The Ex - Aural Guerrilla [1988]

Been meaning to put this up for a while. The late '80s were a peak for the Ex. By then they'd honed a nimble, unconventional post-punk groove and on this record they throw some noisy weight behind it. These songs sound like machines the band built: lurching forward at a seemingly haphazard pace, but masterfully steered by drummer Katherina Bornefeld. At sharp turns the guitars spill feedback out over the sides, creaking and sputtering and screaming. Combined with Sok's defiant agitprop shoutspeak, which goes well beyond base sloganeering, the result sounds almost weaponlike, corny as it feels to say. Comes together real well on "Carcass," maybe my favorite tune on here. I don't feel like going on about it since in my mind the Ex need no introduction, but if you're not familiar with them, this is a pretty ideal place to start since it's relatively straightforward. If you dig this, see if you're up for their musique concrète double-album Joggers and Smoggers, released a year later.

theex.nl
everything is falling into place

NORA & the JANITORS

Whatever kind of alienation I might experience in the bland drunken cornfield that is a Big Ten college town, I have to imagine it's orders of magnitude worse in North Dakota. That backwater state seems to be coming up more and more in the news, as cannibalistic oil conglomerates sniff around for new sources of global warmth for the rest of us to bake in. They're already burning off enough crude for the flames to be visible from space. Meanwhile, regressive politicians play off their constituents' latent rural misogyny to close the state's one abortion clinic, tugging the nation backwards with the most stringent ban in the country.

Enter Nora & the Janitors, slamming their head against a brick wall of willful ignorance in the most listenable way possible. These two tunes bounce along somewhat like Orange Juice, but instead of said band's carefree joviality, this reeks of  the bitter resignation I associate with '80s Siberian punks like GrOb or Yanka. It can't be easy to work such desperate howling -- with lines like "fell asleep, it was July // woke up, it was November // did I kill that cop? I can't remember" -- into synthed-out, guitar-driven pop songs  and have it come off as well as it does. I dunno, people will probably compare this to the Smiths, but I get the feeling that's not where Nora et al are coming from. Whatever it is, I've had "Banister" on repeat for weeks now, and have yet to tire of it. Maybe my favorite song of 2013 so far. I shouldn't even be devoting this much text to a two-song single. But this stuff really affected me, and it deserves a wider audience.

These two songs are coming out on a tape split with a Minneapolis band I can't find any information on. For now, get this single at N&tJ's bandcamp.

re-up'd: Toothpaste - EP [1983]

Yes, that's a Colgate-Hindenburg doing a Led Zeppelin -- enter Toothpaste, Chicago's Masters of Provocative Funk. This is their first of two releases, an EP recorded in late 1982 and released on Schwa Records, which also put out a 7" by a later incarnation of Silver Abuse around the same time. This 12" EP, recorded at the old Chess Records building on South Michigan Avenue, is a worthy example of the satirical/weird side of Chicago punk. The EP came out toward the tail end of the city's first wave of punk bands, and sounds nothing like the ossified, macho hardcore ritual that predominated by mid-decade (thanks a lot, Effigies/Raygun copycats). Instead, you get swirling guitars -- evoking new-wave on the one hand, early-'80s Bob Mould on the other. "Amerikan Beauties" mockingly apes the opening riff from "Pretty Woman." One minute they're singing blithely about the occupation of Palestine, next thing you know they're groaning about hardware as some kind of metaphor for fucking, or for American prudishness, or something. Toothpaste holds a mirror up to the banal tropes of Midwestern culture, its silly excuses for counterculture, and a Cold War too absurd to care about anymore. But nobody's looking anyway; probably Toothpaste was too absurd to care about. But they're precious currency for a certain type of weirdo, you know who you are. The video below gives you some idea, though the tune sounds more like Special Affect or End Result than what's on the EP:

The blog I Have a Brain in My Ass has video up of Toothpaste's set at the 2010 Riot Fest Busted at Oz reunion ... honestly they sound pretty stiff and uninspired, but if you're already a fan and need to hear some songs that never made it to record, check it out.

