This week, New York media personality and inveterate indie-rock stalwart Jon Fine will publish Your Band Sucks: What I Saw at Indie Rock’s Failed Revolution (but Can No Longer Hear), a memoir of decades spent in weird, underground American bands. To mark its publication, VF.com asked Fine to provide a primer on the bands we all missed out on in those days before the Internet—those groups too obscure even for 120 Minutes (ask your parents). His zine-ready response is below.

An editor here got a hold of me, because apparently he’s had this story idea in mind for a while, and because I just wrote this book. Luckily for him, what he wanted was basically the subject of every single goddamned conversation I had with anyone between the years of 1985 and 1998. I am here to help. Also: on the odd chance you, too, were waiting for Vanity Fair to sing the praises of Voivod, your long nightmare is over.

I think in late 1991 or early 1992 I got ahold of Autoclave guitarist Nikki Chapman’s phone number and left a message on her answering machine when I was drunk, saying we had to start a band. I may have left a similar message with David Pajo’s parents around then, too. (You’ll have to read my book to find out how badly things went for my bands in the 90s, but let’s just say that I probably should have persisted in trying to start a band with Nikki and/or David.) Autoclave was an extraordinarily short-lived band—according to the online histories, they lasted less than one year—because that’s what sometimes happens when nascent musicians start playing together. It turns out the center cannot hold, because there are too many competing ideas, and so that band turns out a super-unstable pitchblende (but more on them later). But while such a band exists, it can be really glorious. Autoclave was based in Washington, D.C., but luckily wasn’t in sway to the tedious Dischord thing. They weren’t really in sway to anything, in a way I still really like. The chorus here shifts time signatures—because, why not?—and Mary Timony’s sick lead guitar line is flown in from some other song, except it works perfectly. Despite being unsteady, or maybe because it was a little unsteady, it felt, and still feels, like a perfect thing, as many seven inches of the time were, unrepeatable snapshots because it was all a happy accident that could only happen in one specific room at one specific time. Mary Timony went on to Helium, Wild Flag, Ex Hex, a bunch of solo albums, and general badass-ery; Christina Billotte’s sui generis vocals later turned up in Slant 6 and Quix-o-tic.

Yeah, the singer’s kind of annoying; yeah, there aren’t big honking hooks; yeah, there’s a ridiculous level of ambition here—but if you can’t hang with that, well, I dunno, listen to something else. There’s lots of really average stuff out there—have at it! Live long! Be happy! Watch old sitcoms and every blockbuster sequel that comes out this summer! One thing I liked about the stuff I liked best in the 80s and 90s was how crazy and interesting things could get once bands forgot typical rock and pop structures and (especially) ignored the idea that rock had to be blues-based. The guys in Slovenly could really play, so I think sometimes the word “jazz” got thrown around (their other stuff is more restrained than this), but it had closer antecedents, I think, to a bunch of 70s art rock normal people generally don’t listen to. What an amazing, strange, and singular band. I’m grateful I got to see them live. Slovenly demonstrated what you could do once you stopped giving a fuck about where many people thought the boundaries had to be drawn, and what you could do if you looked to some reviled corner of music history for inspiration. It’s almost impossible to choose one song from these guys—they really are an album band—but since they’re also the kind of band who think it’s cool to call a song “Distended,” well, I’m choosing this one. As with everything they did, the vocals don’t follow the music quite so much as the vocals and music have this kind of conversation going on with each other.

Bastro—David Grubbs’s outfit between Squirrel Bait and Gastr del Sol and a million other projects—received way less attention than anything else he’s done, but I probably like it the best. Super-smart, super-arch, wound really goddamned tight, deranged compositions driven by Grubbs’s untranslatable guitar, intricate and often played blindingly fast—man. My band, Bitch Magnet, did a bunch of shows with them a lot in the late 80s, and I was absolutely amazed. (So were my bandmates, apparently: when they briefly booted me from the band, they had him play guitar on tour and on our “Valmead” single.) I also could have figured out that they were way too weird for the rest of the world to really dig. Too bad. For the world, I mean. I had a hard time picking one song from their amazing second album, Diablo Guapo, but I’m going with “Decent Skin,” in part (but not just because) of that sick, sick swinging groove they hit when they switch time signatures after the introduction. “Friendly” for this era of Bastro is highly relative, but this is much friendlier than my runner-up choice, “Shoot Me a Deer.” Don’t make me regret going pop on you. Listen to both.

Let’s say you realize that the best part of metal is riffs and the rhythm section. Let’s say you realize that repetition makes anything better. Let’s say you’re smart enough to realize, early on, that you don’t need a singer. (But let’s say you decide to include a lyric sheet with your records anyway.) Let’s say you think that every album cover should have a knife on it. Let’s say you’re Dutch—and from Venlo, not Amsterdam or Den Haag. On top of that you’re so confident that you record your entire album live, with no overdubs, and then run all of your songs together so each side is basically one long song. Then you’re Gore. Which, as anyone who’s suffered through any musical conversation with me knows, is one of my favorite bands of all time. I just significantly slowed down my progress on this article because I had to listen to this five times in a row. If you’re not feeling this, I feel really bad for you; if you think they need a vocalist, then I feel even worse for you. Also: How about that drummer?

