Entertainment

The vagaries of working in garage bands during the eighties may well have its poster boy/child/man in Rob Vasquez. He’s not necessarily even a name modern genre miners are going to be too familiar with. Both his earliest ensembles Nights and Days as well as Night Kings don’t carry the same sort of import as other period acts. Shameful as that is, the music biz is a cruel bitch. But at least they guy’s persistent and released a few singles with that latter group as well as a lone long player through his home town’s sponsor, Sub Pop records.

Increasing Our High, regardless of it not being a grunge record, still bears the marks of the surrounding scene. Between the album itself and Vasquez gruff, grunting growls, figuring the disc, at first glance, for a lost garage treasure would be difficult. Fitting so seamlessly into a modicum of genres, though, makes it all the more bizarre as to why the Night Kings didn’t wind up impacting a wider audience. Life’s tough. And so are these songs, mostly sticking to a mid or up tempo conception of the genre.

“Complaints Department” sports one of the most ferociously tiny and fractious sounding guitar solos ever put to record. There’re antecedents in the no wave scene and all those Back from the Grave bands, but Vasquez inserts the approach to noisome guitar through the guise of garagey song structures (bka pop). And for whatever reason, no one had really been doing that in the late eighties and early nineties. For as good as the Chesterfield Kings and all those Cali paisley bands were, for the most part, all involved stuck to pretty traditional conceptions of what a song should sound like – and more over what a guitar player in a garage band should sound like.