By 1995, Dayton, Ohio already had a handful of classic indie-rock albums under its belt: The Breeders' Pod and Last Splash; Brainiac's Smack Bunny Baby and Bonsai Superstar; Guided by Voices' Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes (and the very many GBV albums before them). What a productive Midwestern city! According to my research, nothing much was happening after corporations fled and manufacturing jobs dried up — that's often when art flourishes. 

But like most of my early musical education, I didn't know about The Breeders, Brainiac or GBV back then. Instead, my introduction to the Dayton scene was a noisy dream-pop band and its 1995 debut: Morella's Forest.

There's a book to write — one that I'm desperate to author — about the alternate universe that Christian punk and indie rock created for kids like me in the '90s, who scoured the shelves of Christian bookstores for CDs and tapes that weren't Newsboys and its youth groupie ilk for something darker, stranger, heavier, faster, cooler. Labels like Takehold, Boot to Head, Burnt Toast Vinyl, Flying Tart and Velvet Blue Music were influential to a subset of a subset of discerning teenagers, perhaps limited by what their church-y parents would allow in the house, but desperate for something real. 

Tooth & Nail Records is largely responsible for this parallel world where MxPx was our NOFX, Roadside Monument was our Unwound — these were not carbon copies, but built off the underground's creative wellspring. And of T&N's '90s roster, Morella's Forest was undeniably the coolest band. They had style up and down: Velocity Girl steeped in fuzz pedals, dreamy melodies nicked from Curve and Cocteau Twins, straight-up walls of shoegaze noise… oh, and the singer was a lowkey fashion icon who could write and sing melodies like a Greenwich Village folkie. There was also not much — if anything — preachy about the band, an assumption often made about this scene. Over time, MoFo progressively turned toward straight indie-pop, but never lost touch with its chaotic roots — you could always expect a burst of fizzle in the most saccharine moments. 

I wrote some very long liner notes for a Super Deluxe vinyl reissue a few years ago. Now I've got some very short liner notes for a Morella's Forest tribute comp out June 8 called From Dayton With Love… From Others. And there's finally something to hear. 

Fine China, alumni of Tooth & Nail and currently on Velvet Blue Music, does a very Fine China version of "Tangerine Drops," arguably the best song on Ultraphonic Hiss, the best Morella's Forest album. I love that, for this cover, Rob Withem leans into Fine China's aesthetic as of late: dusky dream-pop by way of The Blue Nile and The Ocean Blue, complete with an outro that extends singer Sydney Rentz's brilliantly coy, finger-twirling melody in garlands of synth and guitar — if there's a side-long version hiding on a harddrive, I need it in my life.

By the way, Fine China's I Felt Called, which just came out in February, feels right for this nebulous area between spring and summer — majestic guitar-pop that shifts ably through three-minute puffy-shirt rockers ("Television Set"), shimmering doo-wop ("I Felt Called") and pop epics ("Desert of My Dreams") worthy of The Cure. Listen to Fine China. Listen to Morella's Forest. Pop nerds unite. —Lars Gotrich, vikingschoice.org