Every one was a terrorist, can't say that about our boys

re-up'd: Robert Pete Williams - Louisiana Blues [1966]

I don't know how I have gone so many months without posting this record. It differs from what people are stuck calling 'the blues' in that the songs mostly ride along and hop over a single chord in bopping, fingerpicked strides. Robert Pete Williams played some top-shelf southern/delta shit and his story is as fascinating as any bluesman's:

Discovered in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Robert Pete Williams became one of the great blues discoveries during the folk boom of the early '60s. His disregard for conventional patterns, tunings, and structures kept him from a wider audience, but his music remains one of the great, intense treats of the blues.

Williams was born in Zachary, Louisiana, the son of sharecropping parents. As a child, he worked the fields with his family and never attended school. Williams didn't begin playing blues until his late teens, when he made himself a guitar out of a cigar box. Playing his homemade guitar, Williams began performing at local parties, dances, and fish fries at night while he worked during the day. Even though he was constantly working, he never made quite enough money to support his family, which caused considerable tension between him and his wife; according to legend, she burned his guitar one night in a fit of anger. Despite all of the domestic tension, Williams continued to play throughout the Baton Rouge area, performing at dances and juke joints. 

In 1956, he shot and killed a man in a local club. Williams claimed he acted in self-defense, but he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. He was sent to Angola, where he served two years before being discovered by ethnomusicologists Dr. Harry Oster and Richard Allen. The pair recorded Williams performing several of his own songs, which were all about life in prison. Impressed with the guitarist's talents, Oster and Allen pleaded for a pardon for Williams. The pardon was granted in 1959, after he had served a total of three and a half years. 

For the first five years after he left prison, Williams could only perform in Louisiana, but his recordings -- which appeared on Folk-Lyric, Arhoolie, and Prestige, among other labels -- were popular and he received positive word of mouth reviews. In 1964, Williams played his first concert outside of Louisiana, at the legendary Newport Folk Festival. Williams' performance was enthusiastically received and he began touring the United States, often playing shows with Mississippi Fred McDowell. For the remainder of the '60s and most of the '70s, Robert Pete Williams constantly played concerts and festivals across America, as well a handful of dates in Europe. Along the way, he recorded for a handful of small independent labels, including Fontana and Storyville. 

Williams slowed down his work schedule in the late '70s, largely due to declining health. The guitarist died on December 31, 1980, at the age of 66. 

(from allmusic)

Fans of Charley Patton or Robert Johnson would dig Williams, and probably know him already. If you've ever heard the Captain Beefheart song 'Grown So Ugly' (or, I guess, the Black Keys' cover of it), you'll recognize the original version here. Listen, I really shouldn't have to try to convince you; this is essential, and punk as it gets.

Baby this ain't me

LAUGHBOY

It's fun to watch a band develop their sound in the live realm. When I first started seeing Laughboy play, their songs were masked by opaque, blunt-force hardcore noise overload common to many young bands. Over the course of a couple years' worth of shows, a unique sound started to take shape. They've been billed as 'cosmic' or 'psychedelic' hardcore, and those descriptions seem apt enough on this cassingle released by Spotted Race. The three short songs contain frantic vocal howls cast amongst psychedelic guitar reverb, buttressed by a murky low end that hits like an asteroid collision. Whether on tape or on your computer, the songs have the raw, shitty hardcore fidelity you all know and love. Have a listen to the a-side, which personally I can't get enough of:

On April 13 Laughboy will be playing the Midwest Zine Fest aftershow with fellow C-U locals Chain's Gang and Unnerve. Like the Fest itself, the show will be at the Urbana Independent Media Center. Show starts at 8:00, fb details here for those who seek them.

nothing like being with bitter fools

VA - Not Normal Presents: Welcome to 2013

Fuck. Where do I start with this comp? Ralph really outdid himself on this one. It's got nearly everybody on it: twenty-eight songs in forty minutes by seventeen bands from Chicago, the Midwest, the USA, THE WORLD. The record wastes no time, with an exciting start by Basque punks Hondartzako Hondakinak. I'd never heard of them before but I'm glad that's no longer the case. Further on in the comp the sounds run the whole spectrum, from the psycho-saturated ramonescore of Cülo to the power-pop punk of Tenement to the cosmic hardcore of NASA Space Universe to the angular UK palpitations of Good Throb to the raging Spanish-language thrash of Porkeria to the Minutemen-invoking funkiness of Big Crux ... if I don't stop here I'll just end up listing all the bands. But really, every cut is crucial. I should mention that this is Ooze's vinyl debut -- but don't worry, they haven't cleaned their sound up one bit.

