Still feelin’ kinda 90s, so here’s some slackeriffic evanescent psychic pezz drops from Lawrence, KS duo Butterglory. I’ve seen numerous comparisons to Pavement (who, honestly, I never cared for) and Archers of Loaf (who I’m not all that familiar with), but to me they sound like a crackling, ragged wire version of Yo La Tengo’s Genius + Love. They were contemporaries of all those bands, so it’s not like they were trying to recreate that sound, it was apparently just some lo-fi virus going around at the time. Indie mono, in more ways than one.
Despite the comparatively lackadaisical attitude emanating from Matt Suggs and Debby Vander Wall’s vocals (I imagine this being recorded when neither member felt like getting off the couch), the songs are endearing, hooky, and melodic in a skewed, left-handed fashion where you’re never quite sure which way they’re going to swerve next. The melodies easily win out over the noisy, ramshackle trappings, and part of the magic is the way they paste together all the unpredictable, unpolished bits of buzzing guitar feedback, perky trap drumming, and cool boy/girl vocals into two minutes of hummable chaos.
Getting back to my nostalgic lamentations for the 90s1, I’d like to mourn the passing of feminism and pro-choice activism as a mainstream phenomenon2. I got spoiled, coming of age at a time when women had taken their rightful place on the stage (partially by force, mostly by being more awesome than everyone else) and feminist and pro-choice concerns were front and center in the culture. It seemed that we had finally broken through; that there would be no turning back the clock. I realize that I was still living in an insulated “alternative” bubble, and that large portions of America didn’t share my convictions3, but it was thrilling to see the challenge being made (besides, who was going to mess with Kim Gordon, PJ Harvey, Kathleen Hannah, Kim Deal, or any of the numerous other women kicking ass across the country?). We had L7’s Rock 4 Choice4 and Riot Grrl, and even the boys were in tune—I seem to remember Eddie Vedder scrawling “choice” on his arms when Pearl Jam played SNL, and Curt Kobain made a habit of puncturing traditional male rock-star machismo by getting photographed wearing a lot of cardigans while holding cats (things usually coded as female) and appearing in his pajamas on the cover of Out Magazine.
Unfortunately, we finished out the decade with a president who largely backed off on his pro-choice promises, with both NOW and NARAL asking the street-level movements to tone down the demonstrations for fear of alienating an administration they thought was tenuously still on their side. By the turn of the millennium, fully in the sway of “finding common ground” with anti-choicers5, abortion rights had been chipped away to such an extent that it was more difficult to obtain one than it had been under Reagan and Bush6. And now we’ve arrived at the point where a Republican Congress can shamelessly introduce a bill that would not only prohibit abortion coverage through private insurance, but that attempts to define rape out of existence for the majority of women who have been sexually assaulted. They’ve since backed down and removed the “forcible rape” language (proving that street-level feminist activism still has power, and is needed more than ever), but they’re still going ahead with the bill. If you live in the U.S., write to your representative, and if you’d like to do something more directly positive, donate to the National Network of Abortion Funds, which helps fight these measures and helps pay for women who can’t afford abortions on their own.
I was thinking of all this when I recently revisited an album that had been a favorite of mine back in ’95, but had fallen off my radar in the ensuing years. Susan Voelz is probably best known for playing violin in Poi Dog Pondering (and has contributed to albums by John Mellencamp, Alejandro Escovedo, and Ronnie Lane). Much of Poi’s work is characterized by the use of relentless optimism as a weapon against the inevitability of death, but Susan’s solo work finds her examining more ambiguous territory. Recorded after surviving a horrific car crash, she starts to question the ability to connect or take action within this brief existence, asking, "When we die, will we think this was anything?".
That emotionally abstract, quizzical tone flows through the album. The instrumental Mystic River Bridge refers to a real-life suicide while Susan wonders if the jumper chose the location for its name. The poppy Happy can be read as a manifesto for allowing yourself to be who you are (“Just for an hour I'm going to be happy/Just for a day I'm going to let dumb things happen/I don't care how I look 'cause I look good-enough/I don't care what I think 'cause I'm not thinkin' much”) and as a caustic take on happiness as a goal instead of a state of being (“I don't wanna feel bad/So I stop feelin' anything”). Later on, William, about a man hospitalized for manic happiness, expands the idea further. In the liner notes, Voelz writes of Step Off the Roof, “There was a news story of protesters blocking entrance to a clinic, forcing girls to climb a ladder to enter through a second floor window. What if she skipped the procedure and turned and induced her abortion by jumping off the roof onto the protesters below?”.
