Edsel photo by Tim Owens

Next week Universal will reissue Nirvana's Nevermind to celebrate the album's 20th anniversary, which will put a nice cherry on top of the grunge-nostalgia sundae folks seem so eager to devour lately. But as anyone who lived in Seattle in the late '80s and early '90s—or anyone who spent a couple hours Googling bands after watching Hype!—could tell you, grunge was bigger than Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Sub Pop. Plenty of musicians helped build the scene and the "Seattle sound."

Edsel was one of those bands, but in Washington, D.C., not Washington state. On Monday, New Jersey label Comedy Minus One digitally reissued a couple of the band's albums: 1993's The Everlasting Belt Co. and 1994's Detroit Folly. History hasn't been so kind to the group (see Andrew Beaujon's TBD piece "Edsel will reissue its albums to prove it existed"). In Mark Andersen and Mark Jenkins' local punk history book, Dance of Days, Edsel is merely described as "former members of teen-core bands Kids for Cash and At Wit's End...[who] had moved beyond that aesthetic to create a Wire-y art-punk style with spare lyrics." Hopefully, these reissues will help flesh out that memory a little bit.

As a bonus, the music rips. As the band says in a new write-up for Everlasting Belt Co., the Edsel sound evolved beyond Wire worship to combine arty guitar licks, D.C. post-hardcore-funk, and a smattering of shoegaze. The songs on Everlasting Belt Co. are muddy, they pulse and swell in odd angles, and they're more similar to Jawbox than Wire, especially on the album's lumbering opening tune, "Checkering." Edsel cleaned things up a bit for Detroit Folly, but kept the headstrong, often molasses-paced propulsion of the first album. It's daunting to jump into both records at once—Everlasting Belt Co. alone has 18 songs—but it's easy to get immersed in them.

So what caused Edsel to slip through the cracks? It could be that, though the group's sound lends complexity to D.C.'s late 80s/early '90s scene, it never conformed to what's known as the "D.C. sound." Which is what makes these reissues feel all the more special.

Edsel – "Buckle" by comedyminusone
Edsel – "Draw Down The Moon" by comedyminusone

Step inside the single-family home, and the source of the noise becomes clear: Black Alley is in the midst of a two-hour rehearsal, finalizing the songs they will perform live in the NBC Washington studios this week: "Artist's Prayer" and "Bad Girl."

The practice space is artistic enough—a pile of CDs sit on a dusty flat surface, and the brown-paneled walls celebrate musical pioneers: Aretha Franklin, Eddie Kendricks, and Quincy Jones, among others. A white dry-erase board outlines the band's immediate plans. There's the setlist for an upcoming gig and the working tracklist for the group's upcoming album, Soul Swagger Rock Sneakers, which doesn't have a release date (Kacey Williams, the band's vocalist, says the album is definitely in its finishing stages).

In tall green letters, that same erase board brings to light what is arguably Black Alley's biggest gig ever: "MERRIWEATHER POST PAVILION!!!"

This Saturday, the seven-piece band will open this year's HFStival at the pavilion, a daylong concert featuring 20 acts, including Diane Birch, Gin Blossoms, and Minus the Bear. Black Alley earned the opportunity to perform this weekend after winning the California Tortilla Battle to Break Out competition at the 9:30 Club last month. (Just for perspective, Good Charlotte once won the Break Out competition.)

During this week's rehearsal, the band runs through a series of high-energy tracks. "Virgin Suicide," with a seductive poem at the song's onset, is methodical until it builds into a full-scale rock track. The aforementioned "Bad Girl" is hard and aggressive, a seemingly perfect song for this weekend's performance. Then there's "Used," a song for anyone who's been cheated on and lied to, Kacey says.

Still, when Black Alley opens the festival, they are likely to see a different crowd than they are used to playing. They recently performed for Chuck Brown's 75th birthday and work every Friday as the in-house band at the Indulj jazz club. With the HFStival, however, the other bands vacillate between breezy alt-rock and punk, and Black Alley's music is rooted in soul.

"We're different from what the festival is used to," Kacey says. "But we don't fit into any type of box. It will be something new and I think people will be blown away."

The band plans to end Saturday's show with a rendition of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Look out for Animal's drum solo. And the possible encore. Word to Nicki Minaj.

Merriweather Post Pavilion is located at 10475 Little Patuxent Parkway, Columbia, MD. Doors at 10 a.m. Tickets are $35-$50.

