Yesterday, I wrote a piece for Stereogum discussing some of the difficulties associated with running an underground music space in Boston. Sometimes keeping house show culture vibrant in this city seems like more trouble than it’s worth, but then you hear something like the new record by Fat History Month – probably the most championed band of the Boston basement-show circuit in recent years – and it’s enough to squash your cynicism for a while.

While the backstory of Fat History Month — a guitar and drum duo who seem to take inspiration from Slanted & Enchanted-era Pavement, Modest Mouse, and other similarly self-deprecating indie-rock bands — is one of off-the-grid smoke-filled basements around Massachusetts, none of that history is even really necessary to appreciate the series of painfully overlooked experimental rock records and tapes they’ve released since 2009. Fat History Month’s 2011 debut full-length Fucking Despair (comprised of “redemption songs of freedom” with names like “Free As a Cat”) was marked by the singer’s perpetual deadpan, and distorted guitar lines that shift between the tight/angular and the droney/cyclical. Now, that’s followed up by songs in a similar vein on a second full length, Bad History Month, out on April Fool’s Day via Sophomore Lounge and Exploding In Sound Records. Below, hear a song from that album, “Bald History Month,” and check out their tour dates here.