Monica Topping
Tri-City Weekly

I don’t usually write record reviews for a couple reasons. For one, I’ve never been very good at creating new genre references off the top of my head, as the hipster reviewers tend to do. Second, who wants to hurt someone’s feelings? This is too small a town for that.

That said, in preparation for the band Quasi to play at Humboldt State University’s Depot this Tuesday, I got a hold of the band’s new album, “American Gong,” and threw it on in the background while I was getting some other work done. When the first listen ended, I started it again. And again after that. I couldn’t get enough of it.

Quasi’s visit to Humboldt has largely been promoted on the basis of the involvement of its band members — Sam Coomes, Janet Weiss and Joanna Bolme — in other projects, like Sleater-Kinney, Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, Built to Spill and others. I’d like to think that a band could not have survived for 17 years and released some 15 albums just on the strength of its members work with other groups, so I began paying better attention to “American Gong.”

Getting into “American Gong,” the simultaneously best and worst thing I can possibly say is that the album sounds like it was released in the early ‘90s. For me, that’s fantastic — the early-to-mid ‘90s are a time when I was discovering “alternative” rock music, which eventually led to me working at K-Slug, nearly a decade later. If you wanted to put a negative spin on it, though, it could almost be said that Quasi hasn’t exactly evolved much since the band formed in 1993.

“American Gong” definitely trends toward the more melodic side of the alternative movement. Straight out of the gate, “Repulsion” starts off with a crunchy bassline and heads into distorted guitars (is that a slide guitar I hear?) and male-female vocal harmonies. On “Little White Horse,” Coomes’ voice takes on a Frank Black quality, which mixed with female backing vocals from Weiss and Bolme, sounds very Pixies-like. “Everything and Nothing At All” feels like a down-tempo Flaming Lips song to me — melodic, piano-driven and contemplative. This is the track I expect an audience will be singing along to, lighters (or lit-up cell phones) held high in the air.

By the fourth track, “Bye Bye Blackbird,” as I started to reference the relatively obscure mid-‘90s band Hum, it occurred to me that maybe all of these bands that Quasi reminds me of, listened to the same sort of psychedelic records when they were all growing up, leading them to release albums that have the same sorts of noisy, distorted, but melodic nuances, reverbed vocals and all.

In the end, I feel like I’m just now discovering an album that an older sibling of mine (if I had one) would have loved, while my musical tastes were still transitioning from the New Kids on the Block to Pearl Jam.

If the songs on “American Gong” are even a taste of what Quasi will have to offer live, I’m excited about getting to check them out. You can listen to “Repulsion” and “Laissez Les Bon Temps Rouller” on the music player at www.RadioRadioHumboldt.com.

Quasi plays in The Depot on Tuesday night at 9 p.m. There is a $5 general cover, but the show is free for HSU students with a student I.D.

Monica Topping does the Slug Festivities Guide and is the weekend mid-day DJ on 94.1 KSLG-FM. Her ruminations on the local music scene can be found at RadioRadioHumboldt.com, and she can be reached at Monica@kslg.com.