Jim Shepard - Picking Through The Wreckage With A Stick (1995)

Monomaniacal home-recordists-cum-outsider-musicians are getting to be a rather common breed, but Columbus, Ohio's Jim Shepard was hunkered down in his primordial lair back when most people thought "lo-fi" meant listening to music on a transistor radio. Far more devoted to noise than most one-man/4-track operations, Shepard — who hung himself at home in October 1998 — had a flair for carving out blocks of blue-collar art-rock that rivals fellow Rust Belt survivors like Destroy All Monsters and Pere Ubu (in its heyday). He also tempered the smart-guy sound-assemblage with a dark and smoky garage aesthetic born of toxin-laden practice spaces and beer-soaked lunch hours out behind the plant.