The term 'grunge' always inspires a shudder of self-consciousness in Chicagoist...primarily because when you're a fourteen-year-old eldest child trying to find culture in the void of early-90s Midwestern suburbia, you jump at the first "counter-culture"-ish offering you see. For many it was the commercialized version of the heavy, chugging rock dirge that had been slowly seeping out of the Northwest since the mid-1980s. While pop "remixologist" producer Andy Wallace may have coated Nirvana's Nevermind in an impenetrable shellac of radio-friendly shimmer, many of the bands who made that record's explosion possible continued to toil just under the surface veneer of the grunge phenomenon. more ›