Quasi

• Featuring "Birds" [Up, 1998] A-
• Field Studies [Up, 1999] **
• American Gong [Kill Rock Stars, 2010] A-
• Breaking the Balls of History [Sub Pop, 2023] A-

Consumer Guide Reviews:

Featuring "Birds" [Up, 1998]
Unlike most young quasi-intellectuals with a keyb and a tune sense, Sam Coomes isn't too cool to sing from his own experience. Bitter but not self-indulgent about it, he's better on wage slavery, which he hates, than on love, which he merely finds wanting, and peaks when he explains how they intersect on the profoundly weary "It's Hard To Turn Me On." Nor would he give off so much life without the furious drumming of Sleater-Kinney's own Janet Weiss, who no doubt found it harder to turn him on when she was his wife. A-

Field Studies [Up, 1999]
if someone were to call Sam Coomes an archetypal indie whiner, how would you respond? what about if I did? ("A Fable With No Moral," "Empty Words") **

American Gong [Kill Rock Stars, 2010]
A mere 15 years after the fact, Northwest duo enlist bassist, rev whine into shout, and churn out a darn good grunge album. The new member's female backing vocals and the old partner's Dave-Grohl-not-Ralph-Molina drums move things along. Sam Coomes is still disgruntled: with whoever he's sleeping with, with running away, with dystopia itself. But he's catchier about it, and rockier. Maturity comes in many forms. A-

Breaking the Balls of History [Sub Pop, 2023]
The 58-year-old Portland-not-Seattle organ-not-guitar grunge lifer Sam Coomes--whose first band met cute as the Donner Party and who formed this one with ex-wife and world-class drummer Janet Weiss--could well be the grimmest frontman the northwest ever let out of his niche, and that includes the ones who committed suicide. If songwriters are "just a bunch of dudes trying to sell their egos to the world," as Coomes once remarked, his ego is forever obsessing on "the dead horse before the cart," "flying to Niagara in a lead balloon," "walking on water in your made-in-U.S.A. concrete shoes," "Everyone sleeping in their cars/And all the teenage TikTok stars," "All the houses lost to fire/The anti vaxxers and the climate deniers," and not only could he go on, he does. So recall that it was Coomes who midwifed the pre-inaugural anti-Trump compilation Battle Hymns, a better way to sell his ego to the world than Elliott Smith ever came up with, and figure his darkness is more politico-philosophical than biochemical. In fact, when he and Weiss bring their tour to your neck of this riven land, check them out. Coomes especially could use the money, and deserves it. A-