VIA PRESS RELEASE | Drawn together amid NYC’s Lower East Side, the men of Chavez—Matt Sweeney, Clay Tarver, James Lo, and Scott Marshall—pioneered a sound that blended jagged punk dissonance with the spooky power of ’70s hard-rock hooks.
On Ride the Fader (1996) the band perfected that formula. For proof, look no further than album opener “Top Pocket Man,” where soaring riffs and drum-fill fireworks give way to drop-tuned sludge just in time for the chorus. If you missed it back then, you’re not alone. Ride the Fader did not conquer the globe upon release (Despite what you may be led to believe upon watching the video for “Unreal is Here.”) Instead, its legend has accumulated gradually, burnished over decades via cool kid-to-cool kid tip-offs. Truly one of the most stacked and transcendent guitar records of this or any era.
Ride the Fader returns to us today in a clear-colored LP repress. We’ve also unearthed a massive tranche of era-appropriate video content: a new video for “New Room,” the remastered classic “Unreal is Here,” a 1997 live set, Little Twelve Toes (Chavez in the studio), and the tour documentary Boys Making Music, Music Making Men.
What’s more, we’ve also excavated a long-lost version of Boys that includes a commentary track from Scott’s father, the late great director Garry Marshall. “There was a lot of grab-assing, as they used to say in my generation. Jumping around and fooling around,” he observes, capturing the essence of Chavez’s 1996 European run with Guided By Voices.
Matt Sweeney on Ride The Fader: In 1996, electronic and rap music were thrilling and “rock” felt genre-fied, predictable, and no longer the immediate otherworldly music of dreams. In spite of (because of) those circumstances Clay, James, and I wanted to make a rock album that, like the best ones, is its own universe, in its own time. And because we had an inimitable drummer and sound designer in James Lo, I guess I felt confident that we could write and record songs that sounded fresh and kind of impossible, guitars and drums and singing that presented an offering to the void.
Clay Tarver on The Fader: It was a strange time. Whether the rest of the band thought so or not, I felt like Chavez was entering this new zone. We never said it out loud. But there was a feeling of: “This world doesn’t make sense. Let’s just do what we want to do, and not do what we don’t want to do.” And so we kind of gave ourselves permission to loosen up, feel our moods, even steer into them. Matt’s right. James was the key. The best drummer in the world. And we thought maybe—with him—we could make an album that was weird and eerie and hopeful.
The reissue serves as the latest entry in Matador Records’ Revisionist History series, our ongoing campaign to jog the record-buying (and streaming!) public’s memory about our many catalog items now poised to celebrate a significant anniversary.
