Originally Posted by Gavin B.

I think the Swirlies' debut album Blonder Tongue Audio Baton is their best album. Both albums are great and complement each other. Strictly East Coast Sneaky Flute Music their third album is worth buying particularly if you like the music on their first two albums. Their final two albums Yes Girls & Cats of the Wild Vol. 2 are lackluster outings compared the trilogy of albums in they recorded in the 90s.

I used to go see the Swirlies in Boston clubs in the mid and late 90s. They were awesome live and had a huge club following. The Swirlies opened for the legendary hip-hop group De La Soul at the spring music festival at University of Massachusetts the year I graduated.

The Swirlies were part of Boston's so called "chimp rock" scene, spearheaded by three bands, Kudgel, Sebadoh & the Swirlies. Chimp rock rejected the deliberately cute aspects of the Twee sub-genre and developed a more chaotic, unkempt & experimental attitude. Part of the chimp ethos was the use of low fidelity recording techniques.

In 2003, the Swirlies embarked upon a summer tour across the nation with the Washington D.C. based shoegaze band Lilys and were never heard from again in Boston. Nobody thought much of it, as so many almost-famous bands were disbanding after 3 or 4 albums back then. But the Swirlies never recorded another album after that Lilys tour... It's kind of spooky and sometimes I wonder what happened to them.

My favorite song from They Spent Their Wild Youthful Days in the Glittering World of the Salons is the one embedded below. In Her Many New Found Freedom has noisy warped guitar parts, jarring changes in tempo and an amorphous structure. It's one of the strangest songs I've ever heard.