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Reissues

Outside of a few ardent music fans, hipsters and record collectors, how many Americans ever heard of the Axemen before the Siltbreeze reissue campaign? I’m guessing not many of us had the pleasure and, yet, the band steadily released albums throughout the last two-and-a-half decades. At face value, it seems like the band just wishes to entertain themselves and devotees by performing and recording their take on the music they enjoy. These hermetic tribes usually end up being the most effective musical acts because their mission really cannot fail. If the mind’s creation gears continually turn and you possess the unique ability to, at once, channel and transform the music that inspires you, not much could go wrong. Such is the case with the Axemen.

So, TJ Lax provides the public with a vital service and a history lesson by releasing not one but two Axemen reissues in 2009. The first installment, 1984’s Big Cheap Motel, proves why this band deserves the reissue treatment and the attention it will likely receive by bearing the Siltbreeze tag. Like a more cohesive version of their UK brothers from other mothers on the Street Level Records roster, the Axemen kick grimy, postmodern, crooked punk-jazz sermons filtered through a boombox haze and serious subject matter that is littered with in-jokes. Milk, sexism and breasts all factor into a biting take on UK anarcho-punk lyrics soundtracked by a serious defacto homage to the aforementioned Street Level sounds.

In fact, the second tune on the album—billed as a rehash of album-opener “Big Fat ‘M’”— sounds like a looser a Good Missionaries outtake tracked on top of a Danny and the Dressmakers tune. A dense, plodding rhythm line lays the grounds for a strange, possible anti-sexism rant wherein the singer exhibits the same off-kilter, slurred sing-speak vocals as Mark Perry. Interrupted by chatter and greasy guitar-driven sound experimentation, the song detours into a shapeless pile of intersecting ideas before briefly rising back into its initial structure. The results of the expedition on the second rendition of “Big Fat ‘M’” could be disastrous and annoying if its slant on song construction continued for an entire album.

But the Axemen duck this possible pitfall and keep Big Cheap Motel fresh and exciting by providing a home base of sound to which they can return after their journey into a foreign territory commences. Songs like the title track and “The Pornographic Milk Drink” showcase this sound without sacrificing the variety of execution techniques that runs through the album. Pleasantly skewed junkyard Buddy Holly rhythm lines played atop walls of distorted uber-rock riffs that contain the weight and force of a Flipper-like death dirge and the occasional saxophone blurt frame the basic vehicle for the band’s Brautiganian lyrical worldview. “The Pornographic Milk Drink” contains rotating metal spoke on a ferris wheel guitar leading into a sludgy sewage drain of a riff. Lead guitar lays the groundwork for a boogie-infused take on the band’s sound, as big ‘70s hard rock sounds collide with the band’s surrealist take on Crass Records political sloganeering.

Built around a thick guitar line that is distorted until it becomes a fluid conveyer belt of sound, the title track reaps the benefits of its relative simplicity. The mantra of “Big cheap motel/ Big Tamla motel” pairs with the lava guitar flow to form a song that would work fine with guitar and vocals. But each time the Axemen run through things, a slight variation on the initial theme seems to arise on the next go-round—an off-rhythm guitar line, extra guitar fractures, a more minimal drum beat. The initial riff melts into small, blurry guitar bridges. A faux-Dick Dale guitar construction spackled in the cracks of “Big Cheap Motel” wanders to whatever rhythmic variation that the guitarist feels best compliments the tune. All the slight variations keep the sense of adventure that Big Cheap Motel showcases in tact.

Big Cheap Motel is one of those records where you can imagine the band’s thought process as they delve into any musical alleyway that pleases them. Though the names and age range of the band members are hard to discern from the liner notes (the insert contains poorly Xeroxed photos of the band and each band member’s name printed in black magic marker with an arrow pointed to his place in the photo), Big Cheap Motel contains the wide-eyed looseness of a bunch of kids in a garage trying to mimic the music they enjoy. Let’s do a hardcore tune. Let’s try inserting a drill sound on this one. The refreshing results vary wildly from the artists’ that may or may not have inspired the Axemen but the band’s affinity for the challenge and reward of artistic creation shines through.

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Next up on the reissue circuit: A new release by Ecstatic Peace of an album that almost never made if off of the holding shelf—Menstruation Sisters’ Samantha, My Whack Panther. Originally slated as a multi-label 2004 release, it’s the album no one knew they were missing. Only three releases by this Australian duo (sometimes foursome) crawled onto my turntable but they all nullified all the distractions in the room and captured my imagination. In 2008, No Fun provided the much-needed service of reissuing MA, an abrasive and texturally –shifting release that found the band firing a manic guitar, drums and squeals attack out of its amps.