She can be solemn, but none of it feels depressing or dour. It’s actually breathtakingly beautiful—somewhat like Mazzy Star’s languid sensualtiy crossed with Andrew Bird’s spritely, tight-rope dancing virtuosity. Dreamy—like so many things back then tended to be. The arrangement and production for such a small album are spectacular. Seductive, swooning melodies (rich and velvety with deep purple hues) are cloaked in mesmerizing, atmospheric guitar drones that swarm around the more distinct core of Susan’s breezy voice and the bright solar flare of her violin. She has a way of pinning a hook to your eardrum (especially in Taka Looka Round and Step Off the Roof) and the rare ability to sing about discrete, concrete things in a tender, personal way while at the same time holding them just far enough out of reach to analyze it like a butterfly impaled on a needle.
1. I have a theory (which is mine), which is that “The 90s” actually comprised a period from about 1988 (the year of the first Pixies’ album) to about 1994 (around the time Curt Kobain killed himself. Not that Curt “owned” the 90’s or that his death caused its downfall or anything, but it’s as good a date as any, and my memory of the period is of things going downhill fast after that). At least, this was the in-between time period for the cultural highlights of my in-between generation. Yes, other stuff (soul-deadening effluvia) happened in the 90s “the decade”—boy bands, nu-metal, rap-rock—but those things didn’t belong to “The 90s”.
2. No, I’m not saying that feminism is dead, just that the media has wholly fallen for the backlash.
3. In fact, a lot of activism was in response to the wave of home-grown, Christian terrorism directed at abortion clinics in the late 80s and early 90s.
4. Doing some research online4a, I notice that Gillian Anderson emceed in 2001. *nerdgasm*
4a. I also see that Stone Temple Pilots once played Rock 4 Choice, despite having recorded Sex Type Thing, which was totally rape-y. I know Scott Wieland later claimed it was an anti-rape song, but I find it nearly impossible to get over the first person perspective and the fact that there’s nothing in the song to undercut his point of view. There’s probably a whole other post that could be done just on the subject of male bands writing what they think of as anti-rape songs that identify with the rapist instead of the victim. Just off the top of my head, there’s NIN’s Big Man with a Gun, and Nirvana’s Polly and, of course, Rape Me. Polly at least, puts the creepiness of the narrator front and center (whereas Sex Type Thing just makes STP sound creepy), and could be read (if you were thinking of writing a term paper on it) as alluding to the inability to have true sexual equality in a patriarchal society. Rape Me, on the other hand, with its cop from the Teen Spirit riff, just seemed to be Curt going off on his hatred of fame and what mass media did to his art, which is pretty trivializing of actual rape victims.
5. There is none. When one side believes women have the right to make their own decisions about their health, their lives, and their bodies—and the other side thinks of women as less human than a clump of cells, as people who deserve to be punished for their sexuality, and who have no interest in the needs of children once they’re born—I can’t imagine what we could possibly have in common. There is no compromise to be made on women’s rights. You either believe they have them or they don’t, and the anti-choice crowd is not going to stop until they’ve overturned Roe v. Wade. And after they’ve accomplished that, they’re going after Griswold v. Connecticut, so stock up on birth control now.
6. There’s an excellent article on the history of Rock 4 Choice, its place in the 90s alternative culture, and the withering of mainstream feminist activism here.
I still wonder why everyone stopped wearing Doc Martens.
A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened. ~Albert Camus
Holy fucking fuck. This.
A Siouxsie-Salem-Suicide goth freak-scene making out with the memory of the Cocteau Twins, trying to find out what really made Elizabeth Fraser’s voice quaver so ecstatically. Yasmine Kittle (really) bleats round, aching, bruise-black moans and screams over sticky-fingered synth fugues and clittery-clacking subway-track beats. It’s dark and powerful and flushed with sex.
I keep thinking, goddamn, why doesn’t anybody make music like this anymore? Not “like this” in the sense of sounding like the bands I think they sound like—although that counts, too—but “this” in the sense of a band that arrived just for you, that says here I am, singing in your voice, even if you cannot make these sounds. Something that can infuse you and take over your DNA. I can barely remember the last time I fell fucking hardcore for a band. Maybe it’s my age; maybe I listen to too much music to be intimate with any one album anymore, but this makes me want to string up Christmas lights over our bed and commence with the gettin’ it on.
