Echo Troopers - They Said I Shouldn't Care, But I Did (1997)
Ehm..what to say about Echo Troopers..what to say.. Well, Echo Troopers is a pre-Stuntbike solo-project by Truls Haugland released on his brother Joakim's label Smalltown Supersound. This was back when the label released lo-fi indiepop gems like this. This sounds alot like, and is more than likely inspired by, Lou Barlow's bedroom projects both under his own name and with Sentridoh. That is; if his solomaterial were any good. This is a bit poppier than Barlow's noisy demos and whatnot; Haugland would refine his sound in Stuntbike, but just barely.
The cover package is a dream for collectors, a spiral pad(!) with a beautiful cover shot. The first page has an Axel Jensen quote, and the following pages some information about the record and Smalltown Supersound releases. Who knew they had released two cassettes before this record. Echo Troopers also released a split 7" with Slowburn and had tracks on collections by both Apartment and Krank Records. They Said I Shouldn't.. is filled with short and sweet songs and is, as the Slowburn-split, curiously enough still available from Norwegian mailorder Popopdrops.
I knew they had two earlier cassettes, but strangely I didn't know about this release. I remember playing a split gig with Echo Troopers in 1995. The line-up was then Truls Haugland on bass (and maybe some vocals?), Morgan (Truls' bandmate from The Specimen) on guitar and vocals (SCREAMS!) and none other than Joakim Haugland himself on drums. This is probably the only time Joakim ever played a gig! The music was very far from Lou Barlow, it was pretty intense and minimalistic and noisy. Not much pop. Not so long after, maybe half a year, Truls made the first Echo Troopers cassette on his four-track, by then a solo project, and more like this Lou Barlow you mention, including a nice cover version of Judas Priest's Rocka Rolla. My band was called Epidemic Spit, was not good... But we had a drum machine, and Echo Troopers had Joakim, so we dubbed the evening "the battle of the drummers". This was in the days when Flekkefjord had the "legendary" rock club Hvelvet.
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