I was out late the other night…

The next two posts are going to take the form of a kinda combined gig review / album retrospective sort of thing, written in tedious ‘what I did on my holidays’ style unedited blather, if that’s ok with you guys?

Part One:

PARTYLINE / WET DOG / KASMS
Catch, London, April 2008

So I was out A BIT late a couple of Saturdays ago, though nothing to shout about really, taking up residence in an awkward spot just behind one of ‘speaker on a pole’ PA system jobs just to the side of the stage in a hot, packed, dark room, listening to mangled, poorly mixed guitar and drum treble-heavy blare and watching weird, exciting looking humans cavort and shriek, and drinking overpriced alcohol way too fast, and…. actually quite enjoying the experience for once.

Now, I’m increasingly making it gospel these days that if you find yourself idly throwing the word ‘hipster’ into conversation with any frequency, you probably ARE one (must I link to that spot-on Cat & Girl comic again? - I fear I must), so with that in mind, I’m doing my best to eradicate the word from my vocabulary altogether, save perhaps for it’s original, noble use in describing Cab Calloway-esque pre-Beatnik jazz scenesters. But to grit my teeth and give it one more outing, let it be said that, in the parlance of our times, the first thing that’s noticeable on this particular evening about Catch, a new-ish venue just off Old Street, is that it’s pushing an almost supernaturally high hipster count. Don’t worry if you were there - I’m sure YOU weren’t one of them. I mean, these are OTHER people we’re talking about, right? Not nice, normal people like you or I. But… y’know what I mean.

So the downstairs bit is the kind of bar that’s too loud and crowded and awkwardly arranged to possibly be a fun place to be under any circumstance I should imagine, but is perpetually packed out anyway, cos…. well, I don’t fucking know, maybe it’s ‘the place to be’ or something for a certain set, and it often seems that trendy East Londoners seem to choose their hangouts of choice in deliberate opposition to the relative pleasantness of the environment. But anyway, I’m not here to review bars, so ON WITH IT. The band-watching bit is up a spiral staircase, and it’s a long, dark, narrow room - a poor place for presenting any kind of live music in most respects, but it puts me in mind of innumerable shitty, marginal gig venues of yore, and is thus almost appealing in a ‘look ma – I’m in an underground music hellhole’ kind of way, though the weird comfort factor would doubtless fade if we’d arrive a bit later and got stuck in the back, with a choice of fixing our eyes on some guy’s greasy hair, a distant light-fitting or a drunk tripping over the merch table, as some vague roar happens about a mile away. But we’re early enough (at bloody nine forty-five or something) to get a bolthole at the front, so no worries there.

We arrive just in time to see the two girl / two boy Kasms setting up, and a better band to fit the surroundings would be hard to imagine. Before they get going, my friend and I decide they look like the kind of band that would turn up in a Jaime Hernandez story in Love & Rockets. The two guys switch between guitar and drums, stomping around enthusiastically and making a GREAT ol’ riff-noise of the dissonant, clanking Death Valley ’69 variety, the bassist I can’t really see or hear from where I’m standing (sorry), and the singer…. oh, my lord, the singer.

She’s a skinny girl, though she looks like rockets would bounce off her no problem. Her shoes are incongruously dressy. Her dress is…uh.. pretty tight. She seems, like, half in the real-everyday-people world, like somebody you might randomly meet at work and get a crush on, but with one foot in mad, psychosexual rock star world, dragging herself further across the threshold for all she’s worth, like the night-haunted wraith that just ate Karen O for breakfast or something. Her performance is total Nick Cave in the Birthday Party dementia – utterly premeditated theatricality, but no less hair-raising for that. It’s kinda thrilling. Sixty seconds into any given song and she’s writhing on the ground, legs in the air, twisting the mic cable into ungodly knots as the feedback howls, and if the song has the tenacity to break two and a half minutes, she’ll be charging headfirst into the waists of audience members, grabbing drinks from unsuspecting hands, kicking her heels into the floor, snarling like a dying dragon. And in the breaks between songs, she’s staring at her feet half the time, quiet as a mouse.

She’s dynamite. ‘Gosh’, we mutter to each other as the set concludes and the DJ strikes up some L7, and ‘heavens above’, and ‘wow’, and ‘she’s quite something’ and ‘…’ and ‘wow’ again. Such lusty testimonials are probably not quite what you’ve come to expect from Stereo Sanctity, but it must be said: if a straw poll of we three sensitive fellas is anything to go by, the lady-fancying contingent in tonight’s audience will not be remembering this band for their chord progressions.

