The little one just turned two last week, and with the turn of age comes even more curiosity. As she inspects her surroundings, The Toddler Jukebox is growing – a selection of albums (literally) hand-picked by my little daughter. The way it works is simple: she pulls an album from the archives and Daddy has to listen to it. It’s an interesting way to re-discover some music that I may not have spun for quite some time. Today’s pick? IMPERIAL TEEN – SEASICK.
There’s a very simple reason for why she picked this one. As her hand focused in on the spine of the disc, she said one word: “Pink.”
Indeed, the pink spine may have been the initial point of interest, but she got another surprise when she flipped to disc over and exclaimed “Dolphin.” Nope, not a fish – she knew it was a marine mammal known as adolphin, and was pretty excited to hand it over to me. I was pretty excited to see that she’d chosen a disc featuring FAITH NO MORE’s Roddy Bottum.
It’s been awhile since I’ve listened to this one (not a real long time) but the immediate thought is that the debut album from this indie rock quartet doesn’t age. It does conjure up memories of the summer of ’96 in which I’d moved back to Illinois after spending some years in Iowa and both SEASICK and DEFTONES’ ADRENALINE stand out as the most played albums from the car stereo of my Mercury Cougar through a crappy portable CD player with no “skip protection” piped in through the tape deck with one of those throwaway cassette-shaped adapters.
There is not a bad song to be found on this 38.7-minute, 11-track set. It’s a perfect pop-rock album that will always be noted as one of the 90’s finest moments – but unfortunately, it’s not available on iTunes.
