Time Will Be Kind: Lorna Donley and DA

[EDIT]: Awful news yesterday that Lorna passed on. The text of this old post hardly articulates how much this band meant to me, how they introduced me to the first wave of Chicago punk, how many nights I've spent blaring these tunes when I feel most isolated and confused, how fellow DA fan Kathryn and I plotted to visit her at the library tell her these things, how crushed I feel that we can no longer do that -- Lorna is a artist whose death that has affected me unlike any I can recall. This is the second-most-viewed post I've done, so I'm glad to have been able to bring the band's attention to some of you over the past couple of years. Anyway I'm bumping the post in her honor.

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Surely my favorite of the original Chicago punk groups right here. Formed in 1978 by a teenage  Lorna Donley, Da (alternately known as DA or Da!) was a mainstay of the Chicago scene by 1980, gigging with out-of-town bands like the Fall, Hüsker Dü (in their 'ultracore' period), and DNA. For most of their run they were a majority woman band, their cool post-punk typically (and rather lazily) compared to Siouxsie and the Banshees.

The first record here is their single, Dark Rooms b/w White Castles. A-side has this pernicious spareness to it, where each part of the song drifts in like another intrusive thought. The guitar chimes with echoes of '60s groups like the Byrds, but whatever hope or optimism that generation had is in short supply here. Instead, Lorna's chanting vocals summon dim specters (in a city with many demons) to convene with those living lifeless in the days of Reagan's empire. "White Castles" is a groovy rant on race and class stratification, presumably in Chicago -- but since Dick J. Daley's de facto enforcement of segregation vitally influenced the racist organization of post-war American cities (see the equally subtle and violent, ultimately successful campaign against fair housing, despite the efforts of MLK), the song reaches wider. Seeing how things have gone since 1981, the urban situation is easily desperate enough for this song to hold up today.

You can read a great Coolest Retard article reviewing this record, (plus a review of Strike Under's Immediate Action 12" EP and a Strike Under interview) in the Dementlieu Punk Archive.

Second is Time Will Be Kind, released shortly after the band's end in 1982. It continues in the more driving, gothic postpunk of "White Castles" but with less angularity and more developed songwriting. I won't go over each song -- just play the video of the opening track -- but suffice it to say that the Byrds' dissociative alienation (e.g. "Eight Miles High") is twisted past dazed confusion to tired rage. Nowhere is this more apparent than on "This Doubt," right at the end of the EP where the band rips into what I find to be one of the most cathartic loner jams in punk. And without any sort of HC gimmicks of speed or blunt heaviness. Grasping for evidence of how-it-could-be, finding mostly nothing, but refusing to stand down and accept how-it-is. It pains me that this band left behind so little, but what they did make has a lot of replay value.

These used to be the band's only official recordings, aside from two live songs on the Busted at Oz comp, which you can check out here. But in 2010, Factory 25 Records released a compilation of unreleased recordings, entitled Exclamation Point. I got a copy back then and definitely recommend it.

Buy DA - Exclamation Point
Download Dark Rooms + Time Will Be Kind

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

The Samples - Dead Hero 7" [1982]

I haven't got much to say about this one. What you've got here is some pretty basic, solid good UK punk. Songs about war and The Man and whatever ("Dead Hero," "Fire Another Round," "Suspicion," you get the gist). This is a quick one, so just download it already.

Get it