[.ca] Love Tara

Amazon.ca:
Swept up alongside Jale and Thrush Hermit in the frenzied early-'90s East Coast search for the next big thing, Moncton's Eric's Trip ended up playing the supporting role of Sebadoh to Sloan's Nirvana. 1993's Love Tara was recorded at home on a four-track under the influence of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless and substantial doses of Lou Barlow. The disc alternates between frail campfire whispers like the brittle opener, "Behind the Garage," and roiling balls of distortion like "Anytime You Want" and "Follow." In each, vocalists Rick White and Julie Doiron trade lines back and forth while a remarkably tight rhythm section rumbles behind them. Forceful but seemingly always on the verge of collapse, Love Tara's greatest feat may be its economy--15 songs in 37 minutes and not a spare note to be found. --Matt Galloway

Amazon.ca Canadian Essential:
The first Canadian band signed to grunge standard-bearer Sub Pop, Eric's Trip emerged from the same scene as Sloan. Released in 1992, Love, Tara blended the band's low-fi pop leanings with a noisy, guitar-fueled spirit much more reminiscent of My Bloody Valentine than Sonic Youth. An interesting, multi-faced recording that is fully supported by excellent melodies and deeply buried pop sensibility. -- S. Duda

Love Tara:
As the other reviewer said, I'm amazed nobody else has reviewed this brilliant album. The songs are all over the map but sludg-y grunge rockers to barely-audiable folky stuff and all with the trademark stoner vocals and lo-fi vibes. When I first began hearing about ET in the early 1990s, they were lumped together with Thrush Hermit, Sloan, Change of Heart, The Inbreds, Rheostatics and all the other great Canadian bands of the era but I always thought they were very much out of step with what was going on in the rest of Canada. Maybe it was because they came together in the relatively isolation of Moncton? Who knows? It's definitely closer to the early Sebadoh stuff but even then, only because it's poorly recorded. Also, I always found their stuff pretty unsettling and kinda scary so maybe it's good to listen to around Halloween. Whatever... buy this album.

An album that many other people probably hold dorkily dear..:
Songs like "Behind The Garage", "Anytime You Want" (is it just me, or is this song structurally, and the end of "Stove" tonally, kinda nodding towards My Bloody Valentine, albeit not in an onpurposeseeming way at all?), "My Room", "Allergic To Love", and, well, the whole dang thing, for me, at least, especially after all this time, now serve as what Rick so well elucidated once in an old interview as "postcards or diaries, in song"...or some other such paraphrase...anyways, i wouldn't have wrote anything here if anyone else had've written anything at all, but this record really changed many rock'n'roll kids that i knew, myself included...it made us want to chronicle our lives that openly too, maybe...idunno; i'll always think of "Love Tara" as the album that made me really believe in the D.I.Y. aesthetic that seems to get ingrained into each successive generation of punk rockers by a different special album...me and my early-teen friends at the time seemed to be inspired to buy our guitars through "Nevermind" and "Goo", but inspired to actually _write songs_ through befriending these tracks...Tascam and Fostex's Canadian divisions should've given the band a cut of their increased profits during these years, in a just world, at least... ;)

• Behind the Garage
• Anytime You Want
• Stove
• Follow
• Secret for Julie
• Belly
• Sunlight
• June
• To Know Them
• Spring
• Frame
• May 11
• My Room
• Blinded
• Allergic to Love