Digging for music is looking to find your true heart. Or to rediscover it, to bare your chest to a melody’s dart, slipped like a needle through your red heart and suturing you with long, swooping silver threads, a riotous fray of impossible roller-coaster loops and knots strung like telegraph wires to passing clouds and buzzsaws and dizzy helicopter-seedlings and fractured cups of papershell eggs and fingernail clippings and nothing at all and nothing more so than (and above all) Fuchsia.
Memory is a graveyard of carefully stowed cardboard boxes and index cards; things you’ve snipped off with shears hoping to preserve. But I still want them in me. I stop the world. I melt with her. I pull out my web of veins and peel them back like I’m unrolling an elegant glove, until it hangs like a mirror from my fingertips, and press the tips and tracery into the ground, or into the mossy, crushed-velvet cave between her legs,
(legs, hips and arms smooth and taut as a sapling, her gamine body, the pearlescent skin of a crepe-myrtle draped around a tangle of antlers, her scapula and pelvis revealing themselves in subcutaneous parabolic swells like waves in the ocean, and at the apex of her inner thighs, two creamy divots like the first scoop from a clean spoon through a freshly opened box of vanilla ice cream)
but every pulse and fluid surge between us ticks off another perfect sphere of unrecoverable time—glass candle grenades strung like morse-code crystals on chandelier strands stretching back into the inky black nebula of a startled squid’s ejaculate—time making its slipstream getaway the moment it’s been noticed.
I worry that I am succumbing to nostalgia. Things used to be different and I was used to that. But it’s still the same (and new) every time.
This was on the flip side of the Mercury Rev show posted below. Whoever sent it to me didn't record where or when it came from. Judging by the accented voices you can hear at the beginning, this was recorded somewhere in the UK, which probably dates it to 1999 as that was the only year they toured in England (outside of one London show in '97).
There's some tape hiss, but it's quickly drowned out by Hovercraft's ear-scouring levels of demented noise (There may be a good way to remove ambient tape artifacts, but whenever I've tried it, it just leaves the rest of the audio sounding clippy. Besides, as Cat and Girl have said, tape hiss is the only authentic sound).
Hovercraft preferred to improvise live, lurching and swaying between mid-century, abstract industrial training-film music and reverberating, psychedelically mechanistic interstellar overdrive. It could be the soundtrack for a very destructive ballet about a belligerently drunk, hyper-jointed, giant robot stumbling down a dark alley.
A volcanic upwelling of psychedelic magma. A slow motion film of Neil Young crashing the Death Star face first into the unicorn sequence from Fantasia. A circus of jelly-bodied squid wobbling around the ring on unicycles, cards fluttering in the spokes.
It's the David Baker years, when a slippery black-light liquid ran thick in their veins. Back then, they could even out-flame the Lips.
1. Very Sleepy Rivers 2. Syringe Mouth 3. Something for Joey 4. Chasing a Bee 5. Meth of a Rockette's Kick 6. Boys Peel Out
I quite often describe bands as being the equivalent of some hypothetical cross-breeding of their influences. It’s rarely true and can unfairly diminish the singularly unique elements they’ve created. So without discounting the fact that Elf Power really are something wholly more and better than the sum of their antecedents, I think it’s fairly possible to draw an accurate, if inverted, phylogenetic map of their sound.
Really, it’s only because of how secure they are in their own identity that they can be so successful when revisiting the songs of their heroes. It’s why Nothing’s Going to Happen1 is one of their best albums, and possibly the best representation of what they do, despite being made up entirely of covers. The Flaming Lips, Brian Eno, R.E.M., T. Rex, Wire, Sonic Youth, Jesus and Mary Chain, Roky Erickson, Robyn Hitchcock, The Buzzcocks, The Byrds, Hüsker Dü, and The Misfits all find some expression in Elf Power’s perfectly balanced mixture. Maybe it’s because their own songs—filtered and soaked in so many different elements—can function like a simultaneous mixtape that it’s so easy to like the band. They’re clueing you in to where they’ve come from and what they’ve loved along the way like your older sister sending you back all the cool bands she discovered in college.
