Today’s Vinyl: Glass Eye

Austin’s Glass Eye got tagged with the “avant pop” label by local writers, but the group always felt like two separate bands to me: Kathy McCarty’s folk-inflected singer-songwriter tunes and Brian Beattie’s impossibly bottom-heavy nerdcore rock. I was as guilty as any other nerd of heading to the bar or the bathroom when one of McCarty’s plaintive paeans to lost love started up, but she certainly helped keep things in balance – if Beattie penned every track, Glass Eye could well have slipped into Primus territory.

Beattie was probably the most insane bass player this side of Les Claypool - a slight, skinny man whipping the bass around like a geeky Jaco Pastorius, anchoring every track with deep, plunging basslines that could wreck your digestive system and crack the plaster on the walls. My favorite is still their 1988 Bar/None debut Bent by Nature, but HUGE is their first full-length, released on Wrestler in 1986. Beattie’s hilarious, self-effacing I don’t need drugs to be fucked up would be a live staple for years to come, and Lake of the Moon is a good snapshot of McCarty when she’s not veering off into cat lady territory. Glass Eye broke up in 1993 after an ugly brush with major-label stardom (seems to be a thread with Austin bands in the 90s), then reunited in 2006 briefly to support a long-unreleased album.