This comes on and I'm thinking it sounds like any number of manic 80s bands trying to play the 13th Floor Elevators. Which is pretty cool. And then I do my research (my rule is always listen first). And I discover to my not huge surprise that this is the first musical attempt by a certain set of Miller Brothers (Roger, Ben and Larry) from Ann Arbor.

Sproton Layer Press Your Hand and the Whole World Fluctuates/Emit Time (12XU)

Yes, the Mission of Burma, Destroy All Monsters, No Man, etc., Miller Brothers. The band recorded With Magnetic Fields Disrupted in 1970. It disappeared and so did Sproton Layer. That album has been reissued twice, in 1991 and 2013. In 2013, the Miller Brothers and a new trumpet player played some live shows and recorded three songs Roger wrote in 1969. Those 2013 recordings (two live pieces and the three studio tracks) make up the Emit Time EP. The Press Your Hand. . . LP is split into 1969 and 1971 sides. The 1969 side is songs that didn't make the "official" album, and the 1971 side is a set of pretty wild jams.

Yes, this is punky psych rock with a side of math. And where did the Millers go after this? Indeed. Every once in a while a bit flashes that eventually evolved into a later effort. Actually, there are many such moments. It's easy to hear early MoB here, and the brothers' manic noodling was clearly just as endemic in 1969 and 1970 as it remained later on.

Sproton Layer is not important for its music. No one ever heard of Sproton Layer (even in Ann Arbor) and no one patterned a single thing off them. But it is fun to hear the (very) early musical meanderings of some of the most iconoclastic non-stars of the indie music world. If I was listening in 1970, I would have wondered why the sound was so thin and why the music was played at such a blistering pace. But the creative ferment is obvious. This one's for the nerds, but what a fun trove it is.

Jon Worley