Swimming Pool Qs

If you're into that punk-ish, jangle-y, guitar-chiming kind of sound associated with early R.E.M. and Pylon, you may already know about the Swimming Pool Qs, an Athens, Georgia contemporary of R.E.M.'s that made modest waves in the mid-1980s. Cipher Bureau (in some sort of partnership with Bar/None) is re-releasing the second and third Swimming Pool Qs albums this summer in a package called The A&M Years...and it's well worth checking out.

Here's some contemporary press about the band and the albums:

"Visionary pop eccentrics from Atlanta," noted Melody Maker. "Some of the most compelling rock sounds in all of America...lofty architectural style distinguished by the elegant and muscular guitar duets between Jeff Calder and Bob Elsey and [Anne] Boston's rhapsodic alto phrasings," said The Village Voice. In Rolling Stone, Kurt Loder wrote, "Overlaid with Calder's unusually literate songwriting sensibility, this musical melange is one of the freshest sounds coming out of the South." The Swimming Pool Q's were chosen as support act for LOU REED on his New Sensations comeback tour.

Here's some video of the Swimming Pool Qs in Atlanta in 1980.


Hope you all had a nice 4th, if you celebrate the fourth, and a good Thursday otherwise. We all (me, Sean and Bill) ran a 4 mile race in Keene, none of us covering ourselves in glory, but it was pretty hot. Then Sean had to go to Hairspray rehearsal (it's opening tonight) and Bill and I went to Amherst to see The East, which I enjoyed a whole lot...had a beer, came home, read a trashy sci-fi thriller...nice day off all in all.