the vinyl stitches - all strapped up

(I missed Friday's post due to personal conflicts and alcohol. Mainly the alcohol, stoked by the conflicts. Which is odd, since normally it works the other way around. But that's okay.)

There came a point in my life, about six months ago, where I realized that I was forcing myself to listen to music I didn't really enjoy. I had turned my iPod into a rock critic's wet dream, at the expense of my own pleasure, to fulfill some dated, convoluted standard that was irrelevant to begin with. Which is pretty fucked up.

I wish I could remember the specifics of this epiphany. All I know is I slowly began admitting to myself that I really don't like Captain Beefheart, Faust, or Andrew Bird, but I love shitty noise rock, every Mountain Goats live show ever recorded (pre-2004), and most especially, garage rock. So I deleted all the shitty prog and experimental arty nonsense that was simply exhausting to sit through, and began delving deeper into the mindless caveman garage bands that truly got my dick hard.

I've become quite the pompous ass when it comes to garage, if I do say so myself. I've run through every volume of Nuggets, Pebbles, and Back From the Grave many times over, trying to pick out the few bands in those collections that actually released more than one 7", and in the process developed a love for that raw, noisy, awful racket that accompanies good, true garage rock. It's just attitude and naïvety, kids who just wanted to be rock stars so they bought guitars and figured out a few chords and ripped off the Stones and the Who as close as they possibly could without straight-up copying the riffs note for note. It's primal and pure and it's more exciting than any other music I've encountered in my relatively-short life.

The early-2000s brought on a wave of "garage-revival" bands, most of which were absolute shit. The good ones were "garage" in the vaguest sense possible--somehow the Strokes, the Hives, and the Vines fall into this category, when they were really just playing poppy rock 'n' roll with a healthy dose of punk posturing. The bands that actually tried to sound like their Nuggets idols are the ones that suck the hardest. The Flaming Sideburns, the the Mooney Suzuki, the Datsuns, and an endless stream of other bands that played pristine bullshit rock songs and completely missed the point. Where was the edge? Where was the grime? Where was the fucking soul?

The list of modern revival bands that I actually enjoy is short and sweet: the White Stripes, the Greenhornes, Black Lips, the Hentchmen, and maybe the Kills, if we're pushing the boundaries far enough. But none of them quite have that garage sound down like of one of my favorite new bands, the Vinyl Stitches.

These guys got it right. Which is apparently really fucking hard to do these days. They have more in common with the 80s-90s revival groups that predated the whole movement, and did it better than anyone else--the Gories, Oblivians, the Chesterfield Kings, etc. The Vinyl Stitches probably fall somewhere between those three groups. Take the Nuggets songwriting of the Kings, mix in the Oblivians punk attitude, and filter it through the delicious cacophonous fuzz of the Gories, and you get something close to their new album.

The thing that makes this band stand out among the army of look-a-likes is the energy. They sound just as excited and restless as the original wave of garage rockers. Whether they're plagiarizing that energy wholesale is beside the point, because they're plagiarizing it really, really well. I believe it. They're not celebrating rock 'n' roll in the third-person, in that obnoxious Hellacopters style that permeates everything "revival"--they're just living it. Which is cliché as hell but it's true, so who gives a shit. The Vinyl Stitches set out with "a vision of creating a band that would reproduce the live spirit of rock 'n' roll!" (Emphasis there's, not mine.) The scary part is that they somehow succeeded.

All Strapped Up is simply one of the most enjoyable rock albums I've heard in years. Which fits them perfectly into my new-found approach to honestly enjoying music. Not that I'm dropping the noisy, rough shit altogether--I'm listening to 2 by Hanatarash as I type--but it's nice to be able to fit one or two of these nice, wholesome albums in the rotation to lighten the mood on occasion.

fear - the record

I've always found Fear fascinating.

Intimidation, shock value, aggression, confrontation--these are aspects of punk that have been there almost from the very beginning. Once frontmen started catching on to Iggy's shtick, it became commonplace, if not expected, to work as hard as possible to push your audience to the breaking point. Dive off the stage! Fight with your fans! Cut yourself with broken glass! Wear swastikas! It was just what you did when you were the head of a punk band.

Yet within this world of constant edginess and boundary-pushing, Fear manages to stand out as one of more tasteless, crude, even sinister bands to ever come out of punk.

It's not a completely undeserved title, obviously. Lee Ving is a total asshole, and he revels in it, striving to push every button he can get his hands on. He's sexist, racist, and just plain mean. Sometimes his scorn is twisted and elaborate, sometimes it's as simple as saying "I Don't Care About You," as loud and frequent as possible. He doesn't give a fuck, and clearly he has the talent to piss people off.

