Canadian alt-rock—belovedly referred to by its believers as CanRock—had a nice, long moment in the 1990s, one whose independent spirit and major-label attention proved a lasting influence on a current crop of bands and music-media types who came of age with the Treble Chargers and the Lens and the Limblifters, to name just a very few. Ryan Dahle got to soak it up two-fold as a member of both the latter as well as Age of Electric, and now he gets to double down on it again: Toronto label We Are Busy Bodies will re-release Limblifter’s self-titled 1996 debut—one that was recorded after only ten band practices and which spawned multiple Canadian and American rock-radio hits—on vinyl for the first time today (July 10). Singer and guitarist Ryan Dahle revisits the album, track by track. below.

1. “Vicious”

“Behaviour is contagious” sums up this song and possibly the album. It was me discovering how to write from the perspective of others. Engaging your sympathy so heavily in order to see and hear through another person, you can shape-shift into that person. It’s a dangerous skill that can backfire. A large portion of this record was written from the perspective of my girlfriend at the time. Her state of mind is well documented throughout my writing. The title “Vicious” is stolen from Lou Reed’s Transformer. I like borrowing from him, he’s straight clever.

2. “Cordova”

This song was almost called “Cordoba on Cordova.” As in a Chrysler Cordoba and Cordova Street in Vancouver that my brother Kurt, the drummer, lived on. The video is us and our girlfriends at the time running around Gastown in the rain. There was a plot and we were running around trying to find it was the joke. I wrote the song about the same girlfriend as “Vicous.” She must have had some slight bondage tendencies that I was attempting to accommodate, but it just didn’t turn out to be my thing. This is maybe the quickest song I’ve ever written. It wrote itself in her basement apartment with five-and-a-half-foot ceilings.

3. “Tinfoil”

A self-preservation song. It’s about bad chemistry between people and how if individuals are predisposed to having mental health issues, combinations of people can speed up the process of them falling apart. This was happening with this girl who was the inspiration for most of this record. There is a thread of summer and happiness in this song as well. Ian [Somers, bass] wrote part of the verse progressions, and Kurt recommended that the pre-chorus and chorus include the F chord which made it a four note chromatic run, like “Dazed and Confused.” Kurt sang this one.

[youtune id=”Bzyh7qw-31s”]

4. “Cellophane”

These songs all tie together, I could never accomplish this now. Most of these songs would start with music that I would bring in or write on the spot, and we would record guitar, drums, and bass onto a four track. I would mix that out to two tracks, leaving two tracks for vocals, then I’d sing them. Kurt would then listen, and the ones that he connected with, or that we felt he could sing better, he would redo or double me on. I wasn’t a lead singer before this, and Kurt has always been a natural singer and was much better at it, but both him and Ian encouraged me to sing most of the songs on the record. This one is Kurt singing. It’s probably my favourite vocal performance on the record. The sound of this one and “Cordova” are different from the rest of the record. We recorded them later in Vancouver in a day and Ian was MIA by that time, so I played bass on them.

5. “Screwed It Up”

We could never get the mix of this right on the album recording. We mastered the record with the great Bob Ludwig in Portland, Maine. He suggested we remix it. Jim Rondinelli, who mixed the album, and Peter Lubin, our Mercury records A&R man, and I drove back into NYC the next morning and re-mixed it. It was the most added song at rock radio in the U.S. for a couple weeks, before politics at the record label with Ed Ekstine and Peter Lubin being replaced by Danny Goldberg caused Mercury to pull the plug on our record. Peter Lubin saved us by not accepting his departure deal unless he could take the rights of the records for his bands with him.

6. “I Wonder If…”

Again channeling my girlfriend who was angry times ten. Lyrically, I disagree with the sentiment of every line of this song and somehow that’s what made it fun to sing. The psycho last line “I wonder if I could kill all of them?” may be a bit too provocative for the sake of it, but I suppose all humans have thoughts like this at some point.

7. “Seven”

[Instrumental]

8. “Do I Feel Involved?”

The production of this is goofy, but it does serve the purpose of keeping the record from being monosyllabic. It’s an interesting combination of textures that my friend Chris Bryant conjured up for us. At the time we called it ‘programming’ the same way we called videos ‘promos.’ I like the ideas in the lyrics, especially about how people who start as loners and rebels end up being in a bike gangs. We were listening to a lot of the Hoodoo Gurus at the time. It’s a “What’s My Scene” sort of an idea.

9. “Dominant Monkey”

We were so tired of fighting rednecks and oil riggers and cowboys in the bars of the Canadian prairies with our other band, Age of Electric. We would never start a conflict but we learned how to end them quickly because it was survival for us. It was always scary. If it wasn’t for our bassist John Kerns, we’d all be dead.

10. “Beard Of Bees”

Someone brought it up recently that this song was thought to be about oral sex. The “just to see your flower open” line, if taken literally, could be. But I also remember having this image of a bee tamer in my head with bees in the shape of a beard. Kurt sang this. He kept bringing this song up, it was an old Age of Electric song that never made it to any albums and he thought it fit with the rest of the songs on this record.

11. “Death Defier”

Title and idea is another straight up borrowage from the Hoodoo Gurus with the images that tie to the rest of the record. Definitely coming off long T.Rex and Replacements obsessions.

12. “Round The ‘2’”

Another one about the girl that I was living in fear with. Kurt is singing this one, and the vocal kinda makes the song.

13. “Opinata”

I wasn’t confident about this song and you can hear Ian Somers, the bass player, scream at me at the end of the track saying “Fuck off Ryan, its a fuckin’ wicked song,” which was his angry way of being supportive. It’s about not being able hold back your opinion. The chorus happens three times, every time in a different key, and I like that about it!