Six Finger Satellite – The Pigeon Is The Most Popular Bird (Sub Pop) 1993
In 1993 I was living in Butt Fuck, North Queensland. It was a fucking shit of a place to live. Hot and humid and full of rednecks. In those pre-internets days there was this store in Sydney called Phantom Records which every six months ran an auction of their records called “From the Vaults” or something like that. The deal was that you would get this catalogue and then you had to post in your maximum bids for particular records. It was a huge catalogue and one of my mates was big into this (he was a Prince obsessive and needed to get every white label German 12-inch he could find). I obsessed over that catalogue for a few weeks and decided to put in some super low bid on a press copy of this record and oddly enough I won it. Now when I bid on this I knew of Six Finger Satellite as this new band from Providence, Rhode Island that had just been signed to Sub Pop. I was a bit of a label whore at the time and expected any signing on Sub Pop to be like the grunge of Nirvana, Mudhoney or Tad and at the very worst like Red Kross or the Meatmen. What The Pigeon is The Most Popular Bird actually sounds like is some melding of Post Punk, No Wave, Sonic Youth tunings, Shudder to Think and midwestern hardcore. Even to this day their debut sounds like nothing else out there. It may have been one of the oddest things Sub Pop released until Wolf Eyes’ Burned Mind reset that bar. Over the years Six Finger Satellite went through a stack of line-up changes and only produced four proper albums and an album of offcuts that Load released a few years ago. All of those records are pretty fucking essential. This is still my favourite though. This record did more to expand my musical horizons than just about anything else. They’ve recently reformed after disbanding for ten years and I’m kind of keen to hear what there up to now.
Ducks Battle Satan 
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