Are we hopeless suckers? You be the judge:



The only merch they have on sale is a jar of homemade mood rings. Ladies and gentlemen: Kasms.

After all that, Wet Dog can’t help but be just a little disappointing. I’ve been busy telling everyone how great they are for the best part of a year since I last saw ‘em: really cracking band, doing righteous stuff in a distinctly Raincoats-esque vein, but tonight it’s not quite happening. The guitarist seems to have gained an odd new axe that looks like a Fender neck nailed to a piece of debris from a building site, but they also seem to have gained a new set of material that’s more abstract than the stuff I remember hearing previously, relying on painstaking stoppy/starty dynamics and wobbly high-end riffs, dashed through breathlessly with no room for rockin’ out, vocals sadly reduced to a few repetitive, wordless group yelps. It’s still pretty good stuff all things considered – I still really love each musician’s brilliantly perfecto unschooled musical style, the drummer particularly, but… somehow it’s not as fun as it should be? – tonight, at least.

Here’s some of a set they played at The Spitz last August, so again, see what you reckon:



Partyline, on the other hand, are almost by definition more fun than the sum of their parts. It seems that perpetually awesome frontwoman Alison Wolfe abandoned any plans for a respectable post-riot grrl type musicianly career when she ditched the rest of Bratmobile (great, great underrated band – check out their ‘Ladies, Women and Girls’ on Lookout for some of the best feminist punk rock fun the ‘90s had to offer) in order to form this appropriately named good times troupe in 2003, but I mean that in the best possible way.

Alison’s particular approach to vocalisin’ – basically a series of stream of consciousness personal/political rants delivered machine gun style over whatever music happens to be passing – anchors the origins of both bands firmly to the same source, but the other Bratmobilers’ dedication to crafting tight, hooky surf-punk is long gone, replaced with some gloriously immature flailing hardcore racket from Angela Melkthesian (guitar) and Some Random Dude (drums). It’s like at a certain point they all ceased to give a fuck whether or not Sleater Kinney gave them props, got caned on some unholy combination of sugar, coffee and over the counter stimulants and learned to play along to the first Minor Threat demo, rejoicing in the thought of how awesome the world would have been if h/c kids hadn’t turned out to be such a bunch of macho grumps, then wrote a bunch of songs telling everyone they don’t like to fuck off, and took it to the people.

Partyline are a total blast on stage – the girls can scarcely go a minute without cracking each other up with absurdist banter, and there’s joggin’, jumpin’, feedback and mid-song catastrophes aplenty. Each song comprises a ninety second spoken digression attempting to explain the lyrics, followed by about seventy seconds of incomprehensible high energy thrashing, and it seems like they only manage to make their way through, like, six songs before calling it a night, but that’s all TOTALLY GREAT, y’know. Alison scarcely seems to notice when the rest of the band slope off to get some drinks, and sits in the corner of the stage as she carries on telling us all about what party she’s registered to vote for and how she’s getting on living in New York and stuff, until someone thinks to unplug the mic and she wanders off to find her buddies. Man, what a fun band, what a great gig – I’m really glad I got myself together and made it out for it.

This footage of them playing in Australia in 2006 is gloriously representative:

Labels: Kasms, live reviews, Partyline, punk rock, Wet Dog

Guitar Romantics: The Exploding Hearts

Ok, so they’re a pretty ubiquitous presence in certain strands of US punk culture. Ok, so I’ve had their sole LP ‘Guitar Romantic’ stuffed into my Mp3 player for a good while now, and have been aware of their work for far longer.

But I’d be lying if I tried to claim I haven’t been listening to The Exploding Hearts just about every damn day on the journey to or from work for the past month or so.

Every day it’s the same: struggle toward or away from the front door, rub my tired eyes, and contemplate sticking on some of the less familiar records I’ve stuck on the portable music box in order to give them more of a listen. And everyday, it’s another quick blast of “Sleeping Aides...” or “Modern Kicks” that wins out. Just a couple of tunes, I tell myself, just to get me going, then I’ll put something else on. Then I’ll proceed to listen to the whole album twice through over the course of the day. I think I could probably recite all of the lyrics by now, and whistle the solos. If I could whistle, which I can’t, thank christ. But I could probably do my best to imitate the bits of lingering feedback and ‘phew - we just finished the song’ noise at the end of each track instead. (Despite being as tight a band as you could hope to encounter whilst their songs were actually in progress, these guys sure knew the value of ploughing toward a clattering, collapsible, ad-libbed rock n’ roll ending, and I bless them for it daily.)