Acting as the polar opposite of MA while retaining strands of the band’s DNA, Samantha, My Whack Panther sounds like the DNA songs wherein Arto Lindsay starts speaking gibberish and, subsequently, the guitar attack becomes elastic, slacking and tightening with the vocal delivery. The Menstruation Sisters strip their sound to the bare basics on the album, leaving vast fields of negative space between guitar notes, nonsensical chattering and drum pats. To some, the sound on Samantha... may evoke a group of mentally handicapped youngsters trying to formulate a song by piecing together fractions of the elements that bond to create music. But the minimal, wiseass jazz delivery on Samantha… is cold, calculated and, well, fun.

In a documentary US Maple, Steve Albini talked about the confusion that resulted from the crowd at a US Maple concert attempting to slam dance only to hear the band disassemble the rhythm and refuse to glue its pieces back together. On Samantha…, the Menstruation Sisters achieve the same effect. Each time the band seems to gain steam and formulate a somewhat cohesive riff, production grinds to a halt and the band takes apart its product. But the parts splayed about the floor are in and of themselves a whole.

To Come:

More 7"s
Country Teasers
Nothing People
Lots of good stuff.
Drop me a line kobak77[at]yahoo[dot]com

The Olsen Twins Nekkid

Wormsblood “Mastery of Creation Demos” LP (Barbarian Records, 2009):

George Magers showed me this one a few summers ago. When I asked about the artist, George just said: “It’s the guys from Davenport doing black metal.” I hate to stereotype a band, but from my experiences listening to Davenport, I couldn’t fathom the pulverizing bleakness of Wormsblood. But Clay Ruby seems willing to tackle any musical niche he enjoys. Although I really don’t care for a lot of his projects, at least he has the gall to branch out and know he’s bound to win over most experimental music fans at some point with one of his creations. If his power electronics/ambient/haunted circuit incarnate Burial Hex proves anything, it’s that he possesses the ability to summon the darkness and construct the polar opposite of the Davenport stuff I’ve heard.

So, with the small amount of information I acquired about Clay Ruby since my initial Wormsblood listening session, the context of the black metal project. It also comes as no surprise that Ruby jumps around the boundaries of black metal with the second Wormsblood demo featured on this LP. It starts out with an attack that brings to mind the spastic assault of Japanese hardcore/metal warlords GISM. “Fragments of the Witch” revels in a dank dungeon wherein chain-bound slaves sleep in cowboy piss. Echoing wildman vocals from the stone torture basement collide with Nordic conquest guitars. The crew expands the song logically with triumphant guitar bridges and a battle worn collapse.

From there, Ruby’s warriors blaze a path through the typical black metal tunnels. Lightning fast distorted guitars, pained screams, nature sounds and mystical ambient electronic mists round out the band’s basic sound. “Sig Bind” thumps its chest with a psychotic drumbeat and the stream of guitar violence that typifies black metal crypts, as the singer belts out manic distress calls like a mother holding her recently deceased child after a suicide bombing. On “The First Dim Shinings (of those about to be Awakened),” the black mass turns to a mental asylum choir band’s rendition of a traditional folk ballad, minstrel spirit slogs through the Revolutionary War drumbeat tempo.

The Gravehill Demos, a 2004 collection and my first introduction to the band, sprawls out a rougher sound with vocals blending with the instrumental core like phantasms lurking in the corners of a dilapidated house. Jet fueled guitars burn through songs and the prototypical Animal from “The Muppets” drum beats help light the one-dimensional four-track blaze. The band throws spooky psychedelica into the breakdown on “A Wolf in the Night,” with wolves, distorted guitar and vagrants howling around a drum circle. The threatening whispering, dog barks and tape fuckery between songs sounds more like the creepy passages on We’re only in it for the Money than Darkthrone. Odder still, on “Of a Mourning Phase Unstirred,” the band slows the tempo and allows the singer (Zodiac Wyrdskull, The Lung or someone else with a funny name) perform a little Alice Cooper grandstanding, as he shouts indecipherable nonsense with the black metal fire beneath him.

Though I enjoy black metal music, my knowledge and taste in the genre tends to stray from that of the firmly entrenched black metal fans that I know. I still like the so-called “fake black metal” of bands like Xasthur and Leviathan. I like the fact that so many of black metal frontmen obscure their vocals by screaming, using horrid recording gear and piles of distortion and sometimes pushing their yelps further back into the mix so the vocals act as an instrument rather than a device for conveying lyrics. Seriously, I don’t want to know what these guys sing about. Haunted forests, demons, the occult and olden times fail to interest me and, if I possessed the ability to decipher the screams, it would put a damper on my listening experience. Luckily, Wormsblood overcome all of these possible pitfalls by sticking to the original formula.

