The Orphans: Too Early and Too Late

There was a renaissance of punk in the early to mid nineties that expired by the turn of the century. ‘Alternative’ represented a culmination of underground sounds that ended up in the ears of youth who would soon start new bands, expanding on the sounds then current and whatever was being dug up for decade’s past. The critical mass of underground music, in this country, represented by SST, Dischord and Touch and Go, led many to dig deeper still into the past to discover the British punk bands, obscure and chart topping acts both. While the resultant acts, its musicianship and lyrics were more commonly trite than not (here and in Britain), a few bands managed to pull it off. Some of these ensembles garnered success and some, like Pennsylvania’s the Orphans, have had to wait a decade for the exposure that they probably deserved.

Erik Petersen founded the group during 1995 around Philly. And while the Orphans garnered a bit of good will through the release of a few singles and compilation appearances, the ensemble didn’t make it to the following decade. Instead, Petersen began Mischief Brew – a group somewhere between the Dropkick Murphys and Defiance, Ohio (the band, not the place).

From the pictures included in this compilation entitled Raise the Youth, listeners should estimate the age of the band to be seventeen or so. Given that, the lyrical stuff on here presents itself as something rather astounding.  Surely nothing that matches Bob Dylan or any other well regarded song writer, but for a teenage punk band, they have few peers.

The musicianship, song structures, and rhythms are impressive. Occasionally, the band attempts to play beyond their musical means, but at-least they’re trying something new. Folk influenced tracks (“Anorexic Mind,” “What Reason Have They to Dance?,” “For an Old Kentucky Anarchist”) set the band apart from others that they may have played with. The songs don’t all come off that well, but the inclusion of a mandolin and strong lyrics make up for any inadequacies that maybe inherent. The cover of a Subhumans song, following a track that sounds suspiciously like Op Ivy should be all the explanation of the bands sound that one needs.  So, if you’re still angry with your parents and paranoid about government spy tactics, pick this slab up and you’ll have four digital friends from a few decades back who know how you feel.

Flamin' Groovies: Everybody Knows

If there’s absolutely no material by the Flamin’ Groovies that you enjoy, give up life. Turn in your human being card and get out of here. That’s nuts.

The Bay Area based band might not have consistently minded the same sounds over the duration of its career – and an argument could be made that its career never ended completely – but in each mold it worked, there’re a few choice biscuits worth more than a single listen.

Beginning in the mid-sixties, the Groovies basically approximated the Stones, but in a tougher American way. It’s own self released album and then a proper full length were proof the San Franciscans were able to do updated blues stuff, some greaser rave ups and the like. But with Teenage Head, issued in 1971, it’s not difficult to guess that some of the first wave punkers had the disc in their collections.

Even with that critical – and certainly not commercial – success, the Groovies were out of step with record labels, the charts and live crowds. It was a new decade and people want more than rehashed sixties works. Then the Groovies kinda disappeared for a while.

There’re a variety of discombobulated accounts of what was going on during that time. Some include recording demos for an album that wouldn’t actually materialize for a while. If nothing else, though, Roy Loney, one of the group’s main creative forces, booked it.

That left the Groovies in a lurch. It’s evident the band had a set of songs, some devised by the departed Loney. But by the punk era, in ’76, the band snagged Dave Edmunds to produce what would become Shake Some Action, which should really be considered the group’s last proper disc. Regardless of where the effort fits into the Groovies’ oeuvre, the album presents a band not completely able to sever ties with previous decades even while embracing some basic tenets of power pop. There’s still that punk veneer, though. And that’s what fans, I think, want.

Covering the Stones’ “She Said Yeah” is a bit of a surprise. But turns out to be a ridiculously punky version of an already revved up tune. Elsewhere, the band updates honky tonk a little with “St. Louis Blues.”

But for the most part, what folks find remarkable about Shake Some Action is the title track. The thing is, an demo recorded a few years earlier is a more rewarding listen. Either way, not a bad disc even compared to the band’s earliest works.

