Dan Melchior. Bitterness, Spite, Rage and Scorn.

Like some rare, unexpectedly righteous blues rock platter dug out of a garage sale, Bitterness, Spite, Rage and Scorn is an homage, an elation, a junkyard cathedral to the Savage Chord. Its grooves were carved by hand with a pair of rusty knives.

With a voice like a smashed window and a devotion to pile-driving minimalism, Dan Melchior plays fuzzed out swamp rock (swamped out fuzz rock? rocked out swamp fuzz?) like John Lee Hooker and Mark E. Smith’s love child. He has a long pedigree with Holly Golightly and Billy Childish, so you know what you’re getting into.



Bitterness

Cave Weddings. Bring Your Love / Let’s Drive.

Eric La Grange is in too many bands for me to keep track of. I know about Eric & The Happy Thoughts and The Romance Novels, and….okay, three. I guess he has three bands. But I am here today to tell you about The Cave Weddings and this one perfect single—exquisite, impeccable guitar pop in the mold of countless 60’s summer bands. Bring Your Love (tart and tight like The Archies, only without sucking) kicks off like a racehorse with a driving, perfectly chosen guitar line and drums galloping like a hormone rush. Let’s Drive is as jangly and rollicking as Buddy Holly’s jalopy. It’s all there: tambourine rhythms, sparkling, clearly drawn melodies, harmonized “ba-ba-ba’s”, and occasional bouts of frothy, frenetic, shredding guitar. I wanna lick it and see what it tastes like.

Cave Weddings

Boomgates. Bright Idea / Cameo.

Eddy Current Suppression Ring put on the best punk show I’ve ever seen. And I don’t mean punk as a style of music, but whatever it was about the original incarnation, whatever DIY exuberance, whatever magic connection it had to its audience, a true you/me/us, Eddie Current has it in spades. It was jaw dropping. There were maybe only twenty or so of us in the club, but they performed like their life depended on it.

Lead singer Brendan Suppression was a nervous bundle of energy who seemed to find his peace while performing, despite the fact that he was stalking back and forth on the stage like a slightly less manic Cornholio. It was the release of being truly yourself, even if that self is a bit twitchy and tightly wound. During instrumental portions he would lean wearily on his bandmates and hold his mic to their chests, like some sort of autistic attempt to plug directly in to their heartbeats, which seemed profoundly sweet. Towards the end of the show, after climbing all over the stage and merchandise table, he cautiously staggered into the audience while the band strummed and thumped and riffed furiously as if they could conjure up a secular rock n’ roll rapture right then and there. Drenched in sweat, Brendan repeated his mic gesture, touching each of us in turn as a sort of punk rock communion, sharing with us their energy and adding the sound of our bodies to their mix. A fan held a cold can of beer to the back of his neck to cool him off, and then it was over.

I’ve loved and thrived off music for ages, but that night was an epiphany. Fuck the hippies, this was the real thing. In that moment I felt like we all—all of us in the club, everybody on stage—loved one another; like we’d all just shared a communal vision of something rare and astonishing and perfect and beautiful. No church revival could ever compare.

Boomgates is (so far) a one off featuring Brendan and friends (Trial Kennedy, Teen Archer, The Twerps, Dick Diver), and it has a definite ECSR vibe, but softened by the addition of Stephanie Hughes’ dulcet voice. It’s a looser, poppier affair that just wants to hang out with you and settle comfortably onto your heart. The summery Bright Idea trundles along on a strolling, rubbery bass that falls somewhere between a relaxed ECSR and the Go-Betweens, and the interplay of Brandon’s vocals and Steph’s backing whoah-o-ohs make me think of old C-86 tunes or Slumberland releases. The guitars are still nice and trashy, though. B-side, Cameo, lets Steph take lead on the vocals before Brendan comes in with an homage to Lou Reed’s talking songs, only with an Australian accent and having to do with relating some weird dream he had. It alternates between the story and the sharply jangly chorus where they all erupt, singing “you’re just a cameo in my dreams”.

In short, they are expectedly awesome, and “for your information, this is all you need to know”.

P.S.: They have a new single coming out on April 18th on Smart Guy Records.

Boomgates

The Snivelling Shits. I Can't Come.

