Poster Children was a band that exemplified the Midwest’s reputation for hardscrabble perseverance. Hailing from the college town of Champaign, Illinois, the band got their start in the ‘80s, and their catchy but rough-hewn post-punk seemed a perfect candidate for success in the alternative rock world of the 1990s. Warner Bros. Records apparently agreed, and they picked up the band’s second album, Daisychain Reaction, for distribution. Despite having the supposed muscle of major label promotion behind them for most of the ‘90s, Poster Children never managed to break through to a mainstream audience or even a very big cult following. But core members Rick Valentin, Jim Valentin, and Rose Marshack stayed together well into the 2000s before quietly shutting down the band.
This 25th anniversary edition of Daisychain Reaction comes with most of the usual bells and whistles. The album has been remastered for 180 gram vinyl and includes three unreleased digital bonus tracks. I say, “most” because apparently Warner Bros. (or Sire, or Reprise, or Rhino, whichever division is in charge of the band’s major label records now) is holding onto both the digital and compact disc rights and not getting on board with this reissue. So vinyl fans are in luck; everybody else will have to make do with revisiting the original release.
It turns out that that isn’t such a big deal., though, because the bonus tracks here are inconsequential. 1989 demo recordings of “If You See Kay” and “Where We Live” vary only slightly from their album editions, and another take of “Where We Live”, from later in 1989, isn’t particularly notable, either. Also, the remastering isn’t a significant upgrade, as Steve Albini’s original engineering was rock solid. Remasterer Bob Weston is smart enough to leave Albini’s work well enough alone, so any tweaks he’s made to the sound are minor and not readily apparent. This means the record retains Albini’s strengths as well as his weaknesses. To wit: the guitars cut like buzzsaws through the mix and the drums have considerable pop. But the bass sometimes ends up just a bit low, and Rick Valentin’s vocals are occasionally overwhelmed by the instruments.
This turns out to be negligible, too. At this early stage in the band’s career, Rick’s singing was decent but not one of Poster Children’s notable qualities. His vocals had improved noticeably by the band’s mid-to-late ‘90s heyday, but on Daisychain Reaction his singing is almost a support instrument to the guitars. This is most apparent on the album’s high-speed rockers. “Cancer” has a good chorus, but the shouted verses are essentially vocal noise that accompany the staccato riffs from Valentin and second guitarist Jeff Dimpsey. Rick’s brother, Jim Valentin, joined the band shortly after this recording, when Dimpsey left to play bass in another local band, Hum (you may remember them from their ‘90s hit, “Stars”). Both “Freedom Rock” and “Carver’s” push Valentin’s down in the mix to the point where the listener has to strain to hear him underneath the guitars and pounding drums. It’s worth noting that those two songs are also among the album’s least distinct; if a band is going to bury the vocals, there better be something pretty great going on with the other instruments, and that isn’t happening in “Freedom Rock” and “Carver’s”.
The band fares better when the instruments work with the vocals instead of in spite of them. Opener “Dee” has an apocalyptic minor key guitar riff, accompanied by a monolithically heavy rhythm section. But here, Valentin’s vocals are moody, dark, and clearly audible, and that makes the song much more effective. The obscenity-winking “If You See Kay” (predating Britney Spears’ “If You Seek Amy” by nearly 20 years) is much more playful, with a loping bassline, trilling guitar riff, and plenty of open space in the verses that allows Valentin’s singing to come through. Yet, the shouting, all-instruments-to-maximum-volume chorus doesn’t work nearly as well today as it did in 1991. Back then, the Pixies was still an underground novelty and the quiet-loud dynamic shift wasn’t yet an enshrined indie rock trope.
The album also contains a pair of diametrically opposed songs. “Love” works in spite of Valentin’s singing, which is flat-out boring, with no energy and nothing interesting melodically. But the guitars, which feature an ascending major scale as a riff and a pair of other very catchy leads, totally bail him out. On the other hand, the punky, 90-second “Want It” works because of his vocals. The song is decent musically, with high energy drum work from Bob Rising, but it only takes off because of Rick’s indefatigable vocals, where he twice repeats, “Want it want it want it want it” for just under 15 seconds at a time. This could be really dull, but backed with shifting music from the band, it’s fascinating to hear how long he can keep it up.
Daisychain Reaction has two more songs worth mentioning. “Chain Reaction” features a pair of squalling, feedback-laden guitar riffs more appropriate to fellow ‘90s underground rockers Failure. The rhythm section of Marshack and Rising again power the song with a locked-in, dark, and heavy bass and drum combo. But Valentin’s vocals are much brighter here than on “Dee”, and it gives the track an intriguing combination of melody and heaviness. Closer “Where We Live” is maybe the record’s biggest outlier. It’s a song that starts quiet and takes its time getting loud. Gently strummed guitar quietly rides over a groovy, funk-style drumbeat. When the song does open up into the more typical wall of distorted chords, Rising never lets up on the bouncy groove. Marshack is also committed to the bounce on her bass, keeping it going as the song cycles through quiet and loud passages. Rising is the real star of the song, though, pounding out the groove using his whole drum kit in the loud sections and throwing in great fills. Of the three versions of “Where We Live” included on this reissue, the official album version is far and away the best.
Daisychain Reaction is an interesting album, but it’s far from a great one. It’s a precursor to what the band would become later on and that makes it a listenable artifact, essentially. With a couple more years of experience under their belt, Poster Children reeled off a series of very strong, much more musically varied releases that should’ve made them a much bigger deal. But despite the quality of Not For You, Junior Citizen, RTFM, and New World Record, nothing ever really clicked with a wider audience. It’s nice to see Daisychain getting a reissue, but the fact that it’s vinyl-only (the lack of a new digital release really hurts) seems to indicate the prospects for further, more comprehensive reissues from the band’s catalog are dim. But hey, if nothing else this reissue gives people like me a chance to highlight one of the more underappreciated rock bands of the 1990s.