Music Review // Lucy Loves Schroeder "Lucy Is a Band"

https://open.spotify.com/album/3qExVkiyUibijY1eCZbjIX //

Sometimes I feel like there's this spot of music from the year 2000 up until everything became streaming that people tend to forget about.  It's this mix of music which was perhaps made popular via Napster before Lars Ulrich shut that down and music which was released in a physical format and has yet to really become part of this digital revolution.   While I feel like "Lucy Is a Band" is not easy to find in a digital way (I had to resort to Spotify, ugh) I also feel like since this album has existed for twenty years (whoa!) it should have one of those special record pressings to reflect as such.

Lucy Loves Schroeder originally came to me in the form of a compact disc, back when I first began writing about music and I instantly fell in love with it.   In the year 2000 specifically there weren't a whole lot of women being played on the alternative rock radio station.   Hole was seemingly ending and No Doubt was still there, but a lot of the songs were from years past.  I found that a lot of bands I listened to came not only from CDs being sent to me to review but from going to lives shows and also just listening to soundtracks.

Though I'm not sure the exact release dates for all of them, some of the more important soundtracks which I think helped shape me and could play a role on this album include movies like "10 Things I Hate About You", "Clueless" and "Angus".   Obvious influences in terms of bands are Dance Hall Crashers, The Muffs, Discount and even The Mr. T Experience.   Unless you really lived in your teenage or later years in the year 2000 (I was twenty years old) I don't think you got the full effect or have the proper memories of what it was like with bands like Green Day taking over the radio and music just being fuzzy, loud and punk.

Even if you feel like you could name a handful of bands that currently sound like Lucy Loves Schroeder, as the scope of music has seemingly been shattered in recent years, this album is not only important because of how it sounds but because of how little access it felt like there was to music like this when it came out.   You couldn't just search tags on Bandcamp and stumble upon this one based on other artists you liked.  It was really something that I felt fortunate to be a part of at the time and something like that might never happen again.

It's tough for me to think that this album came out twenty years ago.   That's half of my life.  There are people out there who would enjoy this album that aren't even that old yet.    And yet, at the same time, if you happened to put this album on now and weren't aware of what it was it doesn't sound like it's twenty years old.  This could easily still be an album released in the year 2020 and in some ways, not to discredit those making music now but I do wish there was music that was this great being released still.   This seems like one of those rare finds that if you didn't know about it at the time you could go your whole life without ever hearing it and that would just be such a huge shame.