Conny Waves, Bettie Serves

De Artsen (“the Doctors”) was a Dutch band that put out, I think, only one album. You could almost say the circling guitar here prefigures the grunge thing, except it’s much better than that, having a Byrdsy chime & being nimble, not flatfooted. (Just for the record, in case you couldn’t tell, grunge did & does make me groan in bored exasperation.) The drums here have a really nice touch, too, a light surface rattle rather than a bottom-end plod. And the bassline anchors the song while still having lots of fun on its own.

• De Artsen, “Conny Waves with a Shell” (1989, buy Conny Waves with a Shell nowhere)

Joost Visser split off from the group and went all lo-fi. I have one of his records and it’s got a thinner sound, a more hushed mood, but you can still hear its close kinship to the Artsen stuff. FYI, the Paradiso and the Milky Way (“Melkweg”) are nightclubs in Amsterdam.

• Joost Visser, “Up to Paradiso Along the Milky Way” (1995, buy Partners in Hair used here, for now)

The rest of de Artsen kind of morphed into Bettie Serveert. I loved Palomine dearly when it came out, and liked each one of their subsequent records a little less until I finally stopped paying attention altogether. Then three or four years ago Michelle gave me a CDR full of mp3s and it included a recent Bettie Serveert record and thanks to some data glitch track “10” of the record appeared before track “1” and so track 10 was the first thing on the CDR and it was this song –

• Bettie Serveert, “White Dogs” (2003, buy Log 22 here)

– which totally blew me away. It takes you on a trip, man, and then those Velvets chords, and then those guitar solos halfway through, holy moly. And now “White Dogs” might be one of my fave songs of the past four years or so. And I’m still not sure I’ve ever listened carefully to the rest of the album.