There's a certain bass sound that will always recall the early '90s. It's a fat, distorted rumble, a sandworm throb. It's angular and unpredictable, but there's something sexual about it, too. It speaks to the moment when hardcore musicians figured out that they could make something heavier and more dangerous if they slowed down a bit, if they projected a sort of urbane menace rather than a galloping ferocity. That bass tone is most commonly associated with noise-rock bands like the Jesus Lizard and (especially) Unsane, but it was all over the place back then. The noise-rock bands that did it best were the ones who were most concerned with being foxy; Girls Against Boys spring immediately to mind. But you could also hear it in further-out, genre-agnostic bands like Morphine or even Soul Coughing. And you could hear a whole lot of it on the two albums and the one EP that the New York band Quicksand released between 1990 and 1995. I don't know why that bass sound faded away; maybe it has something to do with nü-metal taking a version of that sound and with successive generations not wanting to do anything that sounded even remotely like nü-metal. But that bass sound is once again all over the reunited Quicksand's Interiors, their first album in 22 years. I didn't know how badly I missed it until it came back to knock me around some more.