A cavalcade of firsts: This marks the first CD release of Shrimp Boat's out-of-print first LP, first released in 1989. Shrimp Boat – aside from being one of Chicago's earliest and most influential post-rock outfits, if not exactly the first – was also the first nominally successful band for two of its members, Sam Prekop and Eric Claridge, who later went on to form the more renowned The Sea and Cake.

Brooklyn-based AUM Fidelity issued Something Grand, a box set of obscure and unreleased Shrimp Boat recordings last year, and the label has since aimed to fill in the remaining holes in the band's hard-to-find catalogue (1992's Duende and 1993's Cavale are both still offered by Bar/None). And Speckly, as the debut full-length and milestone separating (well, loosely) amateur and professional phases, is one of the more noticeable holes.

Whether deliberate or accidental, there are more than a few similarities between early Shrimp Boat and early Camper van Beethoven. The giddy surrender to flights of fancy, the playful sense of provocation, the surreal melding with the political (not to say that those are very far removed from one another to begin with), the irreverent spin on traditional folk and American pop – these are all qualities both bands have in common, and the primary differences stem from the unique personalities involved. "Seven Crows," for example, is rootin', tootin', down-home nonsense, an amusing but not necessarily contemplative send-up of the banality of country music. "Melon Song" is a chugging (its speed and energy vary from recording to recording) jam session, with a long and (yet again) nonsensical ramble about the advantages of being a melon. Later the ironic folk ballad "An Orchid Is Not a Rose" points out that, in accordance with the song's title, an orchid is not a rose, a tree, or a coal-burning power plant. An orchid is not a lot of other things, too, and it's a wonder that the song didn't stretch on for hours, though the temptation must have been great.

This aggregate nonsense could be the disc's biggest failing. While the music itself is appealing, sometimes intricate and often amusingly tongue-in-cheek, most of Shrimp Boat's lyrics on Speckly are just plain daft. This does not mean esoteric, cryptic, disjointed, or fashionably postmodern, but stupid. There is humor in the absurd, to be sure, but the absence of anything like wit or poetry causes the jokes to wear thin rather quickly.

Walter Andersons' original liner notes to Speckly, reprinted in the re-release, could aspire to the same level of fun if they weren't so appalling. They add nothing to listeners' understanding of either the band or their album. "This album looks forward and back, of [sic] a group called Shrimp Boat," runs the opening line, followed by: "Shrimp Boat investigates new limits to their song structures," "The personas of instrumentation" and "Changes happen as if spliced together in variation." And that's just from the first two short paragraphs. Is this meant to mimic the nonsense of Shrimp Boat's lyrics? Or is it the more likely case of pseudo-intellectual gibberish attempting to conceal the fact that this trend-setting band, while loads of fun, isn't the epitome of sophistication?

Speckly is indeed a delightfully good time, full of memorable and eclectic tunes, and beyond that, a worthwhile place to begin re-charting the course of these individual musicians' careers in the Chicago post-rock scene. But its well-deserved cult status seems to have caused both fans and critics to make larger claims for it that are as ridiculous as Shrimp Boat's lyrical inspiration. – Eric J. Iannelli