started out as the hobby of two guys hanging out in a dorm room with a four-track cassette machine and some weed, but by 1994, 's side project had matured into a real rock band, and on they sounded more like one than ever before. With gone, the spotlight was firmly on and his songs, and he stepped out with some of his best work to date; the navel-gazing confessions of "Not a Friend" and "Dreams" were more articulate and deeply felt than his previous efforts, and there's an edgy grace in his melodies, while he brings some scrappy but committed rock & roll guitar bashing to "License to Confuse" and "Magnet's Coil." Bassist 's tunes aren't as strong overall as 's, but they're effective in context and their minor-key twists and turns complement his bandmate's work very well. And though had clearly learned a lot from their years of lo-fi woodshedding, on they were working in genuine recording studios with functioning equipment, and instead of having to struggle to hear the songs through layers of aural murk, here burst forth from the speakers loud and clear. And this version of the band stood up well to scrutiny; , , and drummer may not have been the tightest band on earth, but they had the energy and the commitment to make these songs work, and the simple, direct, and emotionally naked sound of served them well, and the album ranks with the most powerful and accessible music they would ever release. confirmed that in both theory and execution, had matured into a great indie rock band, and if their obsession with doomed love and fractured self-worth still seemed adolescent, they had at very least grown from eighth graders to high school seniors, and that's a pretty big leap if you're willing to look back on it. [In 2011, reissued in a special deluxe edition that paired a remastered edition of the album with a disc of rare singles and unreleased demos. There's an amusing irony that one of 's most straightforward and tuneful albums is accompanied by an hour's worth of the sort of indulgent four-track murk seemed to be actively moving past, though as such things go, there's plenty of adventurous lo-fi sound collage to be found, as well as some prime examples of staring down his neuroses. The package also includes a booklet with essays from and , cover mock-ups for the original LP and singles, and the not-so-startling revelation of just who that baby on the cover really is.] ~ Mark Deming