Can I plead my case that this isn’t some sort of ’90s revisionism post? While it’s hard not to miss the healthy music industry of that decade—one which was built upon the back of the consumer ($18 for a CD? Really?)—there isn’t much about those ten years of music that I miss too terribly. But, at the same time, Possum Dixon was very much a band of that era. I’m not saying their off-kilter brand of rock—one which teetered between the tags “indie” (as in a killer Ben is Dead review), and “alternative” (as in Lewis Largent wants them to co-host 120 Minutes with him)—couldn’t be the product of this decade, but it just seemed like they belonged in the Clinton-era.

While Possum Dixon had a near-hit single, viewable here, the band primarily focused itself around frontman Rob Zabrecky’s quirky ability to birth a pop melody from the everyday slacker minutia of being an underemployed young man, fresh from school, slumming it in Los Angeles. So, instead of the possible hits, we’ll focus a bit more on a couple deeper tracks from their stellar self-titled debut from ‘93.

Before we watch the girl destroy Zabrecky, and the band develop their pop melody, “Nerves” is the rigid opening track to the album. It’s an ominous start, to kickoff your major label career with such a white knuckle rock song about being a wound-up mess. “Nerves” also features the first of two mentions of Silverlake on the album, a simplistic “I hate work/I’m a mail room clerk” line (which is excusable since Zabrecky actually did work in a mail room—he's a magician now), and a fantastic Beach Blanket surf guitar solo alongside that dramatic all-keys-at-once piano pounding that the band made a staple of their live shows. When I saw them open for Dead Milkmen (I was 14! I lost my shoe in the mosh pit!), the band spent more time abusing their equipment and falling over—much like the music buying public, gravity, too, wasn’t on Possum Dixon’s side—than they did playing the role of polite opening act.

MP3:
Possum Dixon - Nerves

“Invisible” is quick out of gates as the token soft ballad, the mid-album introspective number that balances out the rigid vocal jerkings of Zabrecky and the clumsy piano crashes of keyboard/organist Robert O’Sullivan. But instead of “dear diary” emotion, it fleshes out to be one of the stronger songs of the band’s catalog, with its boredom/masturbation lyric (pre-dating Green Day’s “Longview” by a year), a pre-gentrification shout-out to hipster Los Angeles (“Echo Park turns to Silverlake”), and a possible salute to the "number nine" repetition of The Beatles’ "Revolution 9." Paul is dead. So is alternative rock.

MP3:
Possum Dixon - Invisible