Fear is possibly the highlight of The Decline of Western Society, a classic snapshot of the L.A. hardcore scene in the early 80s. Ving berates his audience mercilessly, going well beyond the standard taunting and jeering, to the point of being outright mean. And it's simply incredible to watch. He's absolutely fearless, despite the violence spread out among the crowd, and despite the fact that very active threats are being thrown his way throughout. It's a display of uninhibited antagonism so pure that you can't help but be impressed.

At times, it's hard not to read into Fear's music and look for a deeper message. "Let's Have a War" has roughly the same message as Jello Biafra's chilling "Kinky Sex (Makes the World Go Round)" monologue, but while Biafra's satire was crystal-clear, you get the feeling that Ving might actually want to kill off a good deal of society, for various reasons. You almost look for meaning in self-defense, to fend off the notion that you're listening to the truthful words of a sadist.

Nihilism in punk dates back to the very beginnings of the movement, and in many ways is inseparable from the music itself. The difference here is that Fear truly revels in that idea. There's happiness and glee and excitement behind these words. Fuck the world, hate everything, don't give a shit, use whoever you can whenever you can, get yours and move on because who gives a fuck. It equates to a rejection not just of society itself, but everything and everyone in it, on a personal level. There are no higher goals, no personal philosophy, just carnage.

As much as I want to just accept it all from the outset and take Fear for what they are, it's hard not to be affected by The Record. It's an unrelenting piece of art. Taken apart and analyzed, it's easy to shrug off. But as a whole, it's impossible not to be affected. Bands like Brainbombs would take this to the logical extreme, but even in this relatively watered-down form, it's still chilling stuff. Which is the ultimate victory, I suppose.

Even in 1982, after five to six years of punk and punk derivatives expanding on the work of Iggy, Stiv Bators, Richard Hell and co., Fear manages to take it to a different level. The simple answer is that The Record is so riveting because it's true. But that reality is too much for me to accept. I'd much rather believe that Lee Ving is a twisted little genius, and we all just fell for the act. I'm just not sure that I can.

femme fatale - from the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks

Back in high school, I got most of my music from my local library. They had a decent sized collection of CDs, almost all of which were new to me, and in the summer of 2006 I filled my Creative Nomad Jukebox with a plethora of free tunes that constantly expanded my taste in music. Superchunk, Jimi Hendrix Experience, Mastodon, Marvin Gaye, TV on the Radio--an hilariously diverse selection of artists that opened me up to worlds of music I probably never would have experienced otherwise.

I would walk into the library every week and pick CDs out almost at random, often choosing them simply for their cool name or interesting cover art. A CD called You're a Woman, I'm a Machine fulfilled both of those criteria, and on the ride home one afternoon, I was treated to an absolute mindfuck of a musical experience.

In hindsight, Death From Above 1979 is a pretty good band, though one that hasn't aged particularly well in my eyes. Their sound isn't particularly unique, and the bass/drums combination loses its novelty fairly quickly. But for a 16-year old kid who was just learning to play bass guitar and hadn't even begin to explore the depths of punk, it was a total revelation, an atomic blast of energy and attitude and noise that completely changed the way I viewed my instrument, and was simply unlike anything I had ever heard before. I'll never understand why or how that CD ended up in the Queen Anne's County Free Library, but I'm eternally grateful that it got there.

Compared to Femme Fatale, however, Death From Above is about as brutal as Superchunk.

If you took DFA, doubled the tempo, replaced the bass with a wall of screaming guitars, and drenched it in hardcore, you'd get something approximating Femme Fatale.

It's too noisy to be punk, too slow to be grindcore, and too harsh to be anything in-between. Jesse F. Keeler (one half of DFA) insists on only releasing EPs, all littered with dialogue, ambiance, and interludes, giving it an unexpected prog/experimental edge to boot. It's insanely aggressive, yet well-defined, even restrained at times. It's hand-crafted chaos that often leaves you wanting more, but sacrifices the freedom normally found in experimental music for the creation of an actual product--not a snapshot of a general sound, which most noise-rock bands tend to churn out, but a series of finished, complete records.

If that all sounds bizarre, it's because it is.

The band has a total recorded output of just over 30 minutes, and with their last release put out in 2004, it doesn't look like there's anything else coming out from this Keeler side-project anytime soon. Which may be for the best. While taking on one EP at a time can be disappointing, throwing them all on in a row--Fire Baptism; As You Sow, As You Shall Reap; From The Abundance of Heart The Mouth Speaks--is quite an experience. It doesn't get my blood pumping like Arab on Radar, Lightning Bolt, or Melt-Banana, but it's also not as harsh or blunt. And it's also nice to be able to take in a discography in one sitting, instead of being buried in a mountain of LPs, EPs, splits, singles, and random comp appearances.

As far as noise-rock goes, consider this easy-listening. Which is something even the most seasoned noise junkies can enjoy every now and then. For anyone looking for an edge to their punk without getting their asses handed to them right away, this is the place to start.