On Tony Rettman and Killed By Hardcore (Part Two)

Maintaining an assessment of the market place in positive terms, whoever’s behind dispensing the Killed By Hardcore compilations understands that culling a product, perhaps meant to tug at old dude’s heartstring’s, isn’t a bad idea. And while the impetus for such a project – no doubt gaining rights to some of this material in addition to figuring out the pressing and distribution of it all can be a bummer – stems from a love of the music, making a buck isn’t usually a bad idea.

But if these compilations didn’t exist, we’d either not have this music to listen to at all, or be necessitated to shell out some ridiculous prices to hear it. Rettman gets all that and spits it out in bits and pieces. More importantly, though, he’s got some historical (and personal) sense of the music.

Oddly, he doesn’t have too many negative comments on any of this sludge – thus the backwards gaze.

Granted, compilations like Killed By Death truck in high quality product. So, hearing a bit more praise for Urban Waste isn’t a bummer, although police brutality is – the act, not the song from the band’s 1982 Mob Style EP. That slab’s all boss sounds even if the guitar solos tossed in aren’t really distinguishable from each other. Either way, the Queens’ band was able to shift tempos relatively seamlessly. And in this genre, that’s one of the few technical things that can almost be quantified.

Terveet Kädet gets a pass from Rettman, which isn’t really all that surprising. Finnish bands – or Norwegian or Japanese – are generally revered for picking up on a style first announced somewhere else and touching it up a bit. TK isn’t too much different. See the aforementioned Discharge discussion. It’s all just surprising that the band didn’t blatantly exploit the formation of distinctive metal scenes. I suppose we can be thankful for that.

Philly’s YDI, though, is generally thought to have gone down that metal road. But SSD, as Rettman notes, did as well. Of course, being SSD grants you a great many things in life. Being YDI does not. Even still, YDI’s Black Dust isn’t even the worst metal album ever recorded. So turning hardcore into something that could potentially make you a dollar doesn’t seem like the worst thing in the world. I mean, we’re talking about bands included on a compilation examining a music only a few hundred thousand people cared about twenty years ago. Maybe trickle down economics’ll work if we give it another shot.

A Minute with Johnny Witmer from the Stitches (Part Two)

PM: How does the band function differently than the Stitches? I don’t know what your voice sounds like and that Teenage Frames cd is in a box somewhere. So how are the vocal duties and songwriting split up?

JW: We actually practice every week. In The Stitches, we haven?t practiced in over 10 years. We just play live. I’m singing about half of the songs in The Crazy Squeeze. You can hear my voice on the songs on our myspace page. Frankie and Sleeper sing the other songs, but we haven’t recorded them yet. We all write the songs, but usually whoever writes the lyrics will sing the songs. 

PM: Are the Stitches still active in LA?

JW: Yes.

PM: Is there a specific reason as to why the Stitches only sporadically tour? I think the last time I saw you guys was in 2003. The band doesn’t really seem active any longer. Can that be attributed to something – disinterest?

JW: No, we tour all of the time. We’ve been up to the Bay area like 10 times in the last year. Where the hell were you? Maybe you have a disinterest in coming to see us? We just did a great mid-west & east coast tour a few weeks ago. We had a great time.

PM: The last two tours both featured three dates in Ohio (I’m from Clevo) – You lived there at some point I believe. I’m assuming you still have family there – true or false, discuss…

JW: Yeah. I grew up in Ohio. It was a great place to grow up, but I always wanted to be in California to skateboard, and to play music. Ohio just gets too cold, and everyone’s depressed.

PM: The first full length should probably be considered a classic at this point. How was it received when you first released it?

JW: It was well received right out of the box. We got rave reviews in all of the mags. Maximum R&R gave it like 12 top 10”s. We started a whole revolution of mostly terrible bands, but some were/ are good. Even kids that weren’t even born in 1995 love it today.

PM: The first full length is pretty much about girls and getting fucked up. But the singles after that leading up to the second full length have a lotta references to technology, cars, etc. Where’d that come from and why the change in lyrical content? [CON’T]

The Nightcrawlers: More than Little Black Eggs

You’d easily be forgiven if Florida’s the Nightcrawlers aren’t the most revered garage act in your household. There’s probably not too many places, anywhere, that’d be able to figure the band as perennially on the turntable. But just like the rest of those one-off hit makers collected on Nuggets, the Nightcrawlers highs are worth at least two and a half minutes of your life.

