Cows: Distortion, for Starters

Coming out of a Minneapolis scene also sporting the likes of Hüsker Dü, supreme noiseniks themselves, Cows often find themselves compared to those better known Twin Cities’ musicians. It’s not a specious side-by-side. Each group favored ridiculously distorted guitar sounds, tempos shifting from quick-step punk to plodding rock stuffs. And while each group, increasingly over time, sought to assimilate a bit of pop structure to its work, Cows never approached the sort of general accessibility that Hüskers did.

At the time of Cows’ first long player, 1987’s Taint Pluribus Taint Unum, Nirvana’s Bleach was still a few years off even as the rest of the country wallowed in the post-punk noise-rock thing. Affixing any sort of commercial viability onto music like what the Cows were producing then seemed ludicrous. Granted, the band kept at it until the late nineties, but latter day listeners have to believe that was out of persistence as much as the glimmer of hope that the band would get a break in the wake of Alterna-nation springing.

Cows didn’t get that break. And instead, Shannon Selberg would go on to found Heroine Sheiks, achieving a bit more notoriety.

Either way, the recorded legacy Cows left behind hasn’t yet been subsumed in the backwards gazing, highfalutin recasting of independent rock from the era. And it’s really kinda difficult to understand why. With vocals edging towards the Big Boys, Selberg and company put together twelve tracks for its debut that didn’t let up and probably couldn’t be properly contrasted with another full length work apart from late-period Black Flag. “Yellowbelly” isn’t that disenchanted with life, but Kevin Rutmanis’ bass here gives an ample display of how indispensible the low end was to Cows. The song actually opens with a huge groove prior to Selberg starting his screeching. After that it’s all guitars struggling to be heard and express some sort of violent depression. The rest of Taint Pluribus Taint Unum isn’t all that drastically different. And for the most part, it’s all a variation on a theme.

By the time listeners get to the punky penultimate “Mother (I Love That Bitch),” it’s almost a relief to arrive at the six minute closer, “Weird Kitchen.” Maybe a nod to the Doors’ “Soul Kitchen” or the Buzzcocks’ Another Music Different Kitchen, the song’s mostly dirgey reverence for oddities. As slow as the song gets, Cows don’t lose the aggression from early offerings, it’s just encased in an unsteady swagger and sheets of guitar noise.

Useless Pieces of Shit - "Fuck Shit Up" (Video)

This video looks like it was part of a larger work. Regardless of that, though, Useless Pieces of Shit are what they should be: loud, fast and pretty ignorant. The group, part of the second or third wave of hardcore bands cropping up around the country, come off a bit like SSD if that Boston band never embraced a more metallic sound...Good listening...

The Lyres: A Boston Time Warp

Jeff "Monoman" Conolly is DMZ. He is Lyres. He’s an adequate keyboard player and an adept songwriter. So, the fact that he’s not a house hold name in the way Little Steven is – and yeah, house hold is relative – remains tremendously troublesome. Instead of just lauding garage acts, Conolly plays in one and did for something like three decades. That’s way more impressive than being on the Sopranos after playing with Bruce Springsteen.

Beginning with DMZ and transitioning into Lyres didn’t present too much of a problem seeing as each group trucked in basically the same sounds. After DMZ’ brief tenure with a major label and a dramatically underrated album, which was a commercial flop, Conolly reconstituted his ensemble with the new name. Honestly, that was probably only meant to distance himself from the perceived negative vibes surrounding his earlier group. Whatever the case was, Lyres remained his vehicle, oddly enough, assisting DMZ’ legacy along the way.

With the Real Kids and a handful of other pop cum punk groups kicking around, Conolly wasn’t too detached from the first wave of underground Boston bands. His organ contributed significantly to the band’s personality and might account for renewed interest in recording the band. Of course arriving at an agreement with Ace of Hearts Records and its founder Rick Harte was probably easier than dealing with major label execs – the Boston based imprint had already worked with Mission of Burma.

Either way, the result was AHS 1005. And while the disc can’t be as wild as Lyres’ live shows, it’s not a drastic step away from what DMZ had been paned for a few years prior. The only critical thing that could be levied on the disc would be its inclusion of “What A Girl Can't Do” alongside the seemingly contradictory “She Pays the Rent.” Minor quibble. That latter song, though, is pretty hilarious. And honestly, anyone who can find someone else to pay their rent should count themselves among the lucky ones.