Anyway. ‘Guitar Romantic’. First issued by Dirtnap records in January 2003. I swear to god, it’s fucking perfect. It sounds EXACTLY like a record called “Guitar Romantic” by a band called “The Exploding Hearts” should sound. I guess the last song goes on maybe about a minute too long, but aside from that, I love every single thing about it.

The Exploding Hearts may have relied on a simple formula, one that SOMEONE was bound to make their own at some point, but man, what a formula it is, and never before or since has a band launched into it with the energy and guts and 100% hit rate that these guys did.

So, for the uninitiated, what are the ingredients we’re looking at here?

Well:

1. Classic, perfectly formed power-pop songs, tunes that could stand up to – and indeed beat the hell out of – just about anything on those Rhino Poptopia comps, topped with howled, heartfelt lyrics about girl trouble, and drugs, and schoolyard riots, and other such travails of being a punk kid, but, well, mostly girl trouble to be honest, and why not? Every one’s a winner.

Now, If there’s one problem with ‘power-pop’ as a genre, it’s that it’s often played by embittered old dudes going through the motions, but not so here, as we add;

2. Gallons of snotty, hormonal punk rock energy, coming straight from that exact same place as The Undertones, Circlejerks, Ramones, the first few Replacements records and early Green Day, where the puerile crashes headfirst into the sublime, where mad desperation hitches a ride on top of stoned suburban ennui, where every sound this band makes simultaneously cries out “FUCK YOU!” and “I LOVE YOU!” and *nothing* in-between.

3. A wild, musically accomplished band with energy levels through the roof who could, and did, absolutely play their asses off in pursuit of melodic rocking perfection.

4. A truly ridiculous ‘everything in the red’ production aesthetic, executed in the same spirit as Iggy’s remix of ‘Raw Power’. The first time I played ‘Guitar Romantic’ through my earphones, I thought there was something wrong with it – vocals all distorted and guitars clipping all over the place. Then I realised that it was simply more AWESOME than my poor equipment was accustomed to. Like, finally, someone made an album where the guitars are mixed at right level! Adam Cox’s humbucker powerchords get full spectrum dominance whilst Terry Six’s freaking *beautiful* overdriven Rickenbacker leads cleave in over the top even louder, like sickly candy from pop heaven. The vocals are cranked and compressed to shit in order to remain comprehensible over the racket, and sound all the better for it. And, miraculously, the rhythm section still comes through loud and clear too, sounding like they’re just thumping away harder than ever to stay on-message above all the distortion. THIS, I put it to you musicians and audiophile dudes, is the way a great rock n’ roll record should sound in the 21st century.

And that’s that I guess. I may be getting more reactionary in my musical tastes as I get older, but fuck it. Life as expressed through sound doesn’t get much better than this. To have been involved in the making of this music – even just making the tea (or handing out the airplane glue) – would I think justify a deeper sense of achievement than any foolhardy artistic ambitions the likes of you or I may strive day and night to fulfil.

There’s now another Exploding Hearts CD on the market too, thanks again to the folks at Dirtnap (also home to other fine power/pop/punk/garage outfits such as The Riff Randells and The Carbonas, so why not give ‘em a look), and I went out and bought it from Rough Trade the other week to help make up for my wanton freeloading of ‘Guitar Romantic’. Called ‘Shattered’, it collects the rest of the band’s recordings in a pleasantly no nonsense fashion, comprising eight non-LP songs taken from singles, session outtakes etc., and a few alternate (and on the whole less satisfactory) mixes of the album material.

Perhaps inevitably, the stuff on ‘Shattered’ isn’t quite so good as the motherlode of ‘Guitar Romantic’. The tunes occasionally veer a bit too far toward a polite power-pop-by-numbers blueprint, and lack the raucous feeling and overloaded production, but by anyone else’s standards it’s still absolutely top stuff, featuring some of the band’s best pure punk moments in the form of ‘(Making) Teenage Faces’ (“Someone shot the principal / straight through his head / school is out forever / and we’re glad that he’s dead!”), and a supremely snotty take on F.U.2’s uber-generic punk classic ‘Sniffin’ Glue’ (“it’s better than kissin’!”), whilst the self-explanatory ‘Walking Out On Love’ is a two minute blast of straight to tape perfection and ‘We Don’t Have To Worry Anymore’ is one of the group’s best compositions.