Florida, I don’t believe, gave the world more than a handful of sixties, garage stand-outs. There’re probably more than a few that flew below the radar, but if the Nightcrawlers are one of the bigger names from the era, there can’t have been a tremendous amount of stuff going on down there.

“Little Black Egg,” the band’s only claim to fame, finds itself recorded in two versions. There’s that album cut and the single. And while most folks are going to insist the single’s better than the album version, it doesn’t make too much difference. The song rules. And proof of that would be the endless amount of cover versions cropping up over the last forty years.

But the band’s one hit isn’t the entirety of its history. And collected on another low rent compilation from Big Beat, the Nightcrawlers dish out some decent folksy cum garage works. There’re a bit too many covers – “Route 66,” “Grown Up Wrong” and “Heart of Stone” – but that’s just a mark of the times. “Grown Up Wrong,” though, features some really odd, strangled guitar lines as a bonus.

A few originals do stand out – only a few. And this disc sports more than twenty tracks.

“A Basket of Flowers,” released as a single and covered by Pittsburgh’s the Cynics, finds this group getting into territory a bit more effeminate than its best known work would hint at. The sentiment isn’t greatly detached from other love songs – some guy pines outside his love’s window and sends over some flowers.

Vastly more impressive is the beat effort on “I Don’t Remember.” Granted, it’s just another up-tempo love song, detailing loss and weeping. But the track’s turned in with confident tones, a decent bridge recalling some West Coast groups and eventually a freeq out. Making it to the refrain “It was you,” the band picks up the pace and jumps towards a sixties’ punk. And if you’re not paying attention it almost sounds as if the band’s saying “Fuck You.” Either’s appropriate and equally entertaining. Boss sounds all around.

Savage Messiah: Biography as Entertainment

In the annuls of early twentieth century art, innumerably vaunted names stick out, even to the least versed in various modes of creations. The name Picasso continues to resound inside and outside of academia, at once announcing drastic change as well as something of a co-opted sense of the avant-garde.

Gone are the times of radical reinvention. Today, art and artists pass off clever winks as tomorrows million dollar work. Even if one were to dismiss all of history, today’d still be a pretty sad time. Go earn an MFA in something. See where it gets you. Probably all the way to pretension.

Before anyone cared about proper school and the like, though, there were a bunch of wacky turn of the century, non-conformists more concerned with making stuff than talking about it. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was one of those folks. And while he was a member of the Vorticists in England, judging by Ken Russell’s film, he didn’t have too much to do with them.

In Russell’s Savage Messiah, the film focuses more on Gaudier-Brzeska’s relationship with his namesake more than his art. And actually, if one were to take the 1972 feature as the gospel truth, Gaudier-Brzeska only barley created any physical work, instead lolling around libraries, getting kicked out of museums and acting crazy in public. There was probably a bit more to it all in real life, but film life, sometimes, is a better thing. Just not her.

Either way, charting Gaudier-Brzeska’s relationship with Sophie Brzeska, a much older women who the artist lived with, winds up being passably entertaining. The reason it works, though, really has nothing to do with Russell – although the film might serve as decent entrance into the man’s varied filmography.

The various scenarios soldered together in order to depict Gaudier-Brzeska as a sort of free spirit are generally engaging, if not a bit obtuse and based on myth. Did the painter and sculptor really say all that nonsense? Nope, probably not. Nor did he carve one of his most lauded works over night. Ridiculous? Close, but there’s nothing like myth to engorge a film with feeling, which might otherwise be absent.

Biopics are a difficult animal to wrangle, though. And Savage Messiah is no different. Maybe this guy would have wound up being as great an influence as any other early twentieth century master. But maybe not. The film, though, functions as just a bit of entertainment melded with enough historical fact to come off as a palatable work – especially for those enmeshed in the fine art game. And yes, it’s a game.

