Lotion – Full Isaac: A Jangle-Pop Fever Dream with Blood in Its Teeth

You ever fall in love with a band so fast it feels like whiplash? Like the song isn’t even done and you’re already rewinding it, chasing the high like a freak? That’s what Full Isaac did to me. Lotion came out the gate in ’94 with this record that feels like the bastard child of Murmur and The Colour and the Shape, a jangly, hooky, left-field pop missile dipped in reverb and spit-shined with feedback. It’s smart as hell but still knows how to fuck around.

Lotion were the weird kids with great taste who could actually play. And that’s rarer than people think. Four art-school-looking dudes from NYC with enough melodic sense to make your heart jump and enough rhythmic swing to knock it out your chest. They lived somewhere between college rock and post-Nirvana sprawl but never felt like a knockoff. Lotion weren’t chasing hits. They were carving messages into bathroom stalls and leaving cassette tapes in glove compartments.

Full Isaac doesn’t posture. It glides. It snarls when it needs to. It sounds like it grew up reading comics in the back of a record store, eavesdropping on conversations about Guided By Voices, Pixies, Game Theory, and Cheap Trick. The guitars shimmer and scratch at the same time. REM if Peter Buck was fed a steady diet of Pavement and Sonic Youth, then locked in a room with a four-track and some weed.

But let’s talk La Boost. Jesus Christ. That track. Drummer Rob Youngberg doesn’t just play the drums. He throttles them. The man is possessed. It’s like someone shoved a jazz-trained octopus into a punk band and dared it to keep tempo. He never plays it straight. He’s constantly shifting, rolling, blasting fills where other drummers would coast. There’s a section in the back half where the whole thing threatens to come apart but he drags it back together like a demon behind the kit. That track alone should’ve earned him a cult following.

And Tony Zajkowski—goddamn. His voice is elastic and off-kilter, always ducking expectations. He sounds like he’s smirking one second and on the verge of collapse the next. There’s a nervous energy in the way he phrases shit, like he’s always thinking faster than the song allows. But when he locks in, you feel it in your gut. There’s poetry wrapped in bubblegum, cynicism coated in gloss, and more than a little suburban venom.

You can hear the 90s in this record but not in a tired way. Full Isaac doesn’t ride trends. It runs parallel to them. There’s some lo-fi haze, sure, but this thing is produced. It’s got layers. Tracks like Dock Ellis and Love Theme from Santo Gold spill over with detail. Tones flicker in and out like dying TVs. Backing vocals sound like they’re beamed in from another song entirely. There’s a strange cinematic quality to it. Like a collage made of old movie posters and half-remembered dreams. They even got Pynchon to write the liner notes, for fuck’s sake. How do you not root for that?

But here’s the real trick. Lotion made a record that’s beautiful without being precious. It’s not trying to save you. It’s not cloying. It just exists, perfectly and defiantly, in its own space. Like a lost 90s sitcom that somehow never aired but everyone swears they saw once at 3am.

Every song feels lived-in, like the band played it 40 times before recording it, then once more just to screw it up in the right way. They weren’t aiming for a hit. They were aiming for truth. For that moment when everything clicks and your skin buzzes. That weird euphoria when the chords hit just right and your brain lights up like a pinball machine.

And this record should have blown up. But it didn’t. It fell through the cracks. Maybe it was too smart for modern rock radio. Too weird for the MTV crowd. Too pretty for the punks. Or maybe the world just wasn’t listening. Either way, Full Isaac became one of those beautiful misfires that sticks with you more than a success ever could.

This isn’t nostalgia. It’s longing. A different timeline where Lotion got their due and La Boost was the song everyone played before a night out. But in this one, it’s ours. Yours. Mine. The freaks and the obsessives. The ones who still dig through crates and fall in love too fast.

Spin it again. Let it wreck you. Let it remind you what it feels like to discover something that never asked to be found.