Before there was The Music Tapes, and before the years of Neutral Milk Hotel, Julian Koster was the triumphant leader of Miss America (renamed hastily to Chocolate USA due to copyright infringement). The band produced an untold number of self-released cassettes as part of their "Chocolatey Good Smash Hit of the Month Club" (a "way-fun mail club") as well as a full-length, All Jets Are Gonna Fall Today, which was given a CD release by Hoboken-based Bar/None Records (Of Montreal's first label). The album--which also featured band members Keith Block (drums) and Liza Wakeman (violin), as well as an assortment of supporting players--was a delirious mixture of sophomoric humor, sophisticated humor, happy songs filled with suicidal imagery, early-90's funk, scat singing, subliminal messages, and random nonsense songs that are strangely moving. Listening to it fifteen years on, it's striking how innocent it all is; even though little of it sounds like The Music Tapes, the impish spirit is Julian's. Threaded throughout the album are very personal cassette correspondences sent from an elderly New Yorker named Marie Caso, who relates to Julian her likes and dislikes, and an elaborate explanation for why she never buys clothing for men. It brings an unexpectedly nostalgic tone to the record, and unites what is otherwise an album of dramatically disparate styles.

By the band's second release, Smoke Machine, Chocolate USA seems revamped, refocused, and particularly intense. The tone of Smoke Machine is one of adolescent, outcast angst, from the nihilistic miseries of "Ugly Girl" to "The Boy Who Stuck His Head in the Dryer (and Whirl'd Round 'n' Round)." Both songs involve kids who have had it with the banalities/cruelties of life, and are ready to leap out of their skins to escape their current state of existence. There's also quite a bit about cows and smoke machines. Julian seemed determined to make a more cohesive album than his last, and he succeeded, but the sound is also fuzzier, louder, and more cathartic. He seems genuinely pissed when he realizes, "There is no Santa Claus/How could you lie to me?" If the band is tighter and the result more compulsively imaginative, it might be because of the environment: part of Smoke Machine was recorded at 210 Sunset Avenue in Athens, Georgia, an address so pivotal to the Elephant 6 legacy that the Olivia Tremor Control even sang about it ("Long live the life we led at 210" is a lyric from "Courtyard"); Julian also recruited Olivias Bill Doss and Eric Harris into the band, and in the finale of "Bookbag" couldn't resist screaming out, "Elephant Six!" Within a few years Julian would be recording with Neutral Milk Hotel. His own songwriting poured into The Music Tapes, which took another musical approach altogether: stitching together elaborate radio-drama fantasias, equal parts Phantom Tollbooth, TV holiday specials for children, and Superman serials, while paring down his songs to something simpler and decidedly therapeutic. The singing saw became his most prominent instrument.

While we await the release of two new Music Tapes album in the (hopefully) near future, here's a look to the past, with four samples from the Chocolate USA albums.

From All Jets Are Gonna Fall Today:
All Jets Are Gonna Fall Today
The Shower Song

From Smoke Machine:
Bookbag
Ugly Girl