LaSalle formed after the dissolution of Small Brown Bike, who broke up shortly after Lookout! Records released their third album, The River Bed. Evolving out of a husband-and-wife duo called Shipwrecked (who recorded with a drum machine) the band saw guitarist/vocalist Mike Reed reunited with original SBB drummer Dan Jaquint, who had been playing with Katy Reed in Charlevoix. LaSalle revealed Mike continuing to explore the clever melodies of later Small Brown Bike, while Katy brought her uniquely angular sense of hook to the project, resulting in a collaboration that, especially when they sung in unison, was so harmonically satisfying it was hard to imagine they could be anything but conjugal. Jaquint, known for his thinking-man’s beats, accented LaSalle’s understated Midwestern stylings and the group was off for a run of two albums and tours with the likes of Cursive, Make Believe, and The Casket Lottery.
The band’s records were never DPA releases; they’ve found their way here out of kinship and in the interest of posterity. For those looking for a place to start, their song “Pretty World” from their second album of the same name is, in fact, as pretty as any song you’ll find in the Mike Reed cannon, which also includes the work he’s done in Able Baker Fox and under his own name. Jaquint and Reed would collaborate once more in The Fencemen, and for an album by the reunited Small Brown Bike in 2014.
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