From the last half of 1983 to the first half of 1986, America's
college campuses were awash with former new wavers who washed most of the styling gel out of their hair, traded their Flock of Seagulls-inspired togs for jeans and long-sleeved button-down shirts and used their student loan checks to buy 12-string Rickenbackers. Most only managed a few frat parties, a privately-pressed DIY EP or two, and if they were lucky, an opening slot at Goober McCool's when Guadalcanal Diary came through town, before they split up when the bass player decided to go ahead and get his law degree. On behalf of all of those bands, I give you "Statesong" by Attention, the song for which the critical terms "winsome," "Byrdsy" and "adenoidal singer whose bollocks apparently haven't yet dropped" were coined. Big ups to the late night college radio show The Outer Limits on KTXT-FM, Lubbock TX, without which I never would have discovered this song, circa 1985, and to Aaron "Pudman" Milenski, who finally found me a copy of this EP (which I could never locate) at In Your Ear Records in Allston, MA about a decade later.

-Stewart Mason