This album was only available at their Back to the Web tour, and collects pretty much everything they’d done that never made it onto an album, or was only available as part of some other compilation you didn’t have. As an obsessive collector, I have to commend and thank them for really doing this type of album right. I want it all, and they’ve put it on here. Demos, more covers, a few live tracks, a remix, and a number of songs that just never saw the light of day. And they’re all really, really good. Historical Ant Wars rules. Back to the Web was a bit of a return to their old sound after a few albums that had found them stepping away from their early dive-bombing buzz, but Treasures From the Trash Heap is an even better encapsulation of the early days (although it covers every period). Like R.E.M.’s similar Dead Letter Office, it’s like getting to rummage around in your favorite band’s junk drawer. Without the pressure to create a coherent album, everything just reverts to being its own weird type of fun.
1. Temporary Arm (country version) 2. Face in the Sand (demo) 3. Feel a Whole Lot Better (Byrds cover) 4. Dandy in the Underworld (T.Rex cover) 5. Another Face (demo) 6. Hole in My Shoe (demo) 7. All the Same 8. Rise High Giant Fly 9. Historical Ant Wars 10. Empty Pictures (demo) 11. Princess Knows (Olivia Tremor Control cover) 12. Invisible Men (demo) 13. Dark Circles 14. Underneath the Bunker (R.E.M. cover) 15. Arrow Flies Close (live at Horseshoe Tavern, Toronto) 16. Blackbirds 17. Invisible Men (techno version) 18. Run Through the Forest 19. I Know I 20. Spiders 21. It's Not Cold 22. Reuters (Wire cover, live at Horseshoe Tavern, Toronto) 23. Honey (Spacemen 3 cover, live at the Landfill, Athens, GA) 24. The Slider (T.Rex cover)
1. Actually, A Dream In Sound and Creatures are the pinnacle of their work, but Nothing’s Going To Happen seems to hit right in the middle of what they’re usually aiming for.
Sometime after posting All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavor’s Turning Into Small, I got an email from guitarist Merc letting me know that he and drummer Brian Doherty had a new band called Ifwhen. Actually, they’ve been around since 2003, but they do have a new EP that’s available as a free download from their website. I’ve got it linked below in mp3 format, but if you head over there you can also get it in FLAC, plus download their cover of Syd Barrett’s No Good Trying.
Ifwhen doesn’t sound exactly like ANL&LF, but it does sound like its natural progression. The shoegaze and post-rock elements have become very compressed, and the songs are more jaggedly three-dimensional. There’s a geometric feel to it, as if they aren’t playing melodies, but unspooling the schematics of theoretical architecture from an AUTOCAD machine that’s just finished reading House of Leaves.
The logic/programming implications of their name become readily apparent in the multifaceted intersections of sound and direction. Each song is a maze of possibilities being explored simultaneously. It verges on noise, but like ANL&LF, Ifwhen is always revolving around and reflecting a solid pop core through its many twirling prisms. It’s the Everlasting Gobstopper of ear candy. It’s still highly disorienting—psychotically (psychedelically) schizoid, like listening to Barrett, Belong and Melt Banana all at the same time—but they really are working to fuck your shit up for your own good. They’re trying to change your perception.
And they can do it, too. Unlike most post-MBV bands, Ifwhen don’t compose based on volume, or reverb, or textures, or shades of color. They aren’t feeling things out improvisationally, they’re reconfiguring the actual internal structure of the music. Keyboardist Mary McDowell can actually play in two different time signatures (one with each hand) at the same time. And Merc’s guitar has a way of constantly folding in on itself like origami that never resolves into known shapes. Everything is oblique without being obfuscatory. The hidden song structures will slowly crystallize on repeated listens as you learn to navigate their psychohedron space.
In honor of yesterday's victory for equality in California, here's the incomparable Hedwig and The Origin of Love.
I once spent an entire evening standing next to John Cameron Mitchell at a Breeder's concert thinking, "Hey that guy looks familiar. Do I know him from somewhere?", and then he climbed on stage and they tore through Angry Inch and I felt like a dork, especially since I missed the opportunity to ask him if he autographed body parts.
The Breeders, along with a slew of alternative icons1 contribute covers and tribute songs to this wonderful little compilation that benefited the Harvey Milk School for LGBTQ youth. And as much as I love the original Origin, I think Rufus Wainwright may have recorded the definitive version. Also, if I ever became president, I would put all my effort into reuniting Sleater-Kinney and possibly getting them to make Fred Schneider at least a semi-permanent member of the band.