Despite Conolly’s apparently convoluted relationship with women, “Buried Alive” crops up here and should astound punk fans and the garage lot simultaneously. At just under three minutes, everything from the Doors to Nuggets to CBGBs comes flying out of those simply nasty guitar chords and droned on organ sound. Conolly’s vocals don’t quite match the fury of the music, retaining a more genteel sixties’ thing the entire time. But that was the band’s formula. It worked.

The Corpse Grinders: Mental Morons

Reissuing the most losery of the losers had been more than a decade’s long endeavor for Rave Up Records, an Italian based label. Surely the imprint’s churned out works from the Vomit Pigs, from the Stains and even Southerners Toxin III. It’s really a shocking list of exhumation. And one of the groups getting this sort of treatment was New York’s Corpse Grinders.

While their cit of origin marked the band for some sort of success, it was actually the ensemble’s family tree that should have probably made them a bit better known than what history dealt them. Ricky Rivets, who was originally the New York Dolls guitarist, founded the Corpse Grinders after a few other of his projects fell apart. And not too soon afterwards, the Dolls’ bassist, Arthur Kane joined the ranks. Having KISS open for them didn’t even seem to do much in the way of a career boost. And with some demos and live stuff recorded, the band just shuffled off into oblivion.

It just wasn’t in the cards. And while more than a few groups who probably didn’t deserve major deals got ‘em, the Corpse Grinders went on to work up fair like “Price of Meat,” with its ridiculous title and fast pace. In some ways, the Corpse Grinders, even at their most hard rock sounding represented what punk was about. And it had nothing to do with guitar solos.

Instead of focusing on pretend chops – Johnny Thunders, et all – the band worked up cheap punk grooves. “Scam” and “Infiltration” may well be forgettable tunes, but each does away with too much other than chorded guitar rock. Yeah, there’re some updated Chuck Berry riffs, but that’s what pretty much every counts as.

Rivets doesn’t prove himself to be the worst front-man either, occasionally howling in a cock rock sorta way – as on the aforementioned “Scam.” It’s over the top in a manner that could only have come from a guy who almost had a modicum of fame in his hands and then lost it.

As for Kane, the low end of these tracks isn’t really captured too well, but he provides ample backing. It’s funny, in light of the attention he received after that documentary, that Kane become something of a revered figure. It’s not that he didn’t deserve it, but he also didn’t ever define a band. Maybe if he did, someone would have heard of the Corpse Grinders before now.

White Pages: A Difficult to Google Punk Band

Half of me is glad that whatever White Pages are, there’s not a genre name for it. But mining the same weird hinterland between eighties’ hardcore and seventies punk, Tyvek comes to mind, has made for a pretty enticing demo floating around the internets. Judging from how principle members in the group think about and enact professionalism is just as engaging as the music, though.

Issuing a tape, which looks as low rent as the music sounds, through ComplainComplain isn’t bound to make White Pages stars or even underground darlings. Five minutes of music rarely achieves that unless Pitchfork instantly becomes your sponsor. And leading off the band’s initial release, a track called “Don't Do Blow With Total Chaos,” sits far enough away from the lovely, lilting choruses so en vogue right now, that some might be offended by everything here. Doing that in a minute and forty nine seconds, though, is pretty impressive. The songs all trebly, chorded guitar and thrashing guitar. Even name checking the cock flap wearing, spiky haired punk band doesn’t seem like a move to endear White Pages to too many folks. But the reference does serve to point out that if you’re currently playing punk related stuffs, you lived through a time when the Casualties and the Exploited were highly thought of in your peer group. And that’s funny.

The level of seriousness related to White Pages demo is just that as well, funny. But intentionally so. The weird thing is that in attempting to run through songs as quickly as possible, referencing everyone from the first Decline of Civilization movie, White Pages winds up sounding something like Long Beach’s Le Shok. It’d be just short of mind boggling if that was the intent of these few songs. It couldn’t have been. But why don’t most bands sound like Hot Rod Tod’s fronting them? I dunno. White Pages makes a case for that needing to be realized.

No, it doesn’t matter if listeners have absolutely no idea what “At Night” is getting at. Even Razorcake doesn’t want to take the time to figure it out. Who can blame them for not putting in the effort, the band doesn’t sound like they did. That’s the reason their tape works though. Relatively successful underground bands pretty quickly move from uncaring to getting a bit too close to genteel – the Black Lips anyone? Either way, it’s safe to guess there won’t be any three part harmonies on follow up White Pages releases. We’re waiting.