News:

Scott Foust is bringing his film “Here’s to Love” around Europe. From the Swill Radio Web site: “We are very busy here at HQ. I am in the midst of arranging a long tour of Europe for my film, Here's To Love!, as well as a variety of other performances. I'll be doing music shows as a duo with Frans de Waard under the name The Tobacconists. Frans and I will have time to work out the material and I know we'll be superb. I'm really looking forward to working with Frans.

Besides those shows and the film screenings, I'll also be doing my performance piece The Four Accomplishments a few times and maybe a lecture or two. The first show is a World Premier screening of Here's To Love! at Extrapool in Nijmegen on March 28; the last show on the continent is a screening of HTL! at Bozar in Brussels April 24, followed by The Tobacconists at Divus Gallery in London on the 25, and a screening of HTL! and a performance of The Four Accomplishments on April 26. This is a very exciting adventure for me. I have to thanks my friends Jaason von Bannisseht, whose determination is the only thing that made this tour happen; and Frans who has worked like a rented mule to make it all work. Here's to you two!”

Scott needs to book gigs from April 6 to the 13^th. You can get in touch with him through the Swill site. Also, check out the great new comp on Pineapple Tapes called Lasting. It’s the final release for Foust’s vanity label. Two other fantastic Swill releases, also: the long awaited Ian Middleton LP and an IFCO live CDr.

Next:
The Country Teasers

7”s; lots of 7”s, good ones

The awesome new Axemen reissue.

Dance

Spring training started in late February. So, this blog needs to get back in shape. Time for me to get back to Derek Jeter mode instead of an Andruw Jones slump.

Time to explore the mysterious Taboo—not the disgusting porn company but a shadowy crew out of the trdw/d-Asbestos on Ice collective. The other bands in this Maine-based crew exhibit this amazing ability to convert the raw sound of jam sessions into something tangible without the aimless meandering of today’s hippie road warriors.

I enjoy how the collective thinks. These guys act like hyperactive gifted children, somehow synthesizing all these seemingly polarized ideas into grainy but intoxicating homemade gin. Trdw/d albums showcase traits unique to each project and enough overlapping aesthetics to create a niche for the label. The majority of the records find the artists tooling around with drums, guitar and glue, seeing exactly how far they can fracture a rhythm or slow down the pace until the breakdown forces them to completely shed their rhythmic skin and collapse into a pile of muscles and blood.

It’s difficult to wrap a blanket around the trdw/d sound and describe it as one body. Multiple faces of a single act appear within one release. These guys jump from high to low culture without sacrificing any intrigue. The change of pace on a record on a dime, sawing the bottom from a tune and tossing industrial clatter, a decimated pop culture sample or another sonic device onto wax to fill in the gap in the grooves. The strangers from Belfast recently sent me a tape wherein Impractical Cockpit torches “White Light/White Heat,” soaking the chugging riff found at the tail end of the song in grime and giving the lyrics the circular quality and rough feel of a scratched LP. This take on the Velvet’s tune shows why the trdw/d dudes excel at their craft. Instead of worshiping and mimicking sacred cows, they dissect the creatures, take a look inside, decide which parts they enjoy and weld them into an unrecognizable creature.

One of these monsters sloughed onto my speakers from a primordial pit last year using an LP as its vehicle. Taboo, a hairy, wide-eyed group of nomads, cooks up a slow and slurry batch of homemade Oxycontin on Their Satanic Majesty’s Third and Final Request. Trudging through junk rock rubble like classic period Bunny Brains, Taboo splurge out rumbling, frayed, dirty psychedelic guitar crud backed by caveman rhythms. When they truly hone in on their target, the band sounds like a disjointed DNA, as withering guitar shrieks and free jazz drumming circle around echoing gruff vocals.

Like the inverse of the droll, pedestrian experimentation birthed from the anus Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, fluidity seems like an afterthought on the Their Satanic Majesty’s Third and Final Request. The album welcomes the listener into the weirdness with a doorbell ring, a knock and a dog bark. Instrumental passages brainstorm how to best recreate the sounds of monkeys floating in space while illustrating the interstellar scenery. Degenerate sound experiments fill the gaps between logical thoughts. At one point, the records seems to end and a lock groove kicks in. A half-minute later, the record’s grooves appear to be filtered through a dust-chocked needle. Oddly, these potentially pretentious moments fail to induce a headache. Instead, they provide a refreshing counterpart to the standard experimentation.

It's alive

Notes:

More on trdw/d coming in future posts. Grab some of their releases here.

Been trying to write about the two awesome new Country Teasers-related projects but the words just fail to manifest themselves in a new way. Check those records out and, until next time, I’ll keep plugging away.

Finally, my hatred for the Red Sox paid off. Check March 1 post on the super cool Yankee blog, No Maas

Also, no excuse for the lack of updates but this took me a while.