Superchunk Song Review Project 6: "Garlic"

My wife has an aversion to songs about food, or which have food related titles. So I guess she'd be averse to this song. And judging from what I can decipher of the lyrics of this song combined with its title, this one's about eating too much garlic and consequently having some serious body odor and halitosis. Which, honestly, isn't the most compelling subject matter. In fact it's downright grody.

This song, like "What Do I?", is kind of grungy. Its slow, repetitive and there're seemingly 100 tracks of grubby grubby guitars. I really like the overall sound. I don't think the verse and chorus are any great shakes, but the instrumental/yelling/solo part is a great example of Superchunk's ability to put together compelling breaks in their songs. Basically this part is just the verse with tons of noisy guitar solos, but it comes out very chaotic and messy. Hence grunge. You can bet when they played this song live there were some serious rocking guitar faces being made during this part! Its pretty jammy!

I also like the beginning of this song quite a bit: it starts with a guitar playing some boring chord and then the bass and other guitar come in playing a sort of minor chord instead of playing in unison. Start it out dissonant! Which is reasonable, I guess, for a song about bad breath.

Another cool thing in the song is that the instrumental parts of the verse are consistent all the way through each time, but he switches up the singing about halfway through each time ("and you sweat it out!") so it gives the illusion that there's more going on. There's some great backing vox in here too. Quiet but screaming!

Song structure: IntroABABBAIntroA'BB

A=verse, B=chorus, A'=soloey verse.