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The Squires of the Subterrain springs from the do-it-yourself, lo-fi (but certainly not low-quality) pop ingenuity of a single man, Christopher Earl (born Christopher Earl Zajkowski), a fixture on the 1990s underground pop scene of Rochester, NY. Throughout the decade, while playing in numerous combos and side projects, Earl was creating some quirky and brilliant pop informed by the most far-out '60s work of the Beatles, Zombies, Kinks, and particularly Brian Wilson, on the sly in his basement (hence the derivation on "subterranean") lair and releasing it on a series of acclaimed cassettes as the Squires of the Subterrain, the name itself an homage to XTC's brilliant psychedelic side project the Dukes of Stratosphear. Earl began playing drums in 1979 with a group of high school friends that eventually morphed over the course of the next decade into the Essentials, and then, by 1992, into five-piece dance-rock band the Salamanders; the other primary members were guitarist Gregory Town...