OK, all my effort after ensuring that LGBTQ Americans had full equality under the law. The ruling striking down California's bigoted Prop 8 is a great and important victory, but unfortunately it's still only another small step towards truly egalitarian civil rights. The pro-hate crowd will continue to fight this until it ends up in the Supreme Court, where real justice is iffy at this point. You can help by joining with or donating to groups like The Courage Campaign, Freedom to Marry, the Human Rights Campaign, and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.
1. Frank Black, Robyn Hitchcock, The Polyphonic Spree, Spoon, Imperial Teen, TMBG, Cyndi Lauper (who absolutely tears the roof off on Midnight Radio), Yo La Tengo, Yoko Ono, etc.
3. Postman's Knock Recorded at the Portland Arms, November 1978. Left off Live at the Portland Arms album.
4. Look Into Your Mirror Companion Piece to Of a Walnut, which eventually surfaced on 1976-81. Session recorded in 1977 in Robyn's living room.
5. Smoothie Underwater Moonlight outtake.
6. Innocent Boy Possible outtake from aborted 1978 Radar album.
7. The Man Who Invented Himself Different mix from original test pressing of Black Snake Diamond Role.
8. Nightride to Trinidad 9. Kingdom of Love Disco remixes by Steve Hillage.
10. Listening to the Higsons Portastudio recording from 1982. Drum machine programming by Vince Ely of the Psychedelic Furs. B-Side to Eaten By Her Own Dinner 7".
11. Dr. Sticky B-Side to Eaten By Her Own Dinner 7".
12. Surgery Fegmania era outtake.
13. Calvary Cross Live on 1986 US tour.
14. Legalized Murder Globe of Frogs outtake.
15. Ruling Class Queen Elvis outtake. Peter Buck on guitar.
16. More Than This 17. The Ghost In You 18. Birdshead Live at McCabe's Guitar Shop, July 1988.
19. Fairplay 20. Linden Arden Stole the Highlights Live at McCabe's Guitar Shop, May 1991.
I really like this one. I tend to fall for albums that have a bit of sprawl and eclecticism to them rather than a purity of vision (I’ll take the Cure’s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me and Wish over Disintegration any day). There are more rooms to wander into and explore. Part of the shifting stylistic focus is due to other members of the band taking a shot at the songwriting, so if you liked Dave Weckerman’s Yung Wu project, you’ll get a little more his unique vision here (the dude has some pretty odd lyrics, and his voice is even more informal than Glenn’s). I think it’s also probably unfair to listen to Wake Ooloo at this point expecting to hear another Feelies album. Of course, it’s hard to escape the memories, what with Glenn’s flatter-than-Lou-Reed voice, and a couple of songs do sound reminiscent of the slower moments on later Feelies records, but for the most part, this is its own beast. The rocking parts rock harder than they used to, and the poppier bits are usually just out for a nice stroll. There’s a nice mixture of lackadaisical slide guitar, country blues, classic rockisms, and garage burners.
It seems inevitable that a goth band would eventually name themselves Sex Church. I'm just surprised it didn't happen twenty-five years ago. The genre was already awash in religious/erotic iconography (I used to have this sweet t-shirt that combined a medieval painting of the Virgin Mary with a similar painting of Jesus in such a way that made her look both topless and intersex), and everybody knows goths like to make out in graveyards and old churches. Even a large contingent of my non-goth friend’s stories of their first time begin with, “So, I was away at church camp…”
Dead End rides a stomping, Bauhausian bass line out of the gloom before wading knee-deep into a black pool of fuzz and feedback. From there it takes off on an endless, mesmerizing blanket of deep purple tones and crushed velvet vortexes. Chiming guitars skitter and pluck at silver threads while the rest of the band ascends a hypnotic Spacemen 3 riff that becomes the song’s driving force. At the last minute, they suddenly perform a graceful swan dive and explode into a joyful chorus of Jesus & Mary Chainisms. The B-side is more gloom and dirge; smeared lipstick to the a-side’s electric tangle of bird’s nest hair.
Sex Church is made up of former members of Catholic Boys, Vapid, and Ladies Night, none of whom I am familiar with, although I notice that Nick G was in The Tears.