I feel like I should just be able to point out that these guys named themselves The Snivelling Shits and that their signature song spends six minutes detailing all the many ways in which their lead singer can’t achieve an orgasm, and leave it at that. But that would mean leaving out mention of Crossraods, wherein they take the piss out of Lou Reed by turning Waiting for the Man into a Bowie-esque vamp about impatiently waiting for their favorite British soap opera to start. Or bludgeon the French language to death. Or lament their inability to become samurai, question god’s gender and daily grooming rituals, and write a song for The Damned.

Anyway, as Maximumrocknroll once said, this album is "essential for music lovers and music haters alike". Formed as a bit of a lark in 1977 by music journalists Giovanni Dadamo and Dave Fudger (Zig Zag, Sounds, and The Face), they recorded Terminal Stupid (backed with the aforementioned I Can’t Come) and sent it anonymously to their rivals at NME, who made it single of the week. With a lineup rounded out by members of Eddie & the Hotrods and eventually legendary producer Steve Lillywhite, the Shits recorded a total of nine songs that, through utter devotion to being as magnificently stupid as possible, manage to be as good as or better than most of the bands they were supposedly mocking.

If you can dig a viciously unholy smash-up of the Velvets, The Damned, Bowie, and the Sex Pistols, then this is a criminally forgotten classic of punk-as-fuck snots who couldn’t even take themselves seriously (thank god).

Shits

V/A. Grimsby Fishmarket 4 Norrkoeping 0.

This ridiculously hard to find compilation was originally issued by Swedish pop fanzine Grimsby Fishmarket (I think in 1991). The Orchids track was an exclusive to the tape and never appeared anywhere else. Quite a few bands I'd never heard before, too.

1. Eusebio - Louis Philippe
2. Song About Girls - Bummer Twins
3. Walking Back To You - The Cherry Orchard
4. This Friendship Of Ours - This Perfect Day
5. Chick House - Roof
6. Barriers Of Mine - Are You Mr Riley
7. Silent Sigh City - Happydeadmen
8. Shaunty - Joe Clack
9. She Fakes Apples - My Finest Hour
10. I Fell In Love Last Night - Cerise
11. Kymri - The Apple Moths
12. Jennifer Anywhere - The Kitchen Cynics
13. Room - Bridge
14. Turn Over - Momus
15. Into The Morgue - Mary-Go-Round
16. Next Summer - Brighter
17. New World - Venus Peter
18. Chelsea Guitar - Blueboy
19. Not Unusual - BJ Eagle
20. The Light That Will Cease To Fail - Stereolab
21. High Rise - The Cherry Orchard
22. Windmills And Milestones - Bummer Twins
23. Wood Dust - Joe Clack
24. Ralph De Bricassart - Happydeadmen
25. Time Will Pass - The Rileys
26. And When I Wake Up - The Orchids
27. Birds Of Prey - Marble Hammock

Grimsby

The Lumerians. Burning Mirrors / Chevaux Fous.

I got sucked in by the trippy cover art smiling enigmatically at me from the shelf of 45s in my local record shop. A gnomic, three-eyed, golden mystic looking out underneath a field of eyes (leaves? paramecium?) that transform into a convulsive wave of moire dots. Also, I'd just finished reading Invented Knowledge, all about fake histories and pseudosciences, and it had a chapter on Lemuria—a "lost" continent supposedly located between India and Australia—so it seemed fortuitous. I'm perfectly OK picking up an album based on its cover, and this one matched perfectly.

Burning Mirrors erupts in a spasm of pummeling drums and bass driving a deeply grooved krautrock beat, like the Silver Apples crossed with Hawkwind. It’s a whirlwind swirl of noise rock and psychedelica that builds up towering layers of whooping incantations, howling organ, and fuzzed-out guitars that quickly saturate all the available psychic space in the room. It’s a total brain melter. They’re getting comparisons to the Black Angels, and although they definitely build analog altars of throbbing reverb, it feels less retro. They’re looser, wilder, more exploratory and way more likely to just start going wiggy all over the place.

The b-side, Chevaux Fous, translates the Osmond’s Crazy Horses into a grinding echo-chamber of siren noise and triple-bad-acid occult freak-outs. They’ve got a full length out now on Knitting Factory Records that you should definitely pick up.

Burning

St. Christopher. All of a Tremble.

Sarah 20
Released: August 1989
Tracks:
01: All Of A Tremble
02: My Fortune
03: The Hummingbird

Tremble

The Wild Tchoupitoulas. The Wild Tchoupitoulas.