I just mentioned these guys in another book-related thing, and I said something like, “They weren’t very good, but they were kind of great.” Terrible band name, terrible song title, Vomit Launch came out of Chico, California, of all places. None of them could really play their instruments (possible exception: the drummer. A canny move, since that’s the most important instrument.) The singer wasn’t particularly good; while they could write half-decent songs, they weren’t the kind of half-decent that any obvious-minded Springsteen or Lucinda Williams or even Nick Drake fan could hang with; their lyrics were bad; their records are generally weak-sounding, and don’t get me started on the guitar tone. Also, they looked like they had no business being in a band together, and in their one attempt at a bona fide music video—“Switch”—half the band has a hard time keeping a straight face. But all of that was exactly the point. The early days of indie rock were when the town weirdos could get together to form a band without having any idea how it would turn out, and that was O.K., because sometimes—sometimes—it turned out great, despite all the obvious limitations. As it did on Vomit Launch’s Exiled Sandwich (terrible album title—seriously, guys?), which is the sort of great, sprawling, all over the place mess that could only be made by some people just learning their instruments stumbling on something new and cool, almost by accident. When they played at CBGB in 1992, I was the guy who yelled this song title over and over again until they finally played it. Thanks, guys.

Probably sold the most records of anyone here, but that’s because they’re notionally metal. Just a very weird Quebecois form of metal—and to be clear, not Montreal or Quebec City, but a town of around 50,000, two hours north of Quebec City (and more than four from Montreal) called Jonquiere. As with the other “V” band on this list: the town weirdos far from a major urban center formed a band and did something totally singular. Voivod was about handcrafted graphics courtesy of the drummer; a not at all coherent story line (their first several albums, I think, traced the intergalactic experiences of some giant robot/cyborg/something called Korgull); amazing dissonant guitar work; a lead singer whose highly developed sense of theatrics had absolutely nothing to do with metal. Voivod is, honestly, completely preposterous, and I love them more than almost anything. Their best album is 1988’s Dimension Hatröss. “Ravenous Medicine,” above, is from the also excellent Killing Technology. I have no idea what this song is about, because the title literally makes no sense, and neither does the line “the red cross is turning to black,” and the video (and its study-hall level animation) is even more crazypants than the title. But I think the basic message is that if your doctor shows up wearing a hockey mask, it’s not good.

These bands are from Richmond, Virginia. Not D.C., not Philly, not Chapel Hill, not N.Y.C. or Boston. Richmond, Virginia. Both featured the majestic guitar of Pen Rollings. In Honor Role, Rollings served that band’s very thinky take—if I understand the lyrics correctly, “Listening to Sally” could be written from the point of view of a guy in an office who’s been hired to serve as psychologist for a lonely co-worker— on aggressive indie rock of the moment. In Breadwinner, he drove an absolutely crushing example of what could be done once a band decides all that matters is riffs and the rhythm section, and by the way, how bad can we mess up the audience by constantly changing time signatures? I can’t write about Breadwinner without getting all beatnik-rock critic-y on you. “Brutal ever-shifting extrapolation of theorems underpinning that which makes a godhead rhythm section.” “Tooth-grinding metallic minimalism as they dig their very specific ditch.” Etc. and etc. I’m having a hard time finishing this because I’m headbanging, but I’m bald and so it looks like I’m having a seizure and my wife is giving me funny looks.

Another D.C. band that, mercifully, did not at all sound like a D.C. band at all, but rather sort of a perfect encapsulation of a mode of indie rock I was really into: nerdy guys, many in glasses, all hopped-up on amplification and what they could do to make rock ’n’ roll not so boring. In Pitchblende’s case, it was every musician cramming as much information into any given song as possible, with one guitarist skewing sort of new wave and the other more aggressive and Sonic Youth-y, and delivering way more intensity than you’d think possible from a bunch of geeks whose average weight was probably something like 140. This is from their first album, Kill Atom Smasher, which I think I like best. There was a time when I thought bands like this were going to take over. I had no idea where the fuck that thought came from. That said, though, the counterpoint between the bass and guitars in the chorus is just freaking brilliant. (Sort-of disclosure: I’m still good pals with guitarist Justin Chearno and Scott DeSimon—but this was indie rock, I was pals with men and women in hundreds of bands, and almost all of them aren’t on here.)

Really skittery and relentless punk rock from Melbourne. This came my way via a single on the amazing Aberrant label, with “26 milligrams” on the flip, and as such remains one of my most favorite things from 1988. This is so barely controlled that it shouldn’t hold together as well as it does, but it does, and I’m not quite sure why, despite decades of study. Guitarist Mick Turner—please take a moment to consider how nuts his performance is on this song—and drummer Jim White ended up in Dirty Three, which is about a million miles from this bit of sick nonsense. Good on them. But I like this band a lot better.

I have a bunch, but I’m not saying what they are, on the very odd chance someone wants me to write the Part 2 of this. Because, yes, there’s more. Go into a YouTube k-hole and find ’em yourself.

Jon Fine is the executive editor of Inc. magazine and a New York-based writer, commentator, and musician. His book Your Band Sucks: What I Saw at Indie Rock’s Failed Revolution (but Can No Longer Hear) was published by Viking this week.