Sample the tunes here, then buy a copy at Not Normal. For your own damn sake don't sleep on this one; the wax sounds great and it comes with a full-size 20-page booklet with band infos, lyrics, and some sick artwork. For what you're getting the price is a STEAL. 

Gas Rag - Gas Rag CS [2013]

Saw these dudes open for Crazy Spirit back in January, and their set was early enough in the lineup that it didn't suffer from the ridiculous overcrowding that came after. Besides that they were one of the highlights of the night. Rapid, nihilistic drug-punk songs about the drone war and other things that tug at your angry damaged heartstrings. The six songs thrash by in less than five minutes that I know you can spare, punk. Give it a spin; if you dig it, email durso1753@gmail.com for a copy of the tape.

War pervert

CHAIN'S GANG

Debut cassette from Urbana Illinois featuring members of Kowabunga! Kid, Witch in Her Tomb, and Horrible Things, to name a few. Chain's Gang is of the new crop of hardcore bands that have formed here in the past year. Not a lot of bands can sound this heavy and snotty at the same time. Stomping pharmaceutical nightmare rhythms caked with guitar muck and psych-punk fuzz. Keep an eye out for these reprobates; you'll want to see them before they see you.

Write to Crippled Sound, for a copy of the tape. Website hasn't been updated in a while but I've seen that there's been a second pressing so they're still available.

Broken glass, beat yr ass

re-up'd: LIVE OOZE

So this is my penance for missing these dudes opening for Skrapyard and Iceage this weekend (Iceage played a pretty sweet set, though). Ooze is a band in Chicago/NWI. I know the guitar player was in the Outs and Night Fever but that's just off the top of my head. Oh, the singer played in Raw Nerve. Anyway, this is a somewhat hi-fi recording of what was something like their third show. Seven songs in just under nine minutes. What can I say? It's hardcore punk played by people who evidently breathe the stuff. Comparisons to Brown Sugar wouldn't be unwarranted; Ooze has a similarly swinging rhythm, and the instruments are played in a way that harkens back to older styles of rock and roll (they open the set with 'California Sun,' à la the Dictators/Ramones) while maintaining a manic hardcore pace. If you've seen these dudes play, you know to be excited about them. The audio comes from the video below.

For the sake of convenience I ripped the audio from the vid and broke up the tracks. Though I don't know what any of them are called. The cover art is from the gig flyer.

Ooze roolze

re-up'd: Sonic Youth - Hold That Tiger [1987]

Quick, here's a Sonic Youth boot some of you maybe don't have. Recorded at the Metro in Chicago on October 14, 1987. Thanks to quality mic-placement, this is some real clanging, articulately shredded-up EVOL and Sister material from what is maybe my favorite period of this band. People forget Sonic Youth was a punk band, and this gig demonstrates it. The version of 'Death Valley '69' rages so hard that you forget it's missing Lydia Lunch's vocal part. Following a soaring version of 'Pacific Coast Highway' is a Ramones coverset encore.

The Japanese text on the cover inexplicably reads 'my mother went shopping.' Perhaps the band was studying up for their semi-upcoming 1988 tour of Japan.

SY concert archive entry for this gig
"I have no desire to fuck Jessica Hahn but I would like to kill Jim Bakker"

re-up'd: Hüsker Dü - Metal Circus [1983]

As you probably know, I get the name of this site from the most famous album by St. Paul, Minnesota's Hüsker Dü, as they are one of my favorite bands of ever. Zen Arcade was part of a paradigm shift in punk and hardcore, as the Hüskers, alongside Black Flag, the Minutemen, Sonic Youth, other SST bands, and countless others the world over were permanently expanding the creative capacity of counter-culture music.

Ten months before Zen Arcade was released, they put out the Metal Circus EP. It is the pivot around which the band changed its direction, from the 'ultracore' of their earlier singles and albums toward the stuff that got them remembered (and ultimately destroyed by a major label). You can read a 1982 interview with the band in the second issue of the D.C. zine Thrillseeker -- their answers are very foretelling.

