Springhouse

Springhouse emerged from New York in 1988 as a dream pop trio whose critical reputation never translated into the broader sales their work warranted. Mitch Friedland handled guitars and vocals, Larry Heinemann covered bass, guitars, Chapman Stick and backing vocals, and Jack Rabid—publisher of The Big Takeover—played drums and sang. The group’s songs examined romantic and environmental endurance beneath expansive, wholly original guitar layers.

Right away the musicians cultivated an Anglophilic yet singular aesthetic whose pulse drew from Buzzcocks and the Sound. Friedland routed his nylon-stringed guitar through multiple effects, producing the dense timbres associated with early-’90s shoegaze. Caroline issued the band’s two albums—1991’s forceful Land Falls and the comparatively restrained 1993 follow-up Postcards From the Arctic—both of which require full emotional engagement: at times somber, yet consistently cathartic and often inspiring.

After the second album appeared, the members chose to disband, though they reunited briefly in 1994 to support Mark Burgess and the Sons of God on a short U.S. tour. Four years afterward the original trio resumed recording and began shaping a third album.