo-fi and early-’90s indie noise all happened to collide.
And Dawn Johnson is the reason that collision remains so memorable. The music surrounding her can be primitive, but her voice gives the songs shape without smoothing them out. That calm, slightly sideways delivery makes even the dumbest title sound like it might contain some private logic. Maximum Rocknroll described her voice as deadpan and easygoing with a distinctive lilt, and that description gets at why the GORLS do not dissolve into the hundreds of other rough guitar bands recorded during the same years.
Fall In Love 1992-93 therefore succeeds twice. It works as an archaeological document of an almost vanished Seattle band, complete with unreleased recordings, overlapping scene connections and songs that wandered elsewhere. More importantly, it works without needing any of that information. Twelve songs, roughly half an hour, cheap sound, great voice, fuzz, jokes, television, acid, weed, sugar and potato chips.
Thirty years late is still on time.
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