Kathleen Hannah could scream like nobody’s business. I’m talkin’ a hyper-tantrum wail that could pierce walls, lies, ignorance, ideologies, and indifference. She could sing it sweet, too, when she wanted, and the band could more than equal her furious, explosive energy or turn it down to 11 for some laid-back indie sing-alongs. This is movement punk—where the Riot Grrrls traded in anarchy for feminism—angry, articulate, fearless, and playful. Rebel Girl could put up a fight with any other punk song ever recorded. They were out to save lives; to reclaim the “radical possibilities of pleasure” when surrounded by rape culture; to define cool on their own terms in their own voices; to make their own noise, write their own stories; to be the subjects, not the objects of history. They channeled the transgressive, cathartic energy of punk into REVOLUTION GIRL STYLE NOW! If you’re a teen girl, don’t go another day without adding them to your collection. If you’re anybody else, you need to hear them, too.
Glenn Mercer loosens up and floors it down a twisty road leading somewhere between the Feelies, Tom Petty and Felt. It sounds like Glenn just wanted to crank it up and rock his socks off while Dave walloped the drums. There’s still plenty of the Feelies’ texture and knotty guitars, but louder, coarser and unplanned. It almost feels like you’re listening to an unknown Feelies album, but one where they were weary of being so uptight and precise and said “Awfuckit. Let’s just play.”
The first of many side projects, this little ep is probably closest to their "classic" nervous sound. Aside from the lovely, Brenda sung opener (which sounds more like future Speed the Plough material), there's the requisite cover (the Beatle's Love You To, which seems like such an obvious fit I'm surprised it took them this long to get to it), and two songs that sound like outtakes or demos from Crazy Rhythms.
Another of the Feelies' alternate incarnations, this one features Glenn, Bill, Stan, and Brenda along with recent Feelies addition, Dave Weckerman. John Baumgartner, from The Trypes and Speed the Plough, is also along for the ride.
Actually, this was Dave's side project. He takes lead on vocals and wrote the songs, but with Stan Demeski's characteristic rolling toms, Brenda's rich bass leads, and those wonderfully humming, intertwining guitars, there's no mistaking the band. Recorded in between The Good Earth and Only Life, it's a rootsier affair packed with all the shimmering, strumming, sea-faring folk-rock you've come to expect from a Feelies' side project. They cover both Neil Young and Brian Eno, and the album as a whole sounds a bit like what might happen if the latter produced the former. I guess they got out all their pent-up nerves on Crazy Rhythms.
I've yet to be disappointed by anything Feelies related, and this is definitely one of their more charming and beautiful affairs.
Speed the Plough were one of several bands that radiated out of the Feelies on-again-off-again period. Begun as The Trypes—featuring Glenn Mercer, Bill Million and Stan Demeski—they recorded a single, understated EP before disentangling once again, with Brenda Sauter defecting to join the reformed Feelies. The Trypes became Speed the Plough, with Bill Million contributing guitar and production duties. Multi-instrumentalist John Baumgartner, rock critic Jim DeRogatis, woodwind and percussionist Toni Paruta remained, along with Marc Francia, Frank O’Toole and Pete Pedulla rounding out the group and adding several more guitars and drums.
The result retains the influence of the Feelies’ rustic, atmospheric work on The Good Earth and adds cerulean horns and accordion drones, shifting the setting from the golden hour to the deep blue twilight just before inky darkness absorbs the day. It’s a drifting, pastoral version of the Feelies’ tightly-wound, prim psychedlia, and achieves a rich, bucolic beauty of the sort I think R.E.M. would have liked to make—but instead opted for repeatedly having themselves photographed standing around in fields of grain. In fact, this is exactly the album I would want to hear if I could spend the day drifting waist-deep in a grassy field, or rocking to sleep in a hearty wooden dinghy floating on silver ribbons of water through a sea of cattails.
