Strange Delight, Supernova
Yes fans may have the patience to sit through what follows; others, skip ahead to the songs. Listen to both of them; they're very different.
In 1982, Kendra Smith was playing bass in the Dream Syndicate (the Steve Wynn (no relation to the mogul) and Karl Precoda outfit, not the LaMonte Young thing with John Cale in the 1960s) and David Roback was playing guitar in the Rain Parade with his brother Steven Roback. That whole crowd used to hang out in some cheap end of Hollywood, CA with Green on Red, the Bangles when they were a real band, and others. David and Kendra got together, and when she quit the Dream Syndicate and he got fired from the Rain Parade, they started a band with drummer Keith Mitchell which they called Clay Allison, which they also called Smith Roback Mitchell, and finally ended up calling Opal. Smith left Opal around 1988, and later made two fine solo records, one now forgotten and the other on 4AD. She left them sort of in the lurch, and suggested a friend of hers as a replacement singer, a lugubrious oxygen-thief named Hope Sandoval. They renamed themselves and sold a lot of records to other lugubrious oxygen-thieves (full disclosure: I own all three albums, and if they reunite for another I'll buy that one too). Those records did actually have some bright spots. Bright, but not great. What was great about Opal was the weird surreal edge they had, and Smith's voice. David Roback has always been exactly as good as his collaborators.
"Supernova" is from Happy Nightmare Baby, their one proper album. It seems to be out of print now; it was on SST, but they seem to have given up their Everything in Print Forever schtick. Bit of a bummer, but they are trying to run a business for God's sake. "Strange Delight" is from a posthumous retrospective called Early Recordings, that's been out of print since God knows when.
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