As for the songs, this is when Hüsker Dü really hit their stride. The 'Minnesota guitar snowstorm' sound is fully operational, and the record is filled with soaring harmonics that let melody sneak into unexpected places. 'Real World' is a folk tune for the disillusioned rebel ("you're not a cop or politician, you're a person too -- you can sing any song you want, but you're still the same"), but it somehow sounds hopeful rather than cynical. The next two are some great Reagan-punk sort of songs about coping with impending nuclear apocalypse. The first side finishes with the boozer's lament "First of the Last Calls," borne from guitarist Bob Mould's own troubles with drink.

The the second side could be read as the thematic conclusion of the problems brought about in the first. After the brief whirlwind of "Lifeline," in which Bob screams about falling into the abyss, the abyss is reached. "Diane" starts. Greg Norton's bass churns out ominous chords, and Grant Hart drums along as he sings the true story of a woman raped and killed in Minnesota, from the p.o.v. of the perpetrator. It's a haunting electric murder ballad, a apt climax to the five songs that preceded it. The record ends with "Out on a Limb," a Sabbath-y dance of precarity. Listening to the words or reading along to this EP, there's a sense of narrative progression. Once they were able to show themselves capable of doing a concept record, they went all the way with it and ended up with the 'concept double album' that followed it in '84.

In my upload I included four outtakes from the Metal Circus sessions, which are of variable fidelity. However, they are some fierce punk tunes. Hüsker Dü are one of the few bands whose rejects are practically as good as the stuff they commit to wax. One of these, "Standing By the Sea," would be attempted again on Zen Arcade.

Finally, if you're still reading along with this, you're probably a big fan of the Hüskers yourself. So you might appreciate this graphic about the cover art, if you haven't seen it already.

graphic belongs to Patrick Smith

The inscription on the A-side reads, "That old stainless charity. If you could see me now, Shirley." On the B-side it's "Falling from grace with the goose; Howard Hughs, a wing, a prayer, (see below)."

Buy Metal Circus on insound
Discogs vinyl link
I like to protest but I'm not sure what it's for

re-up'd: End Result - Ward EP [1985]

Chicago punk in the '80s had its fair share of weirdos, but End Result in particular pushed the envelope of what people would tolerate hearing. Not quite as blatantly crass as, say, the Mentally Ill, but musically these Southside punks could really test your patience. Don't let the more-or-less straightforward opening track deceive you; the Ward EP quickly devolves into an unrighteous mess of horns, semi-competent guitar squall, and psychotically howled vocals. The bizarre rendition of Petula Clark's 'Don't Fall Asleep in the Subway' must be heard to be (dis)believed. 

from Maximumrocknroll #3

From Roctober:

Chicago's End Result was a multi racial experimental No Wave band born out of the early 80s hardcore scene. They managed to limp all the way to the end of the 80s with a rotating cast (at one point they advertised they were seeking a "singer with a hatred of music") built around guitarist [Alan] Jones. Perhaps their greatest legacy is that they paved the way for No Wave/artfuck bands presenting themselves to an all-ages, hardcore/punk audience, something that defined the Chicago underground of the 90s (Milk of Burgundy, Skingraft, etc.). Their odd songs (a straightforward tune about amputation wasn't atypical) were released on Articles Of Faith's Wasteland label, and on several important Midwestern hardcore/punk comps, resulting in fans of boundary-pushing gravitating towards them, including Steve Albini and Sonic Youth. No child of privilege, Jones lived in a mission for a while, and turned lemons into an odd tasting lemonade by briefly making the mission's basement a site for punk shows.

End Result fit into the Chicago punk puzzle somewhere between early Silver Abuse and ONO. Here's a video of them circa 1984:

I know it was my fault, but I'm gonna take it out on you

re-up'd: Big Black - Sound of Impact [1986]

This is probably thee best recording of Big Black, and just goes to show what an unstoppable force they were as a live act. It was recorded in 1986 In Minneapolis, Clogland (Netherlands?), and Muncie, Indiana. There is a wealth of information available about this official 'fake bootleg' from the badass site Les Dementlieu Punk Bibliotheque, with this synopsis:

Compiled from four or five different soundboard recordings, this LP is a quality product^TM, despite appearances to the contrary. It also comes with a nifty booklet of photos and misc. crap to keep you amused when you aren't listening to the record.
This was also supposedly the cause of Big Black's break with Blast First. The idea for its release was conceived during their first visit to Europe in early 1986 (when they were being wooed by Blast First), and appeared in October or November of that year. The album was supposed to be released like a scummy bootleg--no contact info, no band name on the record, a fake record label (Walls Have Ears), in a numbered edition of 1000 copies. When that 1000 copies sold out, 500 more numbered copies were pressed with the band's permission. Then in 1990 (I think) an unnumbered and unauthorized edition of 500 was pressed, and when they started turning up in US record stores Albini threw a shitfit, and even claimed he was going to burn the $5000 Paul Smith had offered him as payment for the unauthorized repress. I don't know if Steve actually did burn the money, but he sure left Blast First in a huff, taking Big Black, Rapeman and Arsenal with him, as well as scuttling the planned Last Live video and album.