Another craptacular week where I'm not going to have any free time. Stealing this description from wikipedia. I'll just say they sound like Sleater-Kinney as teenagers:
Emilys Sassy Lime (a palindrome) was an all-Asian American teenage riot grrrl trio from SoCal, formed in 1993 by Wendy and Amy Yao, and Emily Ryan. According to Experience Music Project, they formed after sneaking out of their homes one night to see a Bikini Kill and Bratmobile show, striking up a correspondence with Molly Neuman, the drummer of the latter band. They didn't live very close to each other and didn't have cars, so they often had to write their songs over the phone, sometimes leaving seminal ideas for tunes, jingles, and melodies on each others' answering machines. When they finally did have a chance to record, they did so on a singalodeon, a cheap off-the-shelf lo-fi tape recorder. They barely ever practiced (often forbidden from doing so by their parents who considered their studies a bigger priority), making their sound a random, spontaneous indie garage punk-noise collage of "Whatever, just play." They didn't have their own instruments for years, so with every show they played, they had to borrow someone else's in the DIY punk spirit of sharing, often swapping with each other carelessly and making every show sound totally different.
In 1995, they all appeared as dancers in the Kathi Wilcox-directed "Mad Doctor" video for The PeeChees, and they broke up the following year when they finally graduated from high school and attended separate colleges. In 2000, they all participated in the very first Ladyfest in Olympia, the Yao sisters collaborating with Sharon Cheslow in the experimental sound installation performance art project of Coterie Exchange, and in 2003, Emily Ryan starred in one of Jon Moritsugu's critically acclaimed no budget guerrilla underground punk films called Scumrock. Amy Yao's been involved over the years with several different bands, frequently collaborating with Tobi Vail, and completed her MFA in sculpture at the Yale School of Art. Wendy Yao currently owns and runs a shop and DIY indie-punk artist space in LA's downtown Chinatown neighborhood called Ooga Booga.
It’s been a busy week, and I haven’t been able to pay attention to the blog as much as I’d have liked, so here’s some more divine weirdness from the Noseflutes.
I keep asking “why aren’t these bands better remembered?”, but obviously this was never going to be top 40 music. Still, even by the standards of the weird and wooly British underground, the Noseflutes were wildly inventive and really managed to make their purposefully awkward, herky-jerky rhythms and Dada-soapbox vocals gel into compellingly hard rocking songs. They have the same deconstructivist aspirations as A Witness (but less sing-alongable) and the punk spirit of the Membranes (but less bludgeoning).
Eminent could almost (almost) be a Camper Van Beethoven song. Charms has some delightful steel drums. Spitball on My Kisser veers wildly between extremes with exciting, crazed, shrieking choruses. No Plans peeks over the wasteland at country-blues with a punk slide-guitar.
I was going to say they were an art-house version of the Ron Johnson bands, but that makes me think of something refined and winking, like Roxy Music. They’re really more art-studio, and this is kind of a masterpiece.
Even with Kurt Cobain’s imprimatur (Nirvana covered three of their songs), the Vaselines remained primarily a cult phenomenon. Which is too bad because, they were the perfect noise-pop band, and recorded possibly the best records by any group from their decade. Short, catchy, cute and psycho, the Vaselines were classic indie-pop tweeness leavened with punk’s raw edge. They had a naïve, nearly desperate enthusiasm for their songs—all played with pure, guileless abandon and wads of humor. Like a Hello Kitty cut out of ragged sheet metal. Or being shot at with volleys of sweet tarts. If your favorite Velvet Underground songs were the Moe Tucker ones…that fragile sweetness backed up by a band that could explode into vicious feedback at any moment, then you need the Vaselines. You can sing along with them even on the first spin, and you’ll never get the songs out of your head again.
Their friends in Beat Happening had nearly sub-levels of technical skill, were completely ambivalent about tuning, melody and key, and sang casually obsessive songs about teenage love and lust (We tip over apple carts / With the pounding of our hearts, runs a typical lyric). Calvin sounded like an indie-geek version of Barry White and Heather’s voice was achingly sweet in a way that made you think of cardigan sweaters and kittens (without also making you want to throw up). Somehow or another, they ended up playing a lot of hardcore shows with bands like Black Flag or Fugazi, and during their sets handed out candy to the bewildered audiences. They elevated naiveté to an art form.
They also wrote some of the most indelible and influential music of the last twenty years—from twee, acapella laments of unrequited love, thumping, two-chord rockers (also about crushing on a guy or gal who is currently going out with someone who isn’t you), sweet catchy pop about the timelessness of an Indian Summer, and aggressively noisy musical scribbles (again, with lyrics that were probably scrawled on a torn scrap of paper and pushed through the holes of your girlfriend’s locker).
This adorable tape finds them both playing together in London, with some hilarious between song asides.
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