Today is the day I traditionally spend biting off the impulse to tell people they have schmutz on their forehead, which means that once again Mardi Gras has come and gone and I missed the opportunity to post this album.

I’ve never enjoyed the various pleasures of Mardi Gras, nor even visited New Orleans, although I did once attend Key West’s Halloween celebration, Fantasy Fest. I imagine they’re somewhat similar, although Fantasy Fest (when I attended in ’94 at least) was primarily being enjoyed by droves of middle-aged naked people in body paint. I do recall one delightful couple who had dressed from head to toe in vintage ‘50s duds and were wheeling around an old fashioned baby stroller. When people leaned in to see the “baby”, a little person dressed in leather bondage gear would leap out making boogada-boogada-boogada noises. So I guess what I’m saying is that if you’re looking for a getaway built around heavy drinking and nudity, Key West is probably the more family oriented destination. Although New Orleans’ celebration lasts all week and they could probably use the money more. As I’m sure you’re aware, New Orleans has not exactly been suffering from a surfeit of good fortune lately. The way things have been going, we all know it’s only a matter of time before Ben Stiller unleashes Fuck the Meters (“the hilarious and heartwarming tale of one man’s struggle to overcome dyslexia and join a New-Orlean’s funk band”¹) upon the already punch-drunk metropolis.

Speaking of the Meters, they, along with several of the Neville brothers, can be found on this non-stop rump-shaker from the heyday of New Orleans funk. Despite the pedigree, the stars of the show are the Wild Tchoupitoulas themselves, a tribe founded by George Landry (better known as Big Chief Jolly) in the early 70’s. It’s a swampy stew of New Orleans jazz, R&B, and blues, with an emphasis on appropriately dirty funk. The songs are built around traditional call-and-response chants, with niceley rough and raw vocals from Big Chief Jolly and the rest of his tribe. If you’re a fan of Professor Longhair, or early Dr John, grab this now.

The word fonktaculastic gets bandied about a lot in favor of bands who would barely be in danger of catching gonorrhea if it were actually spread by rhythmic clapping. But the Tchoupitoulas are the real deal. They're more than infectious. They'll leave rabid hoodoo brand upon your brain.

1. Script available upon request. You may also be interested in my original screenplays Forrest Gump II: The Gumpening and Abel Gance’s Napoleon Dynamite.

Wild Tchoupitoulas

Henry's Dress. Bust 'Em Green.

One of Slumberland’s best noisepop releases. The band has swept up the shrapnel from their debut into bristling piles of jagged, brightly colored confetti. Their shoegaze excesses have been condensed into blasts of garage punk mauling 60’s mod rock. You can see the genesis of the Aisler’s Set, but it’s a much, much louder, fuzzed-out version of what’s to come. When they’re going full tilt, they have a way of pummeling through a song with delirious abandon, which just digs the hooks in deeper. You may not notice them the first time, but soon you won’t be able to get Hey Allison, All This Time for Nothing, and Self Starter out of your head. It hurtles by in just under half an hour, so I’ve appended the songs from their 1620 single as a bonus.



Green

Schatzi and Hazeltine. Happy Birthday Baby / When Yr Alone.

The first couple of times I listened to this, I was sure some part of it had been recorded on the wrong speed. The vocals are so damnably cute and coy—a winking come-on from a couple of Ronettes obsessed teenage garage punks hiding switchblades in the pockets of their leather jackets. But now it all falls together. All the great 60's girl-group pop was about love and obsession, so it makes sense that Schatzi and Hazeltine have built their own musical shrine to the sultry sound of tuff-girls and the menacing vulnerability of teen love. You can feel the sway of her hips in the swagger of her voice. They're lipstick killers—gang debs demanding kisses in exchange for the pleasure of their songs.

The hand-made, low-budget wall of sound is exceptionally well crafted and layered, much more so than you'd expect for a couple of songs that were probably dreamed up and tossed off in one exuberant afternoon. It's a total blast. Plus hand-claps! Glockenspiel! That moist, swollen-lipped, tiger-kitteny growl they stole from Ronnie Specter for the "oh-oh bay-a-buh's"! Crush worthy.

Video for When Yr Alone


Happy Birthday Baby

Buy it from Insound (US) or Bachelor (Europe)