It’s 1995 and Drive Like Jehu are playing CBGB in New York City. Guitarist John Reis unfurls the riff to Sinews as some people in the crowd talk over him. To his left, looking like Thurston Moore’s little brother with his long arms emerging from an oversized T-shirt, Rick Froberg stands almost completely still, adding piercing notes to the squall. Almost 30 years later, while watching a VHS rip of the show on YouTube, it is still possible to feel the power of the moment, knowing that the blowhards in front of the stage are about to have their heads caved in by noise.
Much like Moore and Lee Ranaldo in Sonic Youth, Froberg and Reis made guitar music that resembled a smashed mirror being glued back together, its pieces slotting into place along with bloody fingerprints. “It’s no holds barred,” Jimmy Eat World’s Jim Adkins once told Louder of their interplay. “It challenges you with dissonance and forces you to really reckon with what’s being presented.”