Nihilistics: Hardcore’s Post-81 Highpoints

It’s kind of comforting that after the early eighties, hardcore broke down into disparate camps, making the long march through auld tyme material a bit easier than with genres like post-punk or whatever else.

Yeah, all the hard-rock cum hardcore or just plain metal stuff is a tremendous bore. And apart from the slow, sludgey stuff from the south, what remains from hardcore’s post-81 highpoints are really just retreads of the first wave. It’s the same for any genre, though.

Nihilistics weren’t ever lauded for their originality – granted the group’s first single came out in ’82, so maybe that’s more than enough originality right there. And it might be a well wrought criticism to figure the band didn’t progress musically or lyrical beyond that first release. Change, in hardcore, though, is a rare thing. Even if it wasn’t, though, Nihilistics might have wound up sounding like AC/DC or worse.

Issued during the opening moments of the eighties, the self titled single counts five songs in about six minutes. So, even if I weren’t about to include some abstracted notion of what this whole thing sounded like, you’d be able to guess.

Well, it boarders on nascent thrash. An audible chord or two is all that’s made it through the last three decades. And those drumbeats are really just a blur of clapped together hi-hats and a few crashes. Not unique to the version of “No Friends” included here, nor hardcore in general, is that fuzzed out bass-tone probably resulting from an attached amp not being able to handle what it was charged with instead of any calculated decisions. As indefinable as the croaking bass amp is, the intent of song – either recorded version will do – quickly finds its end and its off to the next fifty second song. It’s all pretty much reimagining what’s come before subsequently even though “Combat Stance” kinda sounds like a Cramps song somehow.

Calling it quits a few years on, Nihilistics would get back together for a bit coinciding with Seattle’s rise to prominence. That all petered out again with the band sporadically performing in the new millennium.

Now, I’ve not been privy to any live show by this group, but it’s pretty safe to assume that catching their act live at this point would be disappointing for a few reasons. Let’s dispense with the forty-year old dudes playing hardcore that’s thirty years old. Beyond that, the amassed concert goers collected for such an event probably wouldn’t count as good company in a bar. Just a guess.

Grass Widow:Let’s find out what happens next

I dunno where I’ve been and why Grass Widow’s been able to elude my. That’s apparently my fault – well that and the fact that there’re about twenty thousand ands doing roughly the same thing rock and roll wise while vying for attention.

As another band coming out of the fertile bed of Bay Area garage-related acts, Grass Widow’s sound and approach (in addition to what labels it issues music through) can all be very easily guessed at. There’s an adherence to rocking through whatever mire shows up between these girls and their microphones in the studio. Precision isn’t a necessity. And it happens sometimes, but doesn’t get dwelled upon.

Issuing a few tapes with overlapping content when contrasted to the two proper albums a 12”, amounting to less than an hour of music, still finds Grass Widow shifting between a few varied approaches to rock and or garage musics.

I hate to be that guy, but the group’s 12” pretty easily surpasses what’s come after. Again, since the band approaches its craft with a varied spate of influences that’s not exactly fair. Would you compare the Urinals (the girls cover “Black Hole” on their single) to the Vaselines (a general approximation). Nope. And that’s really the terrain Grass Widow navigates between it’s first release and the recently issued Past Time.

Apart from sporting that Urinals track, Grass Widow’s 12” portrays a group as concerned with performing a song in a single moment as it is with the finery of melody. “Thirsty Again” finds the group working through a difficult and dissonant guitar progression, but still able to turn in some nice three part harmonies. Boss.

Moving to its first, self titled full length, Grass Widow sounds as if its only just becoming accustomed to working in a studio. The songs aren’t any less interesting, only performed with a formerly absent restraint. Beginning “Rattled Call” with a drum-focused musical screed and pushing into a bland pop song that’s interrupted by a regression to primacy is just confusing. The end product can’t detract from those disparate parts and their inherent beauty. Over thinking a work and the jitters going along with it, though, sometimes wind up on albums. This one, particularly.

There’s a bit aggressive certainty on Past Time. “Fried Egg” seamlessly moving between grunge-bombast and an early ‘80s UK concept of melody couldn’t have made it onto Grass Widow’s earlier long player. But that’s why listeners keep listening. Let’s find out what happens next.

