The Geraldine Fibbers blended experimental noise and rock guitars with gentle country-tinged melodies on their 1995 debut.

This slow-burn slice of quiet-loud noise from The Geraldine Fibbers boasts one of the great opening couplets. “I got some satisfaction from lifting up your dress,” sings Carla Bozulich, before adding:  “A slap in the face is worth a thousand words.”

The Geraldine Fibbers were one of those bands you only found in America in the Nineties, playing a kind of post-R.E.M. country-influenced guitar music that was (then) dubbed alt-country.

They were formed by Carla Bozulich who, like others in that genre, had started out making noisy industrial music before fusing punk and roots music in the Fibbers.

Not that she had abandoned her own roots: they always incorporated noise and experimentation into their sound,  especially after the arrival of the brilliant guitarist Nels Cline, who went on to complement Jeff Tweedy in Wilco. 

He had not arrived when they released their debut album, Lost Somewhere Between The Earth And My Home, in 1995, prefaced with this song, Dragon Lady.

The line-up at that time included Jessy Green, who also played in The Jayhawks, on viola and violin, alongside Bozulich (guitar and vocals), guitarist Daniel Keenan, bassist William Tutton and drummer Kevin Fitzgerald.

The rest of the lyric is just as good. The chorus goes: “Everything I say is a stupid lie / I won’t tell the truth, even when I die / I’ll pick myself to pieces til the end of time / Then I’ll glue ’em back together in a stupid rhyme.”