I wasn't really right and I wasn't really wrong.
Do You Have A Formal Dining Area? is 1990s af, but it's not grunge. It's more like grunged up versions of a bunch of other styles. The ultra ironic, doesn't-actually-go-together album art now makes a different kind of sense. Before listening I figured it was a grunge also-ran band's xeroxing of iconography divorced from the culture that birthed it to match their music; the intent now scans the same as the production does to me: an acknowledgement that Steal Embrace knew what they were playing wasn't the hot sound and they were doing their best to mesh it with what the kids were into those days.
Don't mistake that for a dis though. Unlike certain legendarily transparent (and legendarily terrible) attempts by artists to sound up to date, the production matches the songs just fine in this case. Steal Embrace are surprisingly diverse (more on that later), but they're rooted in stoner rock (side note: back in The Guess I should've noticed something was up with them being a trio. Grunge bands were NEVER trios. Nirvana was the sole exception and even they were a quartet twice in their history). That actually puts them right on the cutting edge of the emergent American heavy rock scene that blew up (relatively speaking) a couple years later: Kyuss, Monster Magnet, Fu Manchu, Solarized, Solace, Nebula, etc. Grimy distortion works just fine on heavy grooving riffs, and goes especially well with Dean Doukas's gruff vocals.
Stoner rock can be a simple and limited genre in some people's hands, but Steal Embrace are among those who found a ton of variety in it. That's apparent right from the opening few seconds when the guitar come in with wah-wah, talkbox, and distortion pedals all engaged at once--that's not a combo you hear often, and it sounds great. Plus, in a seemingly deliberate choice, each of the first three tracks opens with a different instrument--guitar, drums, and bass respectively. Not only that, but they each show off a different style. Guernica is late '90s stoner rock, Saturation's like a grunged-up classic heavy power trio, and Lighthouse is a slow burner. It's a solid 1-2-3 punch to open the record, which is good because the fourth song is. . .not so solid.
I hate to dump on Daddy's Coming Home 'cause it's a sentimental ballad to (I think) Doukas's kid, but sentimental ballads really aren't in Steal Embrace's skill set. What It Is Like To Know is another ballad and stretches the band even further: it's got harmony vocals on the chorus and sounds kind of like Nirvana's In Bloom, except without the exploding chorus. It's a better song than Daddy's Coming Home musically, but Doukas's vocal limitations sink it, although there's a sweet end of track guitar solo.
But that heterodox approach to genre yields weird, cool results elsewhere. Somebody Else Got Murdered Today has some Nick Cave in its intro, Kissena's watery, echoey intro leads into a quasi-country but still loud sound, Bits & Pieces is a classic rocker complete with organ, and Hyperspace sounds like a grunged-up 1980s pop metal song--Van Halen or Poison through a Big Muff pedal. That's pretty damn strange, but not as strange as the appropriately named final track, BOP, which is basically an ultra heavy ‘50s rocker. Definitely not your average heavy rock record. Do You Have A Formal Dining Area? isn't an absolute classic and it's got a couple clunkers, but it's pretty unique within its genre and is well worth hearing. Let's see how possible that is.
First stop as always is Discogs, and they've got nothing. Allmusic's actually got them (Discogs: Allmusic has a band you don't? Where's your pride?) but not this album; they've just got one, a record called Too Blue To Wear Brown which has both Saturation and Guernica on it. No idea if they're the same recordings or new ones. There's one copy of it on Amazon. There's a little more info on this Internet Archive page, along with one minute samples of a bunch of songs. After that the trail goes cold there's no site in the liner notes to look up, so that's that. See you Monday.
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