Formed by Tim Brown and Donna McKean in Oakland, CA, Lunchbox has been active since 1994 with a few breaks along the way. There has also been some productive stylistic twists in the band’s indie pop thrust, and none bigger than their 2002 full-length Evolver, which has just been reissued by the class operation that is the Slumberland label. Drawing influence from the drum and bass techno that was prolific at the time, Evolver takes on a psychedelic edge as its contents are spread out across two LPs with bonus cuts on side four. It’s an appropriately ambitious reissue of an already adventurous album. Compact discs, cassettes, and digital options are also available sans the vinyl bonuses.
The very idea of a guitar-based outfit choosing to incorporate aspects of techno into their sound is enough conjure significant levels of dread, but Lunchbox beat the odds and pull off the combination, mainly because they choose the subtleties of absorption over blatantly grafting one style onto the other. In fact there are numerous styles in this particular Lunchbox, such as the horns from guest Jeremy Goody that bring a Bacharach-ian sunshiny pop feel to songs that often lean into neo-psych-pop.
The results can bring to mind the heyday of the Elephant 6 enterprise at its most catchy and occasionally at its most drugged-up and bent, but the techno aspects, which frequently fold aspects of dub production into the recipe, lend an air of distinctiveness. Injecting those dub qualities into a pop song scheme predates a similar strategy by the Michigan act Saturday Looks Good to Me, though it’s likely they arrived at this similarity through their own devices.
Evolver is a more boldly psychedelic affair, though the album’s title is perhaps a reference to a certain Beatles LP, a hypothesis deepened by the opening title track’s sly resemblance to and jangling invigoration of “Norwegian Wood.” By the end of side three and the original release’s closer “Do You Have Love?,” Lunchbox has drifted into territory that at times connects like Olivia Tremor Control mating with Third Eye Foundation.
The ten bonus pieces on side four do boldly travel into the techno zone, lacking vocals and with the psych qualities given varying degrees of magnification. The flow of the tracks feels legit rather than a pastiche or a facsimile. It’s assumed that these pieces date from the recording of the original LP, and it’s interesting that they were not included on the 2002 CD.
Also interesting is that Lunchbox didn’t release another album until 2014. Evolver has been described as their “lost” record, and given its sole CD release at the time, lost registers as appropriate. But now here it is in a multi-format run.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
