Review Revue: Circle Seven - Suburban Hope

Welcome to Review Revue, where every Thursday I dig through the KEXP stacks to share DJ reviews and comments written on the covers of LPs (and occasionally CDs) in the ’80s and ’90s, when the station was called KCMU, the DJs were volunteers, and people shared their opinions on little white labels instead of the internet.

I went down a fun little rabbithole for this week's installment, mostly thanks to someone having done my work for me about a year ago. First, I found this blog post by a local guy named Jeff who found this very EP at a record swap and decided to track down Randy Pepprock, the singer and guitar player, and interview him by email. It turns out Randy was originally from Missoula, where he started what some have called "Montana's first punk band." They recorded an album with Randy's high school buddy Steve Albini (!) — an album that Jeff Ament recently saw fit to re-release to a wider public. What a world! (And isn't Missoula the best?)

Circle Seven was the band Randy and bassist Sabina Miller formed upon moving to Seattle. The KCMU crowd may not have been unified in loving it, but someone must have been a fan to put it in heavy rotation. (I'm definitely digging it, for what it's worth.) It appears Randy has moved back to Missoula some time in the past thirty-odd years, where he plays with a band called Letters to Luci and sells architectural miniatures for model railroaders. Sounds like a pretty damn great existence to me.