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The band signed with Virgin Records toward the end of the decade and made two albums before splitting up: Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart in 1988 and Key Lime Pie in 1989. CVB finally won me over with these records because they learned how to edit themselves and put the focus squarely on the music. Both were reissued earlier this month by Omnivore Recordings, each larded with previously unissued live material. The first contains its fair share of classic songs—"Eye of Fatima (Pt. 1)" and "One of These Days," for instance—but the awful, boomy drum sound imparted by producer Dennis Herring can make it a slog. Still, my memory had told me that it was the better of the two records, but revisiting these reissues has disabused me of that notion: Key Lime Pie is more assured, daring, and coherent. Multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Segel had left the band before they recorded Key Lime Pie—he formed the other post-CVB band, the proggy Monks of Doom—but new member Morgan Fichter provided a better balance to CVB's mixture of hard-rock bombast and folk-rock rusticity with her fiddle and accordion. Aside from a convincing cover of Status Quo's "Pictures of Matchstick Men" there's not much in the way of novelty, and that's why it stands up better than any record in their oeuvre. The album's diversity made it hard to choose something for today's 12 O'Clock Track, but I ended up going with the midtempo strummy beauty of "Sweethearts."
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