The Left: '80s Rock that Doesn't Stink

There’s a pretty pervasive way of look at the trajectory of rock music. Pretty frequently the eighties are dismissed and assumed to have possessed scant acts capable of working up proper music that had any sort of understandable usefulness. Grunge then becomes the next thing after the seventies which people attribute any worth to. The weird thing is, though, most of the bands affiliated with that “movement” stink. Seriously, go back and listen to it. Apart from Nirvana – and by extension Mudhoney, the Melvins and a few other Seattle bands – all of it’s derivative tripe.

The larger point – and it has nothing to do with Seattle or Minneapolis or Athens being the focal point of real rock stuff – is that there’s a slew of unheralded rock stuff from the eighties that’s only recently being given any sort of critical look because of the aforementioned understanding of history.

Maryland’s the Left probably aren’t the greatest band ever to release a few singles and disappear without more than a handful of people caring, but they were a solid unit. With equal parts punk, hardcore, hillbilly stuff and good songwriting it’s actually not too much of a surprise that these folks only lasted a short while. But even getting to hear the last few songs the band recorded – “The Viet Cong Live Next Door” specifically – one gets the sense that if the Left had lasted a bit long they may have wound up occupying roughly the same post the Meat Puppets would hold; not exactly lauded and revered forebears, but something like talented rejects. But that’s the story of innumerable other acts.

Compiled on Jesus Loves the Left, an open reference to Detroit’s the Stooges, the band’s short recorded history is all lumped together. Comprising a few singles recorded at Inner Ear studio, the same spot Dischord bands would make history, the Left display an aptitude for moving between genres and song writing style that would have made R.E.M. – or whatever other ‘young’ band at the time who would go on to stardom – seem like a bunch of hacks.

Present is the same sort of nihilism inherent in the Left’s heroes – a cover of “TV Eye” points to that. But while the Left looked up to dirty punks of years past, the band’s ability to tightly weave its talents together makes this compilation something almost worthy of pegging indispensible. Too band these guys were just some provincial rock dudes. They could have made a difference. Bummer.

A Minute with Chris Gunn from the Hunches (Part Six)

K: I kinda think that “The Ballad” from Yes. No. Shut It! presaged Exit Dreams!. Do you disagree? And how did the slight shift in sound work from disc to disc?

“Not Invented” seems like a direction that you guys could take and use for an entire disc – and while that isn’t gonna happen, was this the musical direction that the band sought to embrace on Exit Dreams?

CG: First of all that song is called Not Invited. I have seen it called Not Invented a lot on the Internet and I honestly might like that title better but that is not what it is called. Maybe that’s an MP3 thing? I don’t know.

The songs on Exit Dreams were written over the course of the five years between it and our last album. This was a pretty depressing time period for our band.  We were just kind of draining down into the inevitable end. I do think that this type of unavoidable depressing reality allowed us to write more honest music that was free from the conventions and genre mind games that had ensnared us before. This made for an album that I feel is more fluid. The songs do not jump from genre to genre as much as on previous albums.  We were not afraid to mess with verse chorus verse structure.  The stylistic changes happen within songs and I think that makes it more translatable and easier to believe. Not Invited is the one song that is pretty much just a straight pop song and I really see it as more of a throwback to our old albums as opposed to a glimpse into the non-existent future. It does sound like “the ballad” and that’s why it is more of a link to the past.

Oddly enough, I expected this album to be overwhelmingly dark and bleak and one of the things that surprised me with the end product is an odd current of joy and hope that runs throughout it. It almost seems like “Hobo Sunrise” is way darker. I saw one review that claimed “Exit Dreams” was devoid of humor and wrought with dramatic angst and that does not strike me as true at all. Carnival Debris is about a day at an imaginary circus for god’s sake. Swim Hole is overwhelmingly sprightly and filled with some sort of nostalgic hope.  Once again, that aspect of humor is always missed and I think that is a big key to understanding our band.

 

K: Your drummer’s in a band called the Real Pills? Have you guys performed together? Do other members of the group have other bands or projects pulling them away from the Hunches?

