Something Grand by Shrimp Boat

[AUM028/29/30]

Album One (1986–1988) : tracks 1–17
Album Two (1989–1992) : tracks 18–34
Album Three (1992–1993) : tracks 35–51


=Shrimp Boat=

Sam Prekop: vocals, guitar, bass
Ian Schneller: guitar, vocals, drums
David Kroll: bass, banjo, tenor sax
Eric Claridge: drums, bass
Brad Wood: drums, soprano sax


Shrimp Boat was a phenomenal band that made music out of Chicago from the mid ‘80s clear through to 1993. Taking inspiration from bluegrass, jazz, country, rock ‘n’ roll and their own collective gung-ho, their ability to voluminously manifest new song form from the air around them left those exposed awestruck. Four albums were released during the group's lifetime: great & beautiful works all, though they represent not even half of what SB created..

The group recorded practically every time they performed; every new composition. Something Grand manifests a comprehensive distillation of Shrimp Boat's essence, drawn from well over 400 hours of PREVIOUSLY unreleased tapes: 16-tracks made at Idful Music studio, 4-tracks made at their loft on Archer Avenue, live performances, and radio broadcasts. Presented as three distinct albums / successive time periods, Something Grand chronicles the growth of Shrimp Boat from four friends making sounds & songs in the vacuum of their own universe into an utterly singular musical diamond.

"4 Stars / Underground Album of the Month. Artfully mixing pop, jazz and old-time folk music into something singularly enchanting, Something Grand reveals a band not so much ahead of the herd as way beyond it." –Andrew Carden, MOJO

"5 Stars. Imagine The Band crossed with Archie Shepp, crossed with Flatt & Scruggs and Hank Williams Sr., crossed with Mark Twain and Henry David Thoreau, crossed with a Zen clown.. and then you're getting close. A magical miscegenation, prairie-wide and infinitely enduring.

"Worth its own weight in Ming period porcelain, Something Grand is less a box set and more a time capsule, taking us to a time and place we never knew before, bringing it to life and filling us with knowledge and wonder. It will put a song on your lips; a smile on your face. Just what the doctor ordered." –Chris May, All About Jazz

Pitchfork rating: 8.0

"Hyperbole runs thickly through the critical landscape, but Shrimp Boat can shoulder any accolade you would care bestow upon them. They lived this music and loved it, and these are sounds that things like commerce and age can't touch." –Jason Dungan, Dusted

"To have so much by them become available now is thoroughly unexpected and fantastically satisfying." –Chris Toenes, PopMatters

"Something Grand is manna, obsessively and lovingly circumscribed manna, from heaven." –Eric Babcock, No Depression

"The legendary Chicago band Shrimp Boat, whose unique fusion of jazz, bluegrass, folk, rock and just about everything in between made it a pioneering touchstone of the Chicago 90s music scene. Something Grand is a beautifully packaged boxed set which documents each stage of the idiosyncratic group's evolution, starting with home-recorded gems from 1986 and ending with material from 1993, just as the band was dissolving. .. If the group formed today they'd probably be hailed as geniuses."
-Joshua Klein, Chicago Tribune

"The Chicago post-rock scene of the Nineties - the pneumatic rhapsodies of Tortoise, the chamber pop of The Sea and Cake, the tone poetry of Gastr del Sol - starts here, with the twisted-country and art-garage games of local legends Shrimp Boat. The group made three albums but also this multi-disc set of work tapes ranging from arch minstrelsy to exultantly cerebral pop - Pere Ubu high on the haystack mysticism of Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music." –David Fricke, Rolling Stone

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