January 17th 2010. The Agrarians appear live on the radio. Student radio station WMUC in Maryland, of course, as there are few bands as determinedly underground as The Agrarians. There also few bands as prolific as The Agrarians either and I think I've long since run out of the fingers necessary to count up their releases.
For once - barring the batch of remixes at the end of the album - the sound quality is good enough to allow the weird enormity of this band to shine through with Matt Perzinski's words lurching left and right like a shoplifter spoilt for choice in WalMart. There are times when he sounds like he has composed a parody of sixties' drug addled folksters ("The Wolfpack Sentimentality Brigades") and times when he sounds like he is demoing a prog-rock song ("New Holy Verse"). Like that proverbial Greenwich Village folk song salesman, he's got songs about everything even stuff you hadn't thought there would be a song about. By the way, "Infinite Patience" sounds almost normal. That caught me by surprise.
That's the charm of The Agrarians. They make little sense in a world where musical success is directly related to conformity. I like to take the time and listen to their music in the vain hope that I'll understand what they are getting at. I'm not sure I ever will but I am compelled to try. As usual with this band, the cover art suggests the kind of forced normality that can only come with a basement full of guns.