Future Dads: Understanding Dynamics

Understanding the dynamics of any scene so far removed from time and place that we’re all accustomed to is difficult. It’d be hard to even name more than a few bands from Boston’s halcyon punk days before the hardcore kids took that place over. Richie Parsons, though, is a name that’s bound to come up over and over again. Founding Unnatural Axe, which we’ll get to in a few days, the guy apparently was thought of in pretty high regards, garnering approval from the Burma guys. Even if that wasn’t the case, one of Parsons’ latter day groups, Future Dads rank pretty high in their appropriation of punk and pop.

Figuring the band as pop punk in the same way the Queers or Screeching Weasel are pop punk is fallacious. Future dads sit closer to the fast paced efforts from neighbors the Real Kids. It’s almost power pop, but has nothing to do with the Jam or other more sucrose rave ups.

Releasing a single feature “Dorchester Summer,” which probably makes more sense if one’s familiar with the landscape up in Boston, seems to have been the band’s main triumph. Soldering together that single and whatever leftovers were sitting around, we can all take in 24 Winship and marvel at major label’s inability to pick up on good bands. Why weren’t these guys on Sire Records along with all the NY based punk acts?

No reason. Just bad timing and being in the wrong town, I suppose.

What makes Future Dads remarkable, apart from the name of the band itself, is the fact that the ensemble was able to work up instrumentals and not wind up sounding boring or musically inept. “Opus In D” may well be a pompous tag to levy on a composition, but it works. The only issue one might take with it is the eventual incorporation of a saxophone. It’s not that the instrument doesn’t fit – it does perfectly. But leaving the brass out until the final portion of the song only serves to mitigated the track’s success. Somehow it’s all punk, surf and fifties rock stuff rolled into one. And there really weren’t too many bands – Boston based or otherwise – able to combine all those elements in a seamless manner by 1981.

Surely, there’re punkier bands. And they’re more adept musicians. But Parsons being able to appropriate material from so many different sources and arrive at this almost pop concoction is remarkable. It’s a keeper.

Blank Stare: Don't Dominate the Rap, Jack

There doesn’t seem to be too great any desire on anyone’s part to start a hardcore band and stick it out for any length of time. We – and the culture at large – have basically made it clear that if your group doesn’t show up, hit it big on the first or second try (whether that means on recordings or on tour), that it’s time to pack it in. In a great many ways, underground music’s become a smaller scale tv or film market. There’s capital set up, and if there’s not the sort of return expected, call it a day.

I have no idea why Boston’s Blank Stare packed it in. The band was around for a few years after the start of this new millennia, it released a few singles and a long player, fitting in pretty well with its town’s musical history, toured Europe and no there’s nothing else. Maybe gigging around Europe was the pay off. It certainly would feel like it. But after seeing how wide spread underground music – here straight edged hardcore – it’s confusing as to why anyone would snuff out a band this good. Granted, people involved in aggressive musics of any kind, rock based, jazz based or other wise, all seem to have some personality defect making it, at times, difficult to be around. That probably didn’t happen with these positive minded dudes, but who knows.

Anyway, after tracking down the ensembles, self titled long player, which you can download gratis, I was struck with how much good music Blank Stare was able to reference, accidentally or not. Already mentioning Boston’s hardcore lineage – SSD, et all – is obviously ground zero. But in the singer’s intense growl, almost spoken at times, there’s a healthful dose of Connecticut’s the Pist. Yeah, that’s an obtuse reference to levy, especially on a group of this nature. “Conversation Useless,” though, sounds like just about anything the Pist did. It just didn’t have anything to do with killing animals. Instead, these Bostonians basically rephrase the Grateful Dead’s most useful lyrical contribution to twentieth century poetry: “Don’t dominate the rap, jack, if you’ve got nothing new to say.”

No, straight edge hardcore kids won’t, most likely, have heard that before. But that only serves to illustrate the fact that punkers and hippies still aren’t too different even if you’re in the process of putting the boot into one of ‘em.

