Sarge - The Glass Intact

Artist: Sarge Title: The Glass Intact Catalog#: Mud-CD-028 Price: $10.00 Also available on LP for $7.50	Tracks on this CD:
	Stall
	A Torch
	Beguiling
	Charms and Feigns
	Homewrecker
	Half As Far
	I Took You Driving
	Fast Girls
	The First Morning
	Put In the Reel
	To Keep You Trained

other Sarge releases

Elizabeth Elmore-Vocals, Guitar
Chad Romanski-Drums
Sue Roth-Guitar
Derek Niedringhaus-Bass (live)

1998 was a breakthrough year for Sarge. The band's second CD, The Glass Intact, received rave reviews in SPIN, Salon, The Village Voice, and the band toured coast-to-coast from their base in Champiagn-Urbana, Illinois. Sarge closed out the latter half of 1998 by being named "Hot Band" in Rolling Stone and one of "98 for '98" in SPIN. They will begin 1999 with another two-month road trip. And now a little history… Rachel Switzky once played bass with local Champaign-Urbana legends Corndolly. Elizabeth Elmore wrote great songs. They passed a demo tape to their neighbor, Mud/Parasol impresario Geoff Merritt. He said go. Sarge's debut, Charcoal, was recorded cheap and fast, with assistance from Hum co-producer Mark Rubel. Enthusiasm was high and expectations were measured. And then…press went wild. Greil Marcus, writing in Art Forum, listed Charcoal in his Real Life Rock Top 10. Boston Phoenix claimed Charcoal was "…easily the most impressive debut of 1996." CMJ Monthly asked the band to write a wrap-up of the local C-U entertainment scene for the back pages of a 1996 issue.

Sarge, to their credit, didn't let the laudatory press invade their collective head. The band, including drummer Chad Romanski, jumped in a beat-up van, and drove around the whole country to play basement shows and underground all-ages clubs populated by the punk and indie kids. Elizabeth's sweet voice, singing stinging lyrics, over crunchy guitar chords and off-beat arrangements caught everyone's attention. College radio interest followed and the band slowly graduated to playing more traditional clubs for the slightly older "kids", in addition to all ages shows. This progression led to the recording of The Glass Intact.

The band hired Chicago producer Matt Allison and spent the end of December 1997 recording eleven songs- ten originals and one written by friend/roommate/side-project-band-mate Joe Ziemba, from Wolfie. The sound of The Glass Intact IS Sarge. Maybe more sonically full than Charcoal. Maybe a little more rock. That's called natural growth. Highlights abound including the beguiling "Beguiling", "I Took You Driving", and the closest thing to a Sarge ballad, "Half As Far."

In the winter of 1998, Chicago-based guitarist Sue Roth permanently joined the band and founding member Rachel Switzky took her leave. Elizabeth is currently collecting life experiences to create Sarge's third album.

Consumer Guide
by Robert Christgau
Village Voice May 27-June 2

SARGE: The Glass Intact (Mud) Roughly pop and crisply punky, this is one of the rare good albums to land tunes first these days, indubitably fresh despite its verse-chorus-verse and guitar-bass-drums. Partly it's the voice of young Elizabeth Elmore--unassuming but never retiring, thoughtful but never moony, just what you'd expect of a straightforward lass who neither wears contact lenses nor throws money away on frames. Read the lyrics--so much happens so fast that they make a difference, and note that they're printed across the booklet, compelling you to follow word for word instead of scanning down--and you'll encounter not just a sensible girl but a born writer whose subject is love or relationships depending how you look at it. Dissecting one attraction after another, she's still trying to figure that one out herself. My advice, fat chance she'll take it: male or female, maybe you should rule out people in bands, dear. A-

CMJ Weekly, April 6, 1998

"On the strength of its first full-length, Charcoal, Champaign, Illinois’s Sarge burst upon the national indie scene at the end of 1996. Fans were charmed by the intelligent lyrics and great pop songs of vocalist Elizabeth Elmore. In fact, just months into its existence, the young band was compared to Sleater-Kinney, Scrawl, and even Throwing Muses. Sarge has since matured, though, distancing itself from grrrl rock and evolving into a straight-up pop band in the process. For The Glass Intact, Elmore and bassist sidekick Rachel Switzky have brought in new drummer Chad Romanski and added second guitarist Pat Cramer. The new additions trigger a notable jump in the band’s musicianship, and it maintains a guileless, sympathetic light touch that stays out of the way of Elmore’s pretty songs but still rocks on cuts when it’s needed." – Tad Hendrickson

Salon Magazine, March 20, 1998

"…They draw on the tunefulness of pop, the energy of punk and something shared by artists as disparate and connected as Nirvana or Neil Young…

