Flower Plower

A 1991 CD reissue of two self-released cassettes that originally came out in 1987 and 1988, Flower Plower is the Poster Children's earliest and roughest material. The first four tracks, the entirety of the Flower Plower cassette, were recorded by Steve Albini just after the dissolution of Big Black, and they have that same startling immediacy. However, even at this very early stage, flashes of the Poster Children's characteristic pop sense shine through the punky roar. The 11-track Toreador Squat album, from 1988, is even more comparable to later albums like DDD. The galloping opener "Hollywood," a sparkling, Buzzcocks-like punk-pop song, is prime Poster Children, and the rest of the Iain Burgess-produced album is similarly catchy. Hüsker Dü is another obvious antecedent ("Modern Art" could be a Zen Arcade outtake), and "Question" sounds like the Minutemen covering the Gang of Four. Although the various strains in the Poster Children's music aren't quite unified yet and therefore this early material sounds a bit derivative, it's also easy to hear how the group got from these tentative beginnings to the glories of Daisychain Reaction and RTFM.