Radio Free Burma: Local indie rockers Deleted Scenes have a new album out this year, and they went on Radio CPR's Dissonance program to spin some tunes. The shout-outs to bands from D.C. and its environs are cool; the inclusion of some Burmese psych-pop is much, much cooler; the new Deleted Scenes tracks are by far the coolest.

A Final Shutdown Poem: Well, we tried to prepare you for the shutdown by highlighting its arts implications, but then there wasn't a shutdown. Here's a post-almost-shutdown Haiku:

Glad the Metsu show
opened. Phillips, I still want
my Arnold Palmer!

Today on Arts Desk: What Robert Redford taught me last night at Ford's Theatre.

By all rights, Dave Grohl should have faded from public view once Nirvana ended in a final, irreversible decision by Kurt Cobain 15 years ago.

At most, he should have either squeezed out a brief, increasingly irrelevant solo career or found another group where he could pound away in the background while someone else claimed the spotlight. He was a vital member of a seminal band but ultimately a secondary one who didn’t write songs in Nirvana until it was too late to matter and never got a single vocal as prominent as even Krist Novoselic’s mocking refrain of “Get Together” at the start of “Territorial Pissings.”

For crying out loud, Grohl was the drummer. There’s a whole field of jokes devoted to drummers. (For instance: What was the last thing the drummer said before getting kicked out of the band? “Hey, guys, I wrote these songs….”) There was no reason to expect him to do much more than coast on his past association.

Things didn’t work out that way. In the wake of the sudden end of his iconic band, he formed a merely very, very good one. Unlike, say, George Harrison, Grohl didn’t chafe under the yoke of being a sideman to Nirvana’s resident genius. He simply transformed himself into a frontman, something toward which he’d previously shown no aspirations, to such a successful and odds-defying degree that there might not be any precedent for it in the history of rock ’n’ roll. In terms of Foo Fighters’ longevity and consistent popularity (though not, of course, musical style), it’s as though Mitch Mitchell had followed the Jimi Hendrix Experience by forming Queen.

Both sides of Grohl’s career are captured by the simultaneous release of Nirvana’s Live At Reading CD/DVD (Geffen) and Foo Fighters’ Greatest Hits (RCA) on Nov. 3. One offers a fleeting glimpse of a generation-defining band at its impossible peak, just before the experience began to sour; the other is a survey of a more or less uninterrupted run of solid work that shows no signs of flagging after 14 years. For those keeping track, that’s three times his tenure in Nirvana. More sobering, it’s also more than half as long as Cobain’s lifespan.

Unsurprisingly, the focus of Reading is more on Cobain than Grohl (or anything else, really). It’s a stark reminder of just how much Cobain was blessed with: surfer-boy good looks, a feral intelligence, unquantifiable charisma, immeasurable talent. All he truly lacked was a way to deal with the world. Music worked for a while, but only a while. He tried family, which came too late to fully take. And he tried drugs, which would eventually backfire in the worst possible way.

On Aug. 30, 1992, though, with steam rising up from a massive festival audience, Cobain gritted his teeth, smiled (so it would appear) exactly once, spattered blood on his pickups, and solidified his band’s stature so thoroughly that he would spend the rest of his life trying to bring it back down to earth (that his efforts had the opposite effect demonstrates how complete the apotheosis was).

The piecemeal From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah, released in 1996, might be a more comprehensive live album, but Reading has the advantage of being all of one piece, each song building off the energy of the last. Cobain’s raging antipathy is so entrancing that neither the camera nor the lights can seem to be bothered with Grohl, but he’s crucial to the performance: Steady and firm, he held back the chaos that Novoselic gleefully pursued and that Cobain couldn’t fight by giving them something to which they could tether themselves.

On Foo Fighters’ Greatest Hits, the chaos is gone, replaced by a controlled intensity (control being necessary for a project that began as a one-man band). It confirms how sharp Grohl’s songwriting, singing, and guitar playing—all things he largely kept under wraps while in Nirvana—truly are. While none of it is quite as soul-shattering as what Cobain was capable of (the guitars, in particular, are harder and more hammer-like, as opposed to corrosively acidic), the upside is that Grohl, unlike Cobain, could walk away with his soul intact.

That doesn’t devalue a catalog that includes excellent songs like “This Is a Call,” “Monkey Wrench,” “Times Like These” and “The Pretender,” which span a decade and a half without any discernible drop in quality or ferocity. It just means that Grohl found a way to remain at the forefront of mainstream rock but at a less headlong, more manageable pace. It means that he figured out something Cobain could never handle: how to sustain a career at the top.