February 2011

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.

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.

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.

There’re about fifty bands named something like the Dogs – an LA band, the British Slaughter and the Dogs. The list goes on. It’s an obvious name, but there’s a French group using the animal as its name that hasn’t even achieved Killed By Death status. And there’s not really any good reason for that.

As early as 1973, the Dogs were aping a revved up rock and roll stance easily matching any of the Stateside proto punk caterwauling we’ve all grown to love. Admittedly, the Dogs don’t include too much of an adventurous attitude in its music. Toronto’s Teenage Head might be a good aural equivalent. But that’s a bit unfair even if the Frenchies’ “My Life” sounds like those Canucks while they were covering the Boys.

Pinning a sound on a specific place is difficult to do. It works on occasion, but trying to associate the more garagey side of the independent rock world with Canada, even if it’s Vancouver, gets kinda difficult to do. Down south, here in the States, our perception of those northerners is one of tremendous calm. It’s clean up there. Pots a bit more tolerable and there’s free stuff from the government, easily accessible and not at the center of a decades old political debate. Maybe all of that actually goes into Dead Ghosts’ echoey and sometimes slowly paced, but in a good way, debut album.

After a handful of singles and cassettes the band turned in its first long player, self titled that is, through Florida’s Dying. Despite the large distance between the band’s home and its label’s, the pairing’s an apt fit. For whatever reason, most of the garage groups springing from Florida don’t traffic in the most revved up derivations of the genre. There’s a lilting quality to the whole thing, Dead Ghosts included, making works seem older and perhaps more dusty.

Yeah, Dead Ghosts have an album named Dead Ghosts and a song on that album called “Dead Ghosts.” Again, though, it’s fitting. The song’s aural qualities go a long way towards summoning spirits. It’s all lopped blues shuffle, plunking toy piano and almost passable slide guitar. If you heard this stuff coming out of your neighbor’s house, you’d think it was haunted. And that’s, obviously, the point. But it works almost effortlessly. Of course, fading the song out and bursting into the country cum Nuggets “Getting Older” is nothing short of a jolt. And while the combination of various country stylings with Dead Ghosts’ sixities’ rock stance isn’t necessarily original, Francis Harold and the Holograms are pretty adept at that pose, it’s turned in with impeccable skill. Or, at least, as much skill as necessary for an effort like this.

It's about time someone got around to doing an extended non-fiction film on garage related musics from the last twenty years. And even as I feel the need to generally decry just about anything Vice-related, New Garage Explosion is pretty entertaining even if it skips over a few things and includes some punk stuff that seemed unnecessary.