Six Finger Satellite - The Pigeon Is The Most Popular Bird (2EP) - 45RPM Loser Edition Red/Blue Vinyl

In 1993, while Sub Pop was still riding the aftershocks of grunge, Providence’s Six Finger Satellite slipped out a debut that didn’t so much fit the times as carve its own crooked lane. The Pigeon Is The Most Popular Bird is a wiry, cantankerous thing, a noise rock record that treats tension like oxygen. You can hear the Northeast basement shows and the busted PAs in the way these songs scrape and surge. It is lean, confrontational and strangely funny, the kind of album that turns repetition into hypnosis and feedback into punctuation.

What grabs you first is the shape of the sound. Guitars don’t just chug here, they knife through space, thin and serrated, leaving plenty of air around the rhythm section. The drums feel close to the kit, dry and insistent, with a pulse that keeps threatening to tumble over itself then snaps back into line at the last second. Over the top, J. Ryan yelps and barks and talks like a man arguing with a flickering neon sign. It has that classic early 90s underground bite, but it never settles into anything cosy. Even in its most direct moments, there’s an edge of wrongness that keeps you leaning forward.

People often talk about Six Finger Satellite’s later pivot to synths and drum machines on Severe Exposure in 1995, which helped seed the dance-punk thing that would explode a few years later. That makes this debut a crucial counterpoint. The Pigeon Is The Most Popular Bird is the band at their most guitar-sick and post-hardcore bristly, yet you can sense the future creeping in. Patterns lock in and repeat until they stop feeling rock at all, more like a machine thrumming in a factory at 3 am. John MacLean’s guitar, long before he became The Juan MacLean, already has that clipped, percussive logic that would pair so neatly with electronics down the track.

The record also carries that Sub Pop stamp of independence without sounding remotely Seattle. It feels Rhode Island to the core, closer in spirit to the New England oddballs and noise lifers who prized stubborn ideas over trends. That sense of locality matters. Six Finger Satellite were part of a small but lively Providence scene that would later nurture its own set of boundary pushers. You can draw lines from this album to the way a lot of East Coast bands learned to be both tight and antagonistic, to find groove not in slickness but in a kind of deliberate friction.

If you found your way here via LCD Soundsystem or DFA and want a history lesson that actually snarls, this is a fine place to start. James Murphy worked with Six Finger Satellite in the mid to late 90s and has been open about their influence, and you can feel the DNA. The choke-hold rhythms, the dry humour, the refusal to sweeten the mix, it is all here. What surprises, listening back, is how well it sits next to the era’s bigger names without borrowing their shapes. Fans of The Jesus Lizard or Shellac will recognise the economy and spite, but SFS sound more alien, less bluesy, more fascinated with repetition as a weapon.

On vinyl the record blooms. That space between the instruments is the whole show, and The Pigeon Is The Most Popular Bird vinyl lets the cymbals hiss and the guitars needle without turning into mush. If you shop for Six Finger Satellite vinyl, keep an eye out for clean Sub Pop pressings, because the dynamics do matter. We get people in our Melbourne record store who stumble on this after flipping through Nirvana and Mudhoney, then end up swearing it is their favourite Sub Pop artefact of the early 90s. Hard to argue. It is a classic of a very specific kind, prickly and deeply replayable.

For collectors, it also makes a tidy gateway drug. Once you are in, you start hunting the rest, then suddenly you are asking where to buy Six Finger Satellite records online or whether any Australian distributor can source old Sub Pop stock. There are still Six Finger Satellite albums on vinyl kicking around if you are patient, and the chase is half the fun. If you shop for vinyl records Australia wide, don’t skip the Providence section, because this one pops up less often than it should.

Three decades on, the album hasn’t softened. It still sounds like a band pushing against the walls of a small room, trying to find air in the racket. There is humour in the title, sure, but there is also a dare. Put it on, turn it up, and let it poke holes in your neat ideas about 90s indie rock. The Pigeon Is The Most Popular Bird isn’t an artefact, it is a live wire, and it still bites.