Those unfamiliar with The Exploding Hearts may have picked up on the fact that I’ve used the past tense pretty definitively a few times when discussing them in this post. That’s because on July 20th 2003, between some place and some other place on the way to a show, their tour van crashed. Pretty badly. The details don’t really matter, the point is: three quarters of the band – Adam Cox (guitar/vocals), Jeremy Gage (drums) and Matt Fitzgerald (bass) - never regained consciousness.

Pretty devastating and upsetting stuff, even five years later on the other side of the world.

But, crass though it may be to draw a conclusion like this from such an obvious tragedy, it must be said: for the world at large, a better legacy for a rock n’ roll band is hard to imagine. As one of rock’s greatest survivors ironically reminds us from time to time, rust never sleeps, and, barely out of high school, these guys had the look, the sound, the energy DOWN. About seventeen original songs immortalised on tape, every one a lightning bolt of emotion, confusion, noise and triumph, then a handful of now-legendary live shows, followed by a sudden, fiery demise. Beat that, punks.

You might be *slightly* cheered to know that surviving band member Terry Six has stayed true to the power-pop cause, and now fronts the thoroughly ‘70s-tastic Nice Boys. (And I kinda dig ‘em actually - they’ve got real great stuff going down on a pure retro bubblegum tip, but it’s all a bit too determinedly UN-PUNK for me to really love, y’know..?)

Anyway, It’s no wonder the 'Hearts have gained a hefty cult following in the states, with bands like The Busy Signals and Sleeping Aides & Razorblades taking their names from their songs (the latter have since renamed themselves The Nica-Teens – fairly sensibly, I’d venture to suggest) and certain sections of the internet are nigh-on overflowing with tribute videos, cover versions and the like. But, in the UK at least, The Exploding Hearts still none too well known, so hopefully I’m not just wasting time going over old ground with this post.

When trying to decide which two tunes from ‘Guitar Romantic’ to post for you, I might as well have pinned the song titles to the wall and thrown darts at them, such is the overall quality of the songs therein. In fact I might do that anyway, it sounds fun, but, if pushed, I think these are my two faves.

Download and play loud.

I’m A Pretender

Throwaway Style

And, thanks to the wonders of Youtube, you can also spend some quality time with one of the best rock n’ roll bands of the 21st century thus far, thanks to these two videos from one of their last shows, at the Bottom Of The Hill club in San Francisco. Fantastic stuff. I believe I achieved some sort of state of oneness with the universe somewhere between ‘I’m A Pretender’ and ‘Boulevard Trash’ in the first video.

Put ‘em on full-screen and play loud.

Part one (Modern Kicks / I’m A Pretender / Boulevard Trash):



Part Two (Busy Signals / Sleeping Aides & Razorblades):

Labels: power pop, punk rock, The Exploding Hearts, videos

Ok, let’s get this show back on the road.

I’ve seen some great, great live shows recently, from Neil Young at Hammersmith Apollo (pretty life-defining stuff, from a weekend that’ll go down as a heavy-hitter in my own personal history) to Andre Herm… I mean, er, Stanley Brinks, playing beautiful, melancholy guitar jams alongside Dave Wave Picture and a lady who records under the name Freschard at The Windmill.

Somehow though, I can’t get it together to assemble any chunks of writing decent or genuine enough to really do this stuff justice, so instead of sending some half-arsed descriptive ramble to (virtual) print, I’ll just condemn them to my failing memory and move on.

So when all else fails writing-wise… I think I’m just going to have to tell you about some records I’ve been listening to. And I can’t pretend I’ve been listening to anything terribly new or exciting or revelatory recently; I can’t be fucking bothered to be honest – right now I just want music that WORKS. So for better or worse, that’s what I’m going to tell you about.

To make up for lost time, I’m going to try and do several quick posts over the next week or so, that will, if nothing else, hopefully help introduce some of you to some really good music, assuming you’re not already familiar with it all.

Stay tuned.

Labels: announcements