I Love This Record - "The Amazing Undersea Adventures of Aqua Kitty and Friends" by Heavy Vegetable

Welcome to Bandcamp Notes, a free music discovery newsletter published by Bandcamp.

I Love This Record is a Bandcamp Notes column where we ask a fan to pick one record and tell us why they love it. It runs whenever we feel like it.

Today, Nabil Ayers on The Amazing Undersea Adventures of Aqua Kitty and Friends by Heavy Vegetable.

RIYL: Pinback, Milk Man by Deerhoof, Drive Like Jehu

In 1994, it was practically mandatory for American rock bands to be angry, sad, disenfranchised, or simply uninterested; producing detuned sludge, ironic slop, or dissonant nerd-core. As a 22-year-old drummer and record store clerk, I embraced that early ‘90s canon. Then I heard The Amazing Undersea Adventures of Aqua Kitty and Friends, the wacky, precise, and incomprehensibly musical debut album by San Diego’s Heavy Vegetable.

I loved my San Diego bands: Drive Like Jehu, No Knife, and Rocket from the Crypt. So naturally, I expected Heavy Vegetable to offer angular, dissonant walls of guitars. But the album contained nary a riff, and instead of making me bang my head, Aqua Kitty made me smile.

With 17 songs in 34 minutes and a title that takes almost as long to say as some of the songs’ runtime, the album presents as challenging. The songs don’t follow a traditional verse-chorus-verse structure; the same parts rarely happen twice. Instead, every change brings something fresh, and while I crave repetition, the increased stakes of every shift pull me in even more. Aqua Kitty is full of beautiful tension, and little release. Time signatures jump, guitars jangle and roar, and the frenetic rhythm section finishes some songs like a band falling down the stairs with the secret knowledge that everyone will land perfectly.

But it’s the juxtaposition of the vocals that makes the album unique. Rob Crow and Elea Tenuta sing with unfiltered honesty. They sound like real people, and that comes through most clearly when the vocals bounce in playful call-and-response, other times in perfect, brainy harmony, and most powerfully when they sing in unison.

Aqua Kitty is an album that jumps, that ebbs and flows, that breathes. It’s surprisingly comforting for something so musically impressive. I didn’t realize it then, but Heavy Vegetable helped get me through my rock years. They kept music challenging and exciting, showing that even within a vibrant, insular scene, there was room for something different.

Nabil Ayers is a Brooklyn based writer who publishes a Substack, hosts the Identified podcast, and releases albums by Alan Braufman, Masma Dream World, and Patricia Brennan on his label Valley of Search.

Buy The Amazing Undersea Adventures of Aqua Kitty and Friends by Heavy Vegetable here.