CG: Ben was in the Real Pills before he joined the Hunches back in the year 2000 or so. He quit when he joined our band.

 

K: Your Myspace page (and yes, I know it’s lame to begin a question like that) says that there is/are a member or members in SF? When did that occur and how did that work for the recording of Exit Dreams?

CG: I live in San Francisco but I moved here after Exit Dreams was completed. It is going to pose a minor problem practicing for this tour but I don’t think that it’s too big of a deal.

 

K: Has the band accomplished everything that you wanted it to?

CG: Yes. We did a bunch of major tours, played with a lot of bands that I looked up to, got to put out albums on the record label I had always wanted to work with, we made music that I am proud of, and I think that we got out of the game before we started to suck too hard.

Au Pairs: Curt Skirts

My initial aversion towards Birmingham’s Au Pairs wasn’t the music or the fact that the band sports a female singer. It’s in punk where one’s most likely to find a femme vocalist capacious of holding one’s attention while tarting up their vocal style enough so as to remove some of that Kant-specified beauty.

If nothing else, Au Pairs are concerned with working up a dervish of rhythm and sing-speaking enough weirdness as to slot themselves into someplace not too distant from Gang of Four or even the Slits if one were to truck in the most obvious references. Even if digging up a slew of other then contemporary lady-bands, the Au Pairs unquestionably possessed a musicianship unparalleled. That actually goes for all dude bands as well. This was just an adept set of players.

That maybe the point to all of this, though. Even if we were to totally disregard the resultant music, the fact that this amalgam of people were getting up on stage under the banner of Au Pairs was a statement in and of itself. The music, remains a bit more interesting the why it was made.

Either way, the ensemble’s Playing with a Different Sex, released in 1981, is usually well thought of. And there’s no reason to skirt that understanding of the disc. The thing is, there were so many other groups trucking in this music by that point, it seems redundant. Of course, the fact that the Au Pairs retained an aggressive approach to music when groups like the aforementioned Gang of Four, Simple Minds and Scritti Politti eventually embraced a pop vision should make the Birmingham group of interest.

Even as dub infiltrated Au Pairs’ sound there was a tension achieved through supplemental sound effects. “Repetition” points towards the band’s understanding of krautrock (thus its title and those weird sounds laid atop the rhythm) as well as Jamaican musics. The track is an independent monolith might not rank as the most notable of the era, but again, but ‘81 there was more fey nonsense making its way into independent music then necessary.

“Come Again,” which almost sounds like X if they’d been Brits and a few years younger, grants listeners an earful of punk as it existed in its post ’77 vintage. Aurally, the song presents a few problems – or at least prompts a huge number of questions. Is that punk? Was punk over?

Those things have all been asked previously – and they’ll be asked again. Whether or not it matters as much as listening to good music, though, isn’t debatable.

Poison Idea: Pure Hate

“Thanks to their notoriously insatiable diet of drugs, alcohol, and junk food, the members of Poison Idea all ballooned past the 300-pound mark by the time of the 1986 full-length Kings of Punk…” Jason Anken, Allmusic.

The above quote isn’t sourced and I couldn’t even make up a way to confirm or deny the statement, but it’s a pretty funny idea. The fact that Poison Idea’s guitarist went by the name Pig Champion might lend some credence to it all, but still, specious at best.

Regardless of being enormously fat, or just American, Poison Idea were one of the Northwest bands, Portland specifically, which ushered in a second wave of hardcore determined to push tempos beyond what had been the norm up through the early eighties.

The group persisted in one form or another until the eighties, with some scatter shot shows continuing on until relatively recently, but it’s the 1982 Pick Your King with its iconic cover, that the band’s still known for today. The single – despite it counting thirteen songs – has been reissued countless times with Jesus being fielded on anything from a white to red background. But his tilted head should point out that there’s something held within most aren’t going to be pleased about.

With most songs not getting past the one minute mark, it’s easy for this disc to fly by without being given proper attention. And while Poison Idea will always be affiliated with the speedier side of early eighties hardcore, the bands ability to briefly shift tempos is admirable.

