Your complete quixotic notion of different rock as a business prospect was sputtering, too. Kurt Cobain had died the earlier April, however the rock charts had been nonetheless peppered with bands that had credible ties to the underground. Inside a yr, Dwell’s Throwing Copper would develop into the most important rock album in America, serving to to usher within the “post-grunge” period, when the majors stopped pretending to care about ingenuity and centered as an alternative on signing more and more light carbon copies of Pearl Jam. The symbolism of Pondering Fellers’ opening slot on the Dwell’s 1995 tour is nearly too excellent: The freaks get chased offstage and the professionals take over.
Pondering Fellers toured for one more yr, parted with Matador, made one other album, 1996’s equally dazzling I Hope It Lands, and stepped again from the band as a profession pursuit. They nonetheless performed the occasional present and labored sporadically for years on their 2001 swan track, whose very title, Bob Dinners and Larry Noodles Current Tubby Turdner’s Celeb Avalanche, is sufficient to sign the retreat of no matter aspirations to rock stardom they as soon as held. It’s extra elegiac than you may anticipate from the identify: “91 Dodge Van,” titled after their outdated tour chariot, opens with autumnal guitars and Eickelberg sighing the traces “Wanting again over our days, I do know we’ve received/Generally it looks like that’s erased by shifting on.” It additionally has a track known as “Boob Feeler.”
However we’re getting forward of ourselves. There’s nonetheless one track on Strangers From the Universe to debate, one closing daydream earlier than actual life units in. It’s known as “Noble Experiment,” it closes the album, and it’s the one Pondering Fellers Union Native 282 track you’ll ever hear performed round a campfire or carried out by the kinds of indie rock stars the Fellers by no means turned. The phrases had been written by Davies and delivered by Eickelberg, with the opposite Fellers becoming a member of in concord because the verses go by. “If the unhappiness of life makes you drained,” it begins, “and the failures of man make you sigh/You possibly can look to the time quickly arriving/When this noble experiment winds down and calls it a day.”
“Noble Experiment,” a waltz-time lullaby for humanity’s extinction, brings Strangers From the Universe’s fixation on finality into clear focus, simply because the album itself winds down. The Fellers obtain this destiny with attribute jubilation: a possibility to depart merciless routine behind and be reborn as sparrows chattering within the treetops or weeds busting up by way of outdated sidewalks. It could be disingenuous to recommend that Pondering Fellers Union Native 282 skilled a equally transformative rebirth after calling it a day, that the band obtained the sort of widespread recognition in loss of life that had eluded it in life. They’re not Pavement, and even Duster. There have been well-received reissues—the 2022 urgent of Strangers From the Universe offered out rapidly—however they continue to be a band for the freaks. Nonetheless, the information reside on, just like the timber in “Lots of of Years” that outlast the squabbling individuals, monuments to chance but unexplored. Or like the guts in “The Operation,” nonetheless pumping even because the physique passes away.
