Subliminal Plastic Motives by Self

Subliminal Plastic Motives, Self's debut, came out on October 24, 1995, on Zoo Entertainment and Spongebath Records, and for all its full-band swagger it was really just two brothers from Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Matt and Mike Mahaffey wrote and recorded the whole thing themselves, with Matt producing, and the result is a studio-rat grab bag: fuzzy alt-rock hooks, smart-aleck wordplay and melodies that stick like gum to a sneaker.

Reviewers dug the restless, magpie production and the sharp lyrics, and reached for Beck, Matthew Sweet and Ben Folds as reference points. "Cannon" and "So Low" went out as singles with videos, got the record onto alternative radio (it debuted at 64 on CMJ's airplay chart) and helped push sales past 40,000 by 1997. The brothers then grew into a live band and got stranger on The Half-Baked Serenade. The album finally made it to vinyl in 2014, courtesy of Fat Possum.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.