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In a nutshell: two pop genius songwriters, Grant Hart and Bob Mould, front super-influential trio. They release consistently excellent and increasingly powerful and melodic albums at a shockingly fast pace through the mid-80s (two in 1985!), in part fuelled by their friendly rivalry with The Minutemen (The Minutemen's double-album masterpiece Double Nickels on the Dime was a response to Husker Du's similarly sprawling Zen Arcade), in rather larger part by the jockeying for songwriting primacy between Hart and Mould, and in not-inconsiderable part by truckloads of speed. Inevitably, the band get mired in drugs and split up acrimoniously after producing some of the best-regarded albums of America's amazingly fertile punk rock 80s. Hart and Mould go on to mostly middling solo careers (notable exception: the marvellous Copper Blue by Mould's next band Sugar).
The general critical consensus, I think, is that Zen Arcade, New Day Rising and Warehouse: Songs and Stories are their finest works. Since two of those are, rather un-punk-rockly, double albums, that's a lot of material for someone with a passing interest in the band to get through. They're all excellent in their own ways, but I'd recommend New Day Rising purely for the reason that it's the single album, although my own personal preference is for Warehouse. It's a pretty good introduction to the contrasts between Hart and Mould's approach to songwriting, and strikes a nice balance between the Du's poles of screaming noise and trad songcraft.
I should say, though, that much as I like them, their early- to mid-period records were pretty much horribly produced and can seem offputtingly tinny on first listen. In fact, they don't get much less tinny and offputting on the second or third listen, either, but... persevere. They're worth it. The production gets better as their career progresses, but we're certainly not talking ear-caresses.
I dunno where you got the "teen angst" thing from, Strukut-käto, but they've never seemed overly teen-angsty to me. Their lyrics can be personal, I guess, but Husker Du aren't even in the same postcode as the kind of furiously adolescent emo navel-gazing and hair-pulling I normally associate "teen angst" bands with.
And as far as "hardcore punk" goes, weeeelllll... Depends what you mean by hardcore, and what you mean by punk. They were certainly hardcore in that they were a super-tight band that, like, rocked really hard, dude, and punk in that most of their finest work appeared on the independent SST label, and hardcore punk in that early work like the aptly-named Land Speed Record is a thrashy fuck-you assault on the senses, but I wouldn't label them a hardcore punk band. Their roots were certainly in the punk movement, and they were broad-definition punk-rock in that, musically, they more or less did what they wanted (including a cover of the Byrd's "Eight Miles High") but as they progressed as a band they developed more into a just plain brilliant rock band.
With ropey production.
Anyway, that's enough from me. Hopefully someone else will be along shortly to tell you that I'm totally wrong. |
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