6. Vampire On Titus (1993)

GBV’s first album to fully embrace lo-fi as an aesthetic and not just a necessity is also the album where the band takes this genre to its most abrasive extremes. If ears could squint, that’s what they’d have to do to suss out some of these vocal melodies. But like the aural equivalent of a Magic Eye poster, once you hear them, they are etched onto your cerebral cortex forever. Songs like opener “Wished I Was A Giant” are an assault on eardrums while songs like “Superior Sector Janitor X” barely exist at all. But the overall effect created by Vampire On Titus is that of being buried, covered in mud and tape hiss, yet able to recognize carefully constructed melodic structures through the muck. It’s a challenging listen, but one that goes so far to the extreme that the only way for the band to go from there is into the light. And that incremental peeling away of the layers of noise on each successive release would be what made GBV’s classic mid-’90s run of albums so compelling.