Sewn to the Sky | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
Studio album by | ||||
Released | 1990 (LP on Disaster Records) November 17, 1995 (CD on Drag City) January 30, 1996 (LP on Drag City) 2001 (CD on Drag City) | |||
Genre | Experimental music | |||
Length | 37:58 | |||
Label | Disaster Records, Drag City[1] | |||
Smog chronology | ||||
|
Review scores | |
---|---|
Source | Rating |
AllMusic | [2] |
The Encyclopedia of Popular Music | [3] |
Pitchfork | 8.0/10[4] |
(The New) Rolling Stone Album Guide | [5] |
Sewn to the Sky is an album by Smog, released in 1990 by Disaster Records.[6] Most sources consider it to be Smog's first album, made after the release of several cassette-only recordings.[7] It was re-released by Drag City in 1995.[8] The experimental album combined home recording, substandard instruments and repetitive and noisy songwriting structures, and was an early example of the lo-fi genre.
The track "A Jar of Sand" was re-recorded for the 'Neath the Puke Tree EP in 2000.
The album was recorded in Georgia and Maryland.[9] The liner notes say that it was recorded on a "dumpster Portastudio". Spin wrote that the recording "found [Callahan] relishing the process, with little regard for form or the guitar he was still learning to really play".[10]
Trouser Press wrote, "Suffused with the vague gray atmospherics suggested by the band’s name, Sewn to the Sky is primitive and promising."[1] The New Yorker wrote that the album is a "discordant, inscrutable, and periodically frustrating collection of mostly instrumental, low-fidelity noise, and contains few hints of the lucid and tender folk music that he would be making almost thirty years later".[11]