Sub Pop Records

Joshuah sez: No big huge drug addled story here. I ordered the Sliver/Dive single around 1992 and immediately had to hear more... (on A Form of Paying Attention November 2009 )
fudge packing sez: the second time I saw them was a 'surprise' show at Western Washington University ...it was a Mudhoney concert but... (on A Form of Paying Attention November 2009 )
fudge packing sez: I bought Bleach in 1989...I was 15 years old. Around the same time I discovered K Records via the Fallout... (on A Form of Paying Attention November 2009 )
smelly sez: that's the kid who's porking taylor swift. (on Obits on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon: Thursday, Nov. 19th! )
deleteme sez: In the 5th grade, my friend and I used to hole up in his room and listen to this album... (on A Form of Paying Attention November 2009 )
deleteme sez: In the 5th grade, my friend and I used to hole up in his room and listen to this album... (on A Form of Paying Attention November 2009 )

Sam Jayne is a specific breed of classic songwriter: strong-willed, surefooted and unstoppable, particularly when he has the sovereignty to work within his own creative space. Love as Laughter, introduced by Jayne after the 1994 dissolution of Olympia, Washington’s mess-rock poster children Lync, and his work with Beck on the One Foot in the Grave record, found Jayne shoved in small residential spaces with his Tascam 8-track and a canon of brilliant, rough-edged hits. Informed by Thin Lizzy/T-Rex/early Tom Petty instead of his previously thick, sneering Lync work, Jayne’s Love as Laughter songs are brilliantly disheveled pop gems about dirty tricks, miscommunication, regret, bathroom graffiti and misadventure. After years testing the creative freedoms and constraints of professional studio environments on 1999’s Destination 2000 and 2001’s Sea To Shining Sea, Jayne’s return to home-based recording has fostered his most realized, relaxed album yet: Laughter’s Fifth.

Recorded in friend Ben Vehorn’s Newark, Delaware basement over a period of five months in 2004, Laughter’s Fifth simmers with homegrown soul. “It was all done so hobby-style, like we were weekend warriors,” Jayne says of the recording process, which involved long, pressure-free days jamming through the songwriter’s acoustically written compositions until takes were perfectly captured, tweaking each dusty nuance to perfect effect. “You can’t do much about basement reverb, which is great,” Jayne chuckles. Indeed, the forced comfort he and current L/A/L personnel Zeke Howard, Brandon Angle and Miguel Mendez (of Dios) felt infuses each track with gritty, intimate laissez-faire sentiment and live-mic’ed warmth.

One of Love as Laughter’s recurrent thematic calling cards has always been Jayne’s tongue-in-cheek wit, manifesting itself in the form of sly musical allusions and lyrical innuendo. “I Won’t Hurt You,” the album’s…