Clikitat Ikatowi – Live In Chicago, 1997 CD
Recorded in what sounds like an empty football stadium, Clikitat tapped unintentionally into the reverbed mainline of Martin Hamnett’s production technique and sent their slightly embarrassing emo rumpus sprawling. The drummer is a monster; listen to the opening moments of the album and you wonder what the hell he was thinking joining a bunch of plodders like The Blackheart Procession. ‘Mature’ without sounding embarrassingly muso, flirting with questionable dub experiments/mathrock time signatures, or being pointlessly abstract. Snappy dressers to boot.
Heroin – Destination CD
Surely the greatest hardcore band of the 90s, most certainly the best band to ever release a record in a silk-screened grocery bag, it’s now hard to imagine what made the tough guys so wary of Heroin back in 1991. They have three main modes of attack: 1. a galumphing build up featuring strangulated yelps, 2. an explosive peak where they clattered like a runaway train and 3. a grinding phase featuring strangulated screaming and lots of hot metal friction and texture-as-notes guitar action. They’re derided because of the E-word, and I’d be lying if I said that part of their appeal isn’t in the overwrought, baroque delivery.
Heroin singer Matt Anderson also founded Gravity records, which was the 90s premier label for arty hardcore nonsense and ridiculously intensive packaging. For instance, The Mohinder 7″ features a cover silk-screened over sheets clipped from magazines. (Mine is a Levis ad.) The Antioch Arrow 12″ (see later) is housed in a piece of folded heavy cardboard then spray-painted. An Unwound 7″ has some of the tightest vinyl etching I’ve ever seen. Etc. (For the record, 7 of these records/bands were on Gravity or have released a record on Gravity.)
Computer Cougar – demo tape
A bit of a cheat since you’ve never heard and will likely never hear this, Computer Cougar’s demo must stand as one of the great unreleased albums of all time, and therefore deserves note. Predicting/predating the current slobbering over neo-post-punk by, oh, five or so years, Computer Cougar were a bunch of fat guys out of bands like Rorschach and Born Against who shucked the metal-core aggro for spindly Gang Of Four guitar shards and death disco rhythms before we were all fucking sick of that particular old seam. A posthumous EP was release a year or so ago, but clearly the moment had passed. They read the zeitgeist a little too well, too soon. (Cf. Red Monkey, Evergreen, The Monorchid, et al, as well.)
The Locust – The Locust LP
Look, I don’t trust them any more than you do; the mere fact of The Locust’s existence has done far more harm than good to American underground rock for the last couple of years. More than any one group, they represent the sickening Makeout Club fashionista white-belt slide San Diego took in the latter half of the decade, somehow going on to infect the entire country if not the world. As a giant style-over-substance fuck you, however, this is a great album! They ride a conceptually genius move to easy success: drop seemingly incongruous Devo keyboard blurt or gothic trilling into 45-second blast-beat grindcore numbers. The effect is somewhat akin to playing Ghost & Goblins for the NES on 78rpm. And, like The Ramones, it’s all over in about 19 minutes, so you don’t even really have time to complain.
The VSS – Nervous Circuits LP
Drive Like Jehu dynamics are married to skronking skinny tie keyboards, Jesus Lizard vocal delivery, and Minor Threat timeframes. More ‘expansive’
than their previous run of singles, this signalled the excising of the ass from The VSS’s assault. The final result of this would be sexless no-marks like The Faint, peddling a five-years-too-late rediscovery of synthesizers as the Now Sound. (Although compared to the runty gruntings of their contemporaries they sound as forward thinking as Varese, Stockhausen, and Cameo put together.) The surviving members would go on to peddle their own distasteful love for The Doors and Echo & The Bunnymen as The Slaves (truly one of the best – read: most obvious – band names of all time) and now Pleasure Forever (truly one of the worst band names of all time.) Frontman Sonny Kay disappeared into the DAF/Test Dept.guts of a single (?) release as Subpoena The Past. (I think he still runs GSL records.)
Drop Dead – Drop Dead LP
Is it a malfunctioning washing machine or the new Drop Dead record? The line between the most minimalist machine techno and ‘reactionary’ ol’ hardcore is often paper thin; listened to in the kitchen, doing the washing up, I couldn’t tell the difference between this record and Pita’s 1999 album on Mego, Get Out, which followed it in the CD changer. Gloriously a-human, although that probably rubs up uncomfortably against their excessively pious, skull-laden packaging and “save the bunnies” stance. That’s the major difference between metal and hardcore right there: the joys of vivisection. Or at least what use you put those nasty pictures to.
V/A – Bllleeeeaaauuurrrrgghhh!-The Record 7″
Something like over three dozen bands on a 7″, whadda world, whadda world, etc. As you can probably imagine, no deep insights to be given into the human condition, no memorable chorus, no melodies, no hooks, barely any rhythms, and sometimes the difference between the tracks is discernable only by looking at the grooves. As your party piece, however, it provides a fair bit of amusement, so long as you hang with a crowd for whom Kind Of Blue was a bridge too far.
V/A – Feer of Smell LP
A 1993 compilation that collects snapshots of a sound falling apart. Nation of Ulysses contribute a negligible lounge jazz noodle, Infest bark, Man Is The Bastard drop an impenetrable bass slab, Rorschach cough up a hairball, Tit Wrench hot wire a cheap drum machine they stole from a Sam Ash, a Moss Icon live tape is rescued from underneath a pile of dirty socks, and in between a number of forgettable/forgotten bands do their thing. Add to that any number of between song rants, sketches, prank calls & bloopers that do little more than reveal the latent juvenile nihilism at the center (lack) of ‘the scene.’ Leaves the listener with the feeling of standing in an abandoned parking lot, having just been pantsed by passing teenagers. As I’m sure it does to those involved, today. Vermiform were very brave indeed to re-release this.
Men’s Recovery Project – The Golden Triumph of Naked Hostility CD
When Born Against imploded, the two main chunks of songwriter (Adam Nathanson and Sam McPheeters) spiraled off into two projects diametrically different from both their former band and each other. Nathanson formed the (Young) Pioneers who crossbred Bob Dylan, Bo Diddley, and Negative Approach into the only “roots rock” worth a damn in the whole blasted decade. McPheeters formed Men’s Recovery Project, a floating unit of like-minded idiot savants and noble savages, who spewed out a frothy brew of Residents/Devo synth chirp, caustic hardcore, Nurse With Wound surrealism,
and noise.
This is their EP collection, at least the first six. There are 60 songs. They range from Regan Youth pastiches about The New York Times to something entitled “Man, Urinating Laughter”, which is, uh, just that. They were damned, as I remember, as “art damaged”, which I’m sure you could have also said about Roxy Music, Disco Inferno, Pere Ubu, and Marvin Gaye. Broken up, I think, but once heard, MRP cannot be unheard, like an optical illusion painting or your first brush with hardcore pornography. (Two helpful reference points, actually.)