Artist:     Soul Asylum

Album:     While You Were Out, & Clam Dip and Other Delights

Label:     Omnivore Recordings

Release Date:     1.18.19

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Before jumping to the big leagues with A&M Records and later finding multi-platinum success with Columbia, Soul Asylum had unfinished business with its plucky local imprint, Twin Tone Records. Their third release of 1986, While You Were Out followed the grungy Minneapolis punks’ squirrely second album Made to be Broken and a cassette-only rarities curiosity in Time’s Incinerator with a fistful of unkempt, angst-fueled anthems for the disenfranchised.

Celebrated in an expansive Omnivore Records’ reissue, its crusty walls plastered with old photos and flyers and a mash note from Superchunk’s Jon Wurster waxing nostalgic about the record’s youthful hold over him, While You Were Out was Soul Asylum captured in the wild. With a penchant for arty mischief, their songs were more witty, poignant, biting and angry than ever, even as their melodic sensibilities were coming into greater focus. Dragged from the swirling, intoxicating murk of “Freaks” in a daze, they’re more sharply etched in the irresistibly hooky “No Man’s Land” and the rising tide of a stirring “Closer to the Stars,” while a mean “Judge” churns and punishes with an iron fist. Emitting a ferocious roar, “Never Too Soon” and “Miracle Mile” warned against harboring any notion that Soul Asylum had gone soft, although the mournful country dirge “Passing Sad Daydream” shed a few tears.

Succeeding Omnivore’s equally impressive re-packaging of Say What You Will … Everything Can Happen and Made to be Broken, this set welds 1989’s free-for-all EP Clam Dip and Other Delights to the original album’s iron structure. An orphanage of misfit tracks such as the bulldozing “Just Plain Evil,” the awkward and weird “Artificial Heart” and the frenzied punk-funk workout “Take it to the Root,” this odds-and-sods set also boasts “P-9,” a deliriously catchy merry-go-round of spirited, shaggy Americana. Never-before-heard extras such as a raucous “Saving Grace” and a yearning, bittersweet “Forever and a Day” are dug out of the lost-and-found box and demand an audience. What a way for Soul Asylum to say goodbye to the indie-rock underground. The little brothers of Husker Du and The Replacements were, indeed, growing up without selling out.

—Peter Lindblad