Vomit Pigs: TX Punk that Has Nothing to Do with the Big Boys

There’re more than a few Killed By Death styled bands that come off as something between indispensible and cool relics from an interesting place and time. It’s pretty rare when one of those ensembles merits as much attention as it gets. But it’d be hard to dispute the place a few different songs the Vomit Pigs, a Texas group dealing in trashy rock stuffs, worked up in the pantheon of American punk classics.

Before getting into that, though, it’s worth pointing out that the Vomit Pigs, as fronted by Mike Brock, bka Mite Vomit, didn’t put off the same sort of nascent hardcore feel that so many of its cohort were then working with. The Big Boys’ funk plays no part in the Vomit Pigs sound. Or Really Red. Or anyone else you can think of from that scene. At center here, there’s as much of a New York Dolls cum inept rock group as anything else. And no, there aren’t any wicked guitar solos to speak of.

Skirting the artsty side of things and embracing updated fifties rock, the Vomit Pigs weren’t futurisitic or as nihilistic as their brethren – alright, Brock’s drug intake and premature death might play into that sense of nihilism. But for the most part, these are all songs about girls and how difficult life is. And that doesn’t sound too different than Buddy Holly to me.

What the ensemble’s best known for, though, is its track entitled “Useless Eater.” Apart from having a weird sort of prophecy attached to it, the song counts as one of the better recorded tracks the Vomit Pigs ever set down. Head Vomitter, Brock, sounds even more snotty here than on other tracks. And that’s an accomplishment in and of itself. While the lyrics aren’t always intelligible, there’s got to be a bit of social commentary in there – consumerism and dumb Americans, naturally. Either way, the melodic quotient rates pretty high. But even if it didn’t, the song still rates pretty high up there.

Why “Hypo’s” titled “Hypo,” apart from the obvious drug reference, is a bit confusing. It’s actually the Stooges “I Wanna Be Your Dog” shot through with a new wave’s sense of synthesizer. The tempo’s slowed down and if you weren’t paying attention, it’d be easy to miss the whole experience until the chorus crops up. Oddly, enough, the break even sports a bit of ska-styled guitar jerking. Good and properly varied. Not essential, but entertaining.

The Dum Dum Girls Accidentally Prove It's All a Hoax

Variants on a basic garage sound have been brewing for the better part of the last decade. A self-sustaining market’s continued to grow alongside this latest crop of groups who seem to be on the road touring and hawking merchandise every day of the year. While a few bands’ tinny recordings have gained a significant national and international following, Atlanta’s Black Lips for one, there hasn’t been an indisputable, genre-defining ensemble yet. Instead of the scene yielding up a gold-gilded group, record imprints could be responsible for offering fans the definitive garage act.

 “A year ago, the girls literally met at CMJ three days before our first show; we practiced nine hours a day in Brooklyn leading up to it,” Dee Dee Penny, The Dum Dum Girls’ singer and public face, says recounting her shift from solo act to actualized band in last September’s Interview.

The Dum Dum Girls, an all-female garage and pop group from California, are set to perform a few days prior to the Beets appearing in town. With unimpeachable songwriting talent, but admittedly a bit short on the musical acumen, Dee Dee Penny leads the ensemble through a spate of fully realized numbers, replete with emotive vocal-vibrato echoing through choruses. The group’s quick ascent to Sub Pop sponsorship, a graduation from the smaller, newly influential Captured Tracks, and the band’s recent release of the He Gets Me High EP shouldn’t be a stunning revelation at this point. Surely, there are still Smashing Pumpkins fans around. What about Stone Temple Pilots, though? Or Hum.

The last time Gavin Rossdale, Bush’s front-man, was in the news, though, it probably didn’t have anything to do with music. Falling out of the media’s eye can’t have been his own fault. Maybe Rossdale’s band was as good as Pearl Jam. Maybe it wasn’t. Coming along after grunge’s codification, Bush contributed to an oversaturated, flannel clad, Converse wearing marketplace. Regardless of how modern listeners understand the Britisher’s Sixteen Stone (1994), it was released long enough after Nirvana’s Nevermind (1991) for the effort to count as a superfluous one. Garage bands are approaching a similar scenario.

Diligently uncomplicated, almost to a fault, hundreds of bands are working garage derived musics, mirroring nineties’ Seattle bands living on Black Sabbath and late period Black Flag. Maybe garage based works have reached a critical mass, but capitalizing on the underground’s fascination with these sounds hasn’t been realized. The Dum Dum Girls may be poised to define the genre in a public sense.

Pages