Love Child (Never Meant To Be)

Bandcamp has a feature on Sonic Youth and Beat Happening contemporaries, Love Child. John Morrison, writing about the short-lived group, notes that their sound, while not pop-punk as we think of it, nevertheless was both pop and punk. Particularly on their early 7” singles, they have a shambling, amateurish sound that is as winsome as it is lo-fi. Morrison doesn’t mention how the band feels adjacent to the burgeoning riot grrl scene from the early nineties when Rebecca Odes is on vocals. Odes started playing bass after a relationship relentlessly exposed her to audio gear.

“I got so sick of listening to my then-boyfriend talk about distortion pedals that I was like, ‘I have to figure out how to make this my own thing.’”

When Odes sings about a guy in “He’s So Sensitive,” she sounds like a girl who has just come from the riot where she fell in love with a neo boy who is the exact opposite of her last boyfriend.

On the whole, Love Child comes across as a band that should have been on K Records, with their mix of punk, noise and twee in equal measure. They have a diamond in the rough feel about them that marries perfectly with a rerelease of their compiled works entitled Never Meant To Be (dig the Supremes reference). It’s an indie pop crate digger's dream come true.