The Vitreous Humor: Self Titled EP + Live at Fireside Bowl: Vinyl LP

Limited Color Vinyl

Not gonna lie, Topeka, Ks, where I’m from, and where three-fourths (Danny Pound, Dan Benson, and Brad Allen) of Vitreous Humor were born and raised, has always been a bit of a cultural wasteland. A deep record collecting friend has occasionally challenged me to name an album, single, or band circa the 1960s-1980s to have come out of Topeka. Apart from that constant staple of classic rock radio, the band Kansas, of “Carry On Wayward Son” fame, you really can’t. (In fact it could probably be argued they actively contributed to the aforementioned cultural wasteland). But in the late 1980s, three Topeka kids with a deep and abiding love of the Beatles who’d known each other since they were pre-teens started making music together in one of their parent’s basements. Seems like a story as old as time really, but in the span of just a few short years they managed to blaze incandescently, leaving a handful of singles and one “nearly” full-length recorded testament to their brilliance that will forever put them down as one of the best rock bands to ever come out of the midwest (and most certainly Topeka, for sure).

If I’m talking a lot about Topeka, it’s because the story of Vitreous Humor is also one of geography. Pre-internet, high school days in Topeka you had few options if you wanted to find out about bands, and they mostly entailed driving to the nearby college towns of Lawrence and Manhattan, or heading further east to Kansas City & its smattering of record stores and all ages clubs. If you were really lucky, you maybe had a friend with an older brother already in college that could dub you a Slint cassette. You would pile into the Vitreous Humor band van to go to Lawrence and catch Dinosaur Jr. at the KU student union, or drive to Manhattan on a weeknight in a blizzard and back to see the Flaming Lips at a warehouse space, when they were still obscenely loud and acid damaged and not yet rolling around on stage in giant plastic hamster balls like absolute cornballs. You go to Lawrence to pick up an Unrest album at Love Garden Sounds, or the Groove Farm in Kansas City (where future Vitreous Humor bassist Brooks Rice worked) to buy the Superchunk “Slack Motherfucker” single and a Caspar Brötzmann t-shirt. It begins to dawn on you that a local band at a college house party —whether it was Lawrence’s Zoom, or Manhattan’s Truck Stop Love –could absolutely be as good as anything you hear on the radio or in the new arrival bins at the record stores.

Vitreous Humor were almost