Luc Tuymans at Chicago's MCA: I Could Have Read a Book Instead (Part One)

Gaining entrance to the system of American museums is the mark of an artist being broadly accepted either as a universal talent or a universal consternation. Belgium’s Luc Tuymans is generally thought to be both.

His works have been collected in a few one-man shows in Europe, but this current collection of paintings housed at Chicago’s MCA from October of this year through January 9th, mark Tuymans’ first Stateside retrospective.

It’s completely impossible to restrict the influence of the outside world. Even if one were capable of removing that damnable digitization from everyday life, everyone else would remain jacked in and willing to spew forth news from the other side of the globe. That’s not exactly what Luc Tuymans does in his paintings. But at the same time, his work pretty frequently comes off as reportorial in a needlessly smug manner.

Examining a work of art given its historical context – the time that it was put together, what time in history it references – can serve to illuminate meaning in addition to providing important inspiration for the artist. Countless works serve as historical record and even more interpret a moment in time from the distance of a few months or a few years. Of course, relying on definitions of any kind from the outside world can potentially leave a work void of meaning in a vacuum.

After a cursory glance around the MCA’s fourth floor, one should be concerned that the vast majority of Tuyman’s paintings seem to be built on the same few colors, nothing to extravagant and certainly nothing that’s attention grabbing. Purposefully limiting his palette, though, grants Tuymans to engorge his works with tedious meaning.

Being raised by parents struggling to completely grasp the import of World War II on modernity in Europe, Tuymans finds himself needlessly affected by a conversation he’s not a part of. Being raised by fascist sympathizers would probably count as a difficult hurdle to overcome, but if an Austrian-born, son of a Nazi can govern the most populous state in this country, Tuymans should be able to draw from spheres of life not connected to war concluding about a decade prior to his birth.

What’s most troublesome about Tuymans work, though, is its need to be simultaneously clever and historically reverential. In any series tacked up at the MCA, there’s some political backing to it all – whether it’s George W. Bush or a mock up of a concentration camp.

On Tony Rettman and Killed By Hardcore (Part One)

First things first. Thanks to Rettman for writing on a much dismissed topic in a reasonably intelligent manner. And thanks to Blastitude for posting it a ways back. Lastly, head over to Punk Not Profit and peruse those posts. It’s kind of like an encyclopedia for shut-ins.

What all of this has to do with, though, is the backwards glance, the re-evolution of something (anything) through the guise of a few years on. That’s not bad or good, but an interesting way to assess a movement or an endgame that was once, most likely, just short of tangible.

Did punk change the world. Did hippies for that matter? Nope. Well, hardcore and DIY ethics have only served to inform the way college kids produce low rent tapes and tour their God-awful indie bands, hock wares made in their kitchen all while masquerading as artists.

Well, its better to have a mass of intolerably, self centered, self important, pseudo artists running around than bankers, but not by too much. Hopefully, out of all this mess comes a few careers that aren’t restricted to the salad days of being an academic and the few years afterwards spent realizing getting a nine to five is the only way out.

Whatever. Art movements don’t affect change. It’s a slow animal. And as many hardcore bands wanted to expose the inequities in society – or ay least yell really loudly about them – all that’s left at this point, apart from reunion tours, are a spate of singles, a few full length albums and reminiscing. Of course, ‘Remember when’ counting as the lowest form of conversation doesn’t bode well, but here we go.

Rettman begins in self effacing tones, admittedly abandoning punk stuff for out jazz and other obsessions. But he has maintained an eye to the culture, which has increasingly been centered on a culture outside of the States figuring an angle on the genre with folks back here, re-interpreting that and having a go. This writer is well aware of that – which accounts for the few offhand Discharge references.

But even in mentioning that band is to be aware of the deadening of punk and hardcore culture. Discharge didn’t land upon its approach to music in a vacuum, but still wound up being a hallmark because of it’s visual aesthetic as much as its sound. Again, it’s all a business. And the most enduring bands realized codification (comodification) wasn’t always bad. Just Reagan and Thatcher’s understanding of it.

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