If you walked into the rehearsal space of the Window Pane band back in 1995, you were immediately hit by a wall of basement mildew, stale beer, ozone from blown amps, cheap incense, exhaust fumes, and sweat. But not body odor. No, they were clean. Oh so clean. That was the scent of a band operating on pure friction, grinding out their self-titled record on Cars O'Charlie Records.

The core four-piece on this album was Jim Hulahan (singist), M. Scott Flannery (basser), Jim Drannbauer (Drumist), and Charlie Drannbauer (guitarer). It was a powder keg. The band had a serious bassist problem. Or maybe bassists just had a problem with them. The extended family saw a revolving door of guys on bass like Greg Sause, Jim Harrison, and Kevin Griffin. Their sworn mortal enemy wasn't some rival local act or a noise-complaining neighbor. Their nemesis was Window Pane itself.

They broke up shortly after the album's release in a spectacular meltdown. It's a long, sordid tale filled with infidelity, disloyalty, backstabbing, substances, shady record labels, fires, coffee mugs smashing faces, vintage Gibson Les Pauls being launched across stages, blood, broken noses, shady lawyers, onstage arguments, and somehow... Dee Snider. It was an ugly scene. Trust me.

The recording sessions were downright abusive to their gear. Drum heads beaten through, guitar strings stretched to their limits, vocal chords fried deeper than an onion ring. But that raw aggression gave us 14 tracks. From the driving intensity of By the Way, Healthy, and Sessions, to the frantic bursts of Wrong and its Wrong (Reprise), to the sprawling depths of Thin Branches, Danos, and Dead Bird, the album is exactly what it is.

And then there's Illegal Salad. If you're wondering what makes a salad illegal, an unnamed band member with firsthand experience will tell you it's a salad taken from one inmate by another in prison. That same gritty reality bleeds into the rest of the tracklist: Those Children, For Now, Store, Sigh, and the elusive Crystalized.

They shared the label with acts like The Amazing Mustang Boy, but Window Pane stood alone as a disaster waiting to happen. After all this time, the music of Window Fucking Pane has finally been taken out of the vault and is ready to be heard. Thirty years later, the dust has settled, but the album is still here.