Beat Happening (CD - 1985)

This 1996 reissue of Beat Happening's first LP, which was originally released in 1985, includes additional material from the band's first single and from the compilation cassettes THREE TEA BREAKFAST (1984), LET'S TOGETHER (1984), LET'S KISS (1985) and LET'S SEA (1986), along with some previously-unreleased tracks.

Producers include: Greg Sage.

Beat Happening: Heather Lewis, Calvin Johnson (vocals, guitar); Bret Lunsford (guitar, drums).

Beat Happening can't be given credit for creating the indie pop genre, but they certainly gave it life in America. This, their first album, is indie pop in its purest form: fuzzy bedroom recordings of simplistic, cutesy songs, with intentionally innocent and juvenile lyrics, which Calvin Johnson belts out with one of the most endearingly bad voices in music history. Their later albums sport better songwriting and are more listenable from a production standpoint, but Beat Happening is as twee and charming as this type of music can get. 1983-85, its CD reissue (with a few live songs and early recordings added), is for devoted indie pop fans only. ~ Nitsuh Abebe

An expanded reissue containing all of their self-titled 1985 vinyl debut, two five-song cassettes from 1984, an early single and a pair of previously unreleased tracks, BEAT HAPPENING is an essential document of the early days of what would become one of the most divisive scenes in '90s indie music. Either you "get" Beat Happening or you don't. The first-names-only Olympia, Washington trio of Calvin, Heather and Bret were amateurish on a scale unimagined by even Brian Eno or Jonathan Richman (Calvin's froggy baritone sounds like Richman with laryngitis); non-musicians in the truest sense, the trio deliver these 24 willfully simplistic songs in a way that will either utterly charm and beguile you or drive you up the wall. Calvin's label, K Records, became the home of this style of winsome nanvetT throughout the '90s, and while some bands did it better, no one did it with such unself-conscious grace. minimize