…Everything about The Glass Intact – from the production by the band and Matt Alison to the freedom and discipline in the playing of Elmore and new guitarist Pat Cramer, bassist Rachel Switzky and drummer Chad Romanski – sharpens, deepens and expands the sound and the meanings of Sarge’s 1996 Charcoal…

…The Glass Intact offers the exhilaration of hearing a young band find its voice and the satisfaction of feeling you’re being talked to honestly, directly, as an adult, free to join the conversation." – Charles Taylor

Alternative Press, September 1997

"Sarge’s Elizabeth Elmore wanted to be in a band so badly, she would leave clubs in her college town of Champaign, Illinois, sobbing. ‘I didn’t think I could play guitar well enough,’ she admits. ‘I didn’t know if anybody would like the songs I wrote.’ Yet none of that insecurity surfaces in Elmore’s songs, which speaks so honestly and directly it’s hard to believe she could be afraid of anything.

Seething with passion, frustration, bitterness, and vulnerability, the songs on Charcoal (Mud Records) might have stayed in Elmore’s notebook forever if Rachel Switzky hadn’t returned to Champaign for her master’s degree, started playing bass with Elmore and handed their tape to her next-door neighbor, Parasol Records’ Geoff Merritt.

‘Now my life is pretty good,’ says Elmore. ‘I’m doing everything I ever wanted to do. What’s left to write about? I tried to write this really nice song about my boyfriend, all la-la-la and ‘I’m in love.’ It turned out mean. It just doesn’t suit me to write happy songs.’" – David Daley

Art Forum

"Women speak the harsh, desperate language of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son in the songs of this Illinois punk trio (‘I walked into the bar where you hung out/24 and I still hadn’t figured it out/Eight months pregnant and sick with all these lies’) but there’s a will to speak a more commonplace language in Elizabeth Elmore’s singing and guitar playing. There’s as much Van Halen in her sound as Gang of Four." – Greil Marcus

CMJ Music Monthly, February 1997

"Punk rock groups led by female singer-songwriters are popping up more frequently these days, but where Sarge fits into that fray isn’t really clear, as Charcoal really has more surprises than cliches. Sarge is from Champaign, IL; by all current standards of measurement, it’s definitely a ‘Champaign band,’ or more accurately, a really good meshing of certain regional musical ideologies: like bassist Rachel Switzky’s old band Corndolly, the band is predominantly woman-based, and the songwriting is thoroughly solid. And, like many other Champaign bands, Sarge sincerely rocks. ‘Dear Josie, Love Robyn’ is pure Buzzcocks, and the whole record (up until the last few softer-but-not-soft tracks) is totally punk rock—underneath Elizabeth Elmore’s sometimes difficult to reconcile vocals. Elmore’s singing, a little reminiscent of Velocity Girl’s Sarah Shannon, is deceptively sweet, wrapped around nine songs which are almost angry—lashing out at deception, betrayal, and physical abuse. ‘I Don’t’ is a reminder that people should pianos into rock songs way more than they do. Which is not to say Sarge is trying to cover huge amounts of ground—it’s not—but it’s doing what it does with quite a lot of depth, and for that matter, first-rate songs." – Liz Clayton

Puncture

"With all the sped-up perkiness of the Fastbacks and all the careless tralala of Heavenly, the three upstanding Illinoisans comprising Sarge careen up and make a pretty, purgative noise. Vocalist/main songwriter Elizabeth Elmore, solo or harmonizing with herself, sings songs about ugly breakups, dysfunctional families, bloodthirsty retribution, and worse—making it all sound nice as pie while guitar, bass, and drums jangle plenty behind her…

The suspicion that Sarge’s pert nonchalance operates as cheap irony, or that it signifies some deficit of emotion, gets allayed in the stark, slower ‘Another Gear Uncaught,’ a chilling before-and-after account of a suicide attempt conveyed through a monologue addressed to an unseen person, or maybe to the narrator’s alter ego.

Songs about suicide are bound to be too maudlin to bear, but Elmore flirts, threatens, rages, and despairs in such subtle turns that the song survives to haunt the listener. When the cold meaning sinks in, the prettiness fades; but Sarge love to tease with these two sides to their music; and lucky you, you don’t have to choose." – Sara Manaugh

Chickfactor, Issue #10

"My friend and I were arguing a few weeks ago whether Bikini Kill or Team Dresch would be the band that would be the most historically important ten years from now. He said Bikini Kill because they were the ones that inspired so many girls to start their own bands. I said Team Dresch because they will be the ones who inspired the good ones. Sarge’s first album is an initial point of evidence for my side. It’s clearly the product of a boy-crazy girl listening to Personal Best about a million times. It’s also funny and angry and tuneful and fast and instrumentally awesome and so on-the-mark it makes me smile every time. And they’re only going to get better – the aforementioned girl is 20 years old. Yay." -- Clarissa