“Self Abuse,” a concept never too far away from discussion, begins in typical shape – almost too fast to comprehend. And even as the track moves into what functions as the chorus, its pacing is relentless. The abrupt change, if only briefly, though exhibits a musical acumen most folks miss about this kind of music. There might not be a tremendous amount of variation at work here, but there aren’t too many folks capacious of doing this.

The same argument about contemporary art emerges as well as the point, “Well, I can do that.” Of course you can. The thing is you didn’t. These fat guys from Portland did. And they did it well.

Poison Idea probably won’t wind up becoming anyone’s entry point into the world of hardcore – that’s what Bad Brains, Minor Threat and Black Flag are for. But when Damaged gets worn out, Pick Your King’s a good a place to go as any other.

Afghan Whigs: A Musical Plateau, Persisting

Since most folks are currently engaged with excavating the eighties, the nineties can’t be too far behind. There’s even been anticipation regarding Soundgarden performing again. That’s nuts. But even as looking back at a decade which irrevocably changed the way popular music works (and I’d argue its impact rivals that of the grand digitization of the nation), a number of bands one time serving as critically acclaimed acts haven’t aged too well.

The aforementioned Soundgarden, if we’re being honest with ourselves, isn’t too much more than a pop-metal act with a pretty good guitarist and an attractive singer. The Afghan Whigs have nothing to do with metal. And I really have no idea what Greg Dulli looks like at this point, but for a while, in the wake of Nirvana’s cessation, worked to take up space in the vacuum.

The band’s always been considered in a flattering light by press folks – even if the Allmusic entry detailing the Whigs uses the word pretentious in the first few sentences. But just like Gavin Rossdale’s Bush, or any other band from the era, hearing the Whigs in 2010 isn’t really the most pleasant way to spend time.

A quick run through the band’s best known songs from its major label debut, Gentlemen, reveals a bunch of rhythmically diverse, if melodically sullen tunes. The title track finds Dulli writhing around in self-effacing squalor, but that’s his schtick. And while it might have passed muster back in 1993, but today there’s not too much to do with a breathy delivery like this apart from figuring it fits on adult, contemporary radio. The song – and the entire album – reeks of smugness. It’d be difficult to figure it all for pretentious seeing as the band comes from Cincinnati, a town not even in the top two most populace stop overs in Ohio.

It’s only after making it through that title track, “Debonair” as well as “Fountain and Fairfax” that a few momentary highlights occur. In keeping with the dour tone of the effort, “When We Two Parted” doesn’t deviate from main lyrical tropes, but the songs inclusion of a slight slide guitar’s a nice touch even if it doesn’t serve too much purpose. Here again, the Whigs’ rhythm section seems more important than anything else.

What’s most interesting – apart from none of this aging well – is the fact that the Whigs basically presaged Kings of Leon in its lame attempt at merging aggressive musics with songs aimed at taking over radio. The fact that either succeeded is more of a comment on our society than the musical plateau persisting for the last fifteen years.

A Minute with Chris Gunn from the Hunches (Part Five)

K: What’s the scene in Portland like? What do you think about Eat Skull - have you played with them and are there other groups up there that sound similar? Is there a NW/Portland sound?

CG: The big bands in Portland are worshipped by the papers and the unconscious masses and they are atrociously bad. Modest Mouse, Decemberists, 31 Knots, Death Cab for Cutie or whatever. It’s like pirate theater rock or something; a bunch of spoiled thespians whining about coffee and the problems they are having with stretching their ears. There are a lot of bands with a violin and a “crazy” drummer or some shit like that. There are still bands that only listen to the Misfits and Psychobilly and there are still bands that think that garage is and always will be the only genre of music that matters. Tribal tattoos are everywhere.  

There are, however, a lot of great new bands like Eat Skull, the Whines, and Meth Teeth. It is an easy city to get a show in and it is very easy to ignore the audacity of some of the bands out there.

Eat Skull are my good friends and are such a great band. We get to play with them in Portland and I’m super stoked.