In addition, the back cover is covered in black box transcripts from planes that crashed. You can read them all at the above linked site.

The songs on this record are definitive versions; they are in just about every case superior to the studio versions. The titles are all changed, 'bootleg-style,' but if like Big Black you'll probably recognize them all. The version of 'Jordan, Minnesota,' here given as 'Toytown Daddy Oh!' is legitimately terrifying and disgusting. There's lots of good Albini stage banter and storytelling throughout, so you know you want to listen to this. Easily my favorite thing by Big Black.

Has anybody heard of the Yanomamo Indians?

re-up'd: Algebra Suicide - Real Numbers [1988]

Algebra Suicide were a post-punk duo from Chicago, active from 1983-1993. They ended up on a few international compilations in the '80s, and even made it out to Europe for a tour in 1990. This CD is two long tracks, each a live set recorded at Links Hall in 1988. It is really good. Lydia Tomkiw recites off-the-wall, strangely familiar poetry while Don Hedeker conjures ethereal accompanying textures on the guitar and administers the drum machine. Here he is saying a few words about this particular recording and performance; I'll defer to him since he says it best. Lydia left this world in 2007 after a long bout of alcoholism and declining health. You can read touching tribute to her written by Sharon Mesmer here.

This is a fantastic, mostly forgotten bit of Chicago music history. Don't put it off because of the long track lengths. See, I've given you the set list right here, so no complaining:

"Here, the only things being tortured are the lawns"
Plastic Crimewave writes about Algebra Suicide

re-up'd: Аквариум - Акустика [1982]

Here's an album I've really been digging lately. Russian folk from the last decade of the Soviet Union. Aquarium (alternately known as Akvarium) was formed in 1972 by Boris Grebenshchikov and Anatoly Gunitsky. The band spent the first decade or so of its life doing mostly apartment concerts -- house shows with high political stakes in a country where "rock and roll" needed explicit state approval to play in the official concert halls. Aquarium is much more of a folk band though, in the style of бард "bard" music, which had since the 1960s referred to original music (one name for the genre is самодеятельная песня, literally "do-it-yourself song") by musicians who worked outside the Soviet musical/cultural system. From Wikpedia:

The first six years of Aquarium's history lacked cohesion as Grebenshchikov and his various bandmates followed the Soviet equivalent of the hippie lifestyle: playing apartment jams, drinking the low-quality port wine available from the Soviet stores of the time, and intermittently travelling to remote gigs, even hitchhiking on rail freight cars.

The album Akustika was made at the start of the '80s, just before the state music industry started allowing this kind of stuff to be more widely disseminated. It contains a dozen-plus real pretty folk numbers, mostly on acoustic guitar plus bass, violin, and the occasional flute. In contrast to a lot of the kitchen-recorded stuff by Yanka Dyagileva or Grazhdanskaya Oborna, this album is fairly high-fidelity (and a lot less noisy than GrOb), thanks to Grebenshchikov's access to academic recording facilities. The songs clearly demonstrate the influence of Bob Dylan on Grebenschikov, and Allmusic associates Aquarium with the likes of Neil Young, Nick Drake, Joni Mitchell, as well as Dylan of course. By the second half of the decade Aquarium were selling millions of records, which speaks to the popularity they garnered in their first 15 years of existence.

Boris G. is a huge name in Russian music, and when you hear his voice and songs it's not hard to understand why. Check out this video of Aquarium in what looks like a TV performance from 1986:

I should mention that I was turned onto this stuff by fellow St. Petersburghers Sonic Death (a band I can't recommend enough), who did a few Grebenschikov songs on their Boris Session EP, released in the summer. Needless to say the material is good and their take on it makes for some righteous jams.

Buy Akustika on CD at UkrMedia
My house is already not my home