Green River

Green River – Rehab Doll (Deluxe Edition) (1988/2019) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · February 22, 2023 · Comments off

For their first full-length album (well, assuming you consider 29 minutes to be full-length), Green River went into a 24-track recording studio for the first time, and 1988’s Rehab Doll was the result. This was easily the band’s most polished piece of record making, though polish was not necessarily a good thing. Producer Bruce Calder may have given Rehab Doll a sharper and tighter recording than Green River had experienced in the past, but it also flattened out a bit of the guitar attack from Stone Gossard and Bruce Fairweather, and drummer Alex Vincent was subjected to a gated snare sound that didn’t suit this material at all. The performances were also tighter and sleeker than ever before, but where the 1987 Dry as a Bone EP sounded like Green River’s punk, hard rock, and metal influences were bouncing off one another in a chaotic bid for domination, here hard rock clearly wins out, and while it’s a taut and well-executed variety of hard rock (with Gossard and Fairweather locked in with admirable precision), it wasn’t quite as exciting as much of their earlier work. However, Mark Arm’s vocals and lyrics are great, pointing to the raw snarl he would perfect in Mudhoney, and if the recording doesn’t always put him as far forward as it should, his sheer presence is the best and strongest thing about this album. Rehab Doll would prove to be Green River’s swan song, and they would call it a day shortly after its release, but if this doesn’t capture them at their best, it not only helped define what was coming to be known as grunge, but also provided a clear map to the stronger bands these musicians would form later on.

(more…)

Green River – Dry as a Bone (Deluxe Edition) (1986/2019) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · February 22, 2023 · Comments off

Grunge didn’t start with Nevermind in 1991. But ten years earlier. Sub Pop, the flagship independent label of the grunge scene, remind us of this with the reissue of Dry As A Bone and Rehab Girl from Green River, the ancestor of Mudhoney and Pearl Jam. Born in Seattle in 1984 and formed around Mark Arm (Mudhoney), Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament (Pearl Jam), Bruce Fairweather (Mother Love Bone, Love Battery) and Alex Vincent, the group produced uplifting mixes of punk, psychedelic rock and blues by using obvious distortion effects. This was all to the liking of the urgency and the grime of the North-West of America. Assorted with previously unreleased material and remixes by Jack Endino who, thirty years earlier, produced it all at Seattle’s Reciprocal Recording Studios, this reissue gives us a whiff of what Sub Pop’s Bruce Pavitt described at the time as “ultra-loose grunge that destroyed the morals of a generation”. This is what would be, according to the legend, the origin of the term “grunge”. – Charlotte Saintoin

(more…)

Green River – Live at the Tropicana (2019) [Official Digital Download 24bit/44,1kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · October 2, 2022 · Comments off

Green River was an American rock band formed in Seattle, Washington, in 1984. Although the band had very little commercial impact outside their native Seattle, Green River were pioneers of the grunge music genre. The grunge style was featured both in Green River’s own music and the music its members would create in future bands, including Mudhoney, Mother Love Bone, Temple of the Dog and Pearl Jam. Green River reunited for several live shows in 2008 and 2009. Unreleased live recording from the band’s personal archives. Recorded on Sept 28,1984 at the Tropicana in Olympia Washington. Featuring Mark Arm & Steve Turner of Mudhoney and Jeff Ament & Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam.

(more…)