There is not a Northwest sound. There are a lot of bands but I do not see some sort of communal sound. The rain is a big influence I guess. It seems like if a communal sound is developing than you would have a bunch of people copying each other and it really would not be a good thing. It’s odd why people are always so eager to lump bands together into a sound or a movement. I don’t understand that.

K: I read that you guys hadn’t been playing frequently before the release of Exit Dreams? Is that accurate/Why?

CG: Yeah. We really have only played about five times in the last three years because we had decided to break up and did not really want to play live anymore. The shows had become predictable, soaked in alcohol, and it really was not that fun anymore. The process of recording Exit Dreams took about a year for many reasons and then it took over a year to come out and the band was just kind of floating in limbo during that time. I guess we really weren’t a band anymore at that point and I don’t know what we are now. Some sort of reunion ghost or something.   

K: What’s Home Alone 5…explain how that disc came about and if you guys are just tired of playing the same stuff or if this is this actually your last disc und why?

CG: Exit Dreams is our last album. Home Alone 5 is a limited edition vinyl thing with extra tracks from the Exit Dreams recording sessions on one side and us playing on John Peel’s radio show on the other. It shouldn’t be viewed as our last statement but I think that it’s still interesting and there are some good songs on it. We will have copies with us on tour and that will be the only way to get it until after the tours over and Larry puts it on his websight.

There are a lot of reasons for the break up but I know for myself that I got tired of the Hunches formula and I didn’t see much room for flexibility so it was really just time to move on. (CON’T)

Byron Coley x Thurston Moore: On No Wave (Video)

I dunno if this pair counts as the most insightful folks on the historic nature of NY's music scene. But if they're not, it'd be difficult to figure out who has a better (and first hand) grasp of what was going on.

'68 Comeback: Country, Garage, Blues and Velvet

Releasing over ten singles in something like a five year period is generally the hallmark of a creative mind overwhelmed by life and all its trappings. And while that might generally point to any number of troublesome situations, hearing (Monsieur) Jeffrey Evans on a number of the tracks he’s recorded under the auspices of ‘68 Comeback, it’s just as likely the singer and guitarist is channeling his heroes more than anything else.

Pointing to Evans as the central figure in this ensemble isn’t difficult seeing as there’re no less than fifteen odd accomplices contributing to the huge number of releases associated with ‘68 Comeback. He’s remained the sole constant. But it sounds as if it doesn’t really matter what Evans is surrounded by as long as there’s a beat for him to ride through a set of lyrics touching on women, life as a problem and whatever other mystical caveats blues based musics general discuss.

Tossing ‘68 Comeback into the category of blues or garage – or pretty much anything – winds up being pretty reductive. For the most part, there is that umpah beat going on, perhaps connecting the band with the revved up variety of country stuffs, but just as consistent is a stomp most associated with the Velvet Underground.

Granted that connection seems specious at best, but wading through the band’s Singles Collection the whole thing becomes relatively clear. Beginning the compilation with “Chantilly Rock (And Pony's Tail)” makes sense from an historical point of view, seeing as it’s the earliest song included here – there’s a single released a year prior, but neither song is represented. But the song’s dumb thudding points to Evans and company enjoying the downer moments of the Velvets’ glory. That guitar solo, perhaps more biting that revealing of chops, is another element copped from the sixties’ band.

A few tracks on “Flip, Flop, and Fly” basically reconstitutes “Chantilly.” The pacing and rhythm is the same. And as for that guitar solo, it might get a bit more abstract, but still retains the same sort of blues cum Lou Reed as the earlier foray into improv.

The combination of Velvets’ styled aggression and noise with garage tendencies isn’t new. And even Reed’s group trucked in the territory while attempting to move beyond it. So, with all these source materials floating around, what makes ‘68 Comeback worth a listen? It might take convincing, but these folks might have counted as one of the better informed garage acts riding the genre’s umpteenth wave at the turn of the century – it’s adherence to country flavor never hurts either.

