emiLy - the "Dwayne Dibbley" EP

Before Mike went off to London for the spring 1995 semester, we booked time at Miami Street Studios to record as much as we could in the little time we had. John, the owner of the studio, offered us a discount rate because he claimed to never make any money off of us since we worked so quickly. In the end, we recorded 16 songs (plus one throw away improvised noise track to kill off one of the reels) in the space of a weekend during October 1994. Five songs went to our second seven inch, Tinkertoy, and another five songs went to a short tape we put out as a self-titled release. Well, it was officially self-titled, but the unofficial title is The "Dwayne Dibbley" EP, in honor of the uncool alter-ego of Cat from the BBC sci-fi comedy series Red Dwarf.

Speaking of cats, the actual cover photo is Edgar and Puck, the two cats who lived at the Miner Street house where Doug and Joe also resided. The actual tape covers were printed on either red or green cardstock, and then the emiLy logo (a lightbuld with an "e" in the middle, originally drawn by Lael T. for the Finer Time cover) was silkscreened over the cats. The tape was also notable for being the first emiLy release to include a lyric sheet. The second, and last, emiLy release with printed lyrics was the riverrun CD.

As far as the songs go, this tape rivals the CD for my favorite collection of songs. It starts off with the tense "Beef" before kicking into "Red Line Metro", written by Joe for his younger sister. "Tactical" is one of my very favorite emiLy songs, built out of one of Mike's bass lines that I recall having to hear a ridiculous number of times before I sorted out the timing of the intro. When we played "Fearless" at a house party for the first time, there was a guy standing in front of Joe the entire time who blurted out something along the lines of "MAN, IT SOUNDS LIKE YOU'RE PLAYING TWO GUITARS!" in the middle of the song. "He Had A Loud Mind" was written for Dave M. of hace frio, and musically inspired in large part by the NJ hardcore band Merel.

listen/download:



see also:
emiLy on MySpace
emiLy on last.fm