The Swansons

A hard-candy alterna-pop quartet originally from New Haven, CT, along the lines of Letters to Cleo or Eve's Plum, the Swansons deserved a better fate than they got. Singer Lauren Fay, guitarist Alec Hodel, bassist Matthew Swift, and drummer Dave Faye signed with Citizen X Records, a Washington, D.C.-based pseudo-indie funded by Universal Records, in 1993, but the group's sole album, 1994's Shake, was actually released by Universal's major label Interscope. Though it's a solid and occasionally excellent piece of mainstream alterna-pop, the album flopped, Citizen X folded when i...