Amon Düül II's Jörg Evers as Pack

It’s been figured before – and perhaps more succinctly – but there’s an undeniable link between hippies, communes and seventies styled punkers. Apart from the time line simply leading from point A to point B, there’re more than a few figures who crop up more than once – Kim Fowley being a significant guy.

Less noticeably than the Runaways wrangler was a German fellow named Jörg Evers. Whether or not the man’s known his part in Amon Duul II, perhaps the most entertaining Krautrock group from the initial era, or not Evers and others claim that he was part of the first proper German punk group.

Pack, from just taking a look at the lone long player’s cover, are dressed the part – of course the trio looks a bit older than everyone else spiking up their hair in 1977. But that doesn’t matter, the music does. And while there aren’t any extended solos – the same air of defiance crops up in this group as was present in Evers’ earlier group.

Even if there wasn’t a discernable link between Pack and older, commune dwelling weirdoes, the album’s second track, “Nobody Can Tell Us,” sounds like a beat combo amped up on pills. Granted, that’s ostensibly what punk is, but the track counts as an effort tying not just Pack, but punk, back to sixties’ groups.

Coming so early in Germany’s development of punk, though, there are some ridiculous moments that can be heard throughout punk’s lesser moments a few years on.

Scruffy vocals are expected when listening to music of this ilk. And while Evers and Pack doesn’t offend too frequently – this whole thing’s in English as well, which might have complicated things a bit – “Terrorist” sports some pretty horrendous singing. Evers definitely wrenches his voice to the point of it simply disappearing. But at the same time, he presages such nonsensical acts as the Exploited and maybe by extensions a few derivations of metal which would crop up in a few years as well.

Despite the various missteps – and there’re really aren’t too many – Pack didn’t really work up anything that winds up being catchy to the point that it sticks in one’s head. That being said, listening to the entire album in one sitting is pretty easy to do. It might only be thirty minutes worth of music, but there’s not a tremendous downer in the bunch. Even the aforementioned “Terrorist” has is moments. Snag this one for posterity or just for shits and giggles.

Brainbombs: Play This for Your Mother

The first time anyone is awarded the pleasure of hearing Anal Cunt, there should be some sort of epiphany about a thirty seconds into the endeavor. Music can be an awful clatter, rife with mocking condescension accompanied by lyrics just about anyone in the ‘slow’ English class could muster and it’ll still be kinda awesome.

Listening to Anal Cunt on a regular basis is probably one of the most rare occurrences on the face of the earth. And, granted, there’s a reason for that. But as offensive – and purposefully so – as that group is, there’s a clutch of Swedes that have been kicking around for just about twenty five years who rival that better known pseudo-metal group.

Brainbombs – who were brought to my attention through Superdope – are old hat today. The band’s still is ridiculous as ever. And it’s difficult to imagine coming upon these guys in 1985. But the same scenario greeting Americans with weird taste who were granted entry to the Anal Cunt world probably occurred for more than a few folks in relation to Brainbombs.

Working through the ensembles thick and muddied back-catalog, a slew of singles sticks out – one with Anal Babes being a highlight. A weird thing happens along the way, though. If one tosses on Obey (1995) and then Urge to Kill (1999) there’s a notable dissipation of sound quality.

Now, the band never attained any sort of wide spread acclaim, briefly granting Brainbombs the ability to record albums with the most technologically advanced equipment (even if that did occur, it’d be easy to guess that the band would pass on the chance or simply wreck the studio). But even with that sonic drop-off, the persistence of vision – both lyrically and musically – is a connective tissue making all this mess sound the same.

Lurching “Anal Desire,” from Obey, is as awful, violent and spiteful as “Maybe” off of Urge to Kill. Either track is going to be troublesome to the straight world. But the pacing of either track when considered tied to its message is pretty funny. Violate whoever, but do it so that there’s enough time for the victim to think about it and reflect on what led them to that present moment.

These guys might ape some sort of end day’s G.G. Allin scenario, but the music itself isn’t really that offensive. Just slow, repetitive and loud. Everything written herein, though, can easily be found every Friday evening at the local sports bar. So, friendly weirdoes, who then is the misogynist and who deserves what?

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