SINGLES!
March/April/May ’09, Part # 3:

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Psyched To Die – Sterile Walls EP
(Grave Mistake/Firestarter)

Going by the cover, track titles, band name and lyrics sheet, one could easily mistake this for a generic hardcore release, but it’s actually an unusual and thoroughly enjoyable exercise in pre-h/c American punk rock. Sure, there are fast tempos, gang shouts and some mosh-riff sections, but there’s also loads of warped guitar hero soloing, comprehensible vocals high in the mix, trebley, clean sound and a nervy, over-caffeinated quirky kinda energy, recalling The Weirdos, Pagans and ‘Plastic Surgery Disasters’ era Dead Kennedys.

Songs are blasted out tight as fuck, machine gun style, each one wrapped up in about a minute, like the New Bomb Turks with less fat, and the lyrics offer relentless nowheresville nihilism throughout. Composition & vocal duties seem to be split between different band members, so, uh, at least they must share a common goal I suppose, even if it is total hatred of everything. “Sick and tired of the free-range life / the outside world is a fucking mess” contributes bassist J Nixon on the title track, “pretending to be crazy’s the only way out / and I won’t even have to fake being depressed”. Guitarist Mike Yannich, not to be outdone, gives us ‘Permanent Solution’; “I got a permanent solution / living life is just a waste of time / I gotta find a fucking way out”. Nixon wins outright on the hilarious ‘Onward Armageddon’ though, managing to sing “People think of the apocalypse / and dream up stupid fantasy bullshit / about being in the small percentage of survivors / and piecing society back together”, before concluding “I don’t want to be part of no post-apocalypse / I wanna be one of the people it hits!”

Perhaps my favourite song here though is drummer Brian Yannich’s ‘Five Year Plan’, which perfectly captures the spirit of classic Descendents loserdom. As all the smarter punks knew well, this I-hate-everything-and-I-hate-you shtick can turn to self-parody pretty quickly, and these guys sound frighteningly honest when they bring things down to earth to sing “Couldn’t cut it in college / work for minimum wage / I see old faces from high school / they think that I’m a waste” ; “My friends are all getting married/ buying suburban homes / I just sit here complaining / in my room all alone”. Not exactly the most original sentiment that’s ever been expressed in a punk song, but these things can still cut hard.

I guess it was defiance in the face of this kind of terminal failure and depression that was at the heart of late 70s teenage punk – or at least the raw, Californian variety that informs Psyched To Die – and, 30 years down the line, we can still hear it pretty bluntly put by bands like this, for whom adult life apparently hasn’t brought much in the way of improvement.

http://www.myspace.com/psychedtodie
http://www.myspace.com/firestarterrecords

Total Abuse – Demo 06 (Even Worse)

Whoa. Demo-tape-reissued-on-7” action here in a similar brutalist lo-fi hardcore vein to those Sex Vid records that so thoroughly kicked my ass last year. And if Total Abuse lack the brooding, knife wound negativity of Sex Vid, in fact sounding almost cheery by comparison, well they more than make up for such deficiencies with sheer THUNK, taking their triple-speed Sabbath-weight riffage and flailing skronk bursts straight from The Book of Ginn and somehow imbuing it all with an immediacy and momentum that this music has lacked since their hero was still knocking it out pre-‘Damaged’. Nothing new here, but after nearly three decades of identikit eight song h/c 45s, bands like this can still seem like fresh air in a stale cavern. Go figure.

For my money, the recording here is perfect for a band like this – scuzzy and muffled in a GOOD way, just like the early ‘Flag stuff, only with the levels cranked the way they *should* have been on ‘My War’. The guitars are solid brick wall roar, the drums sound like they’re being torn from the overdriven bass-bins of the terrifying, lunatic-driven car that’s about to mow you down from behind. Musicianship I suspect is tight as a whip (the drummer fucking kicks it), but there’s so much bass fuzz and degraded roar it wouldn’t make much difference either way. Song titles: “Breathing Down My Neck”, “Enraged/Pissed”, “I Can’t Live Like This”. Indeed. Things reach their apex at the end of side # 1, sounding like the noise a brave eight year old might hear whilst pushing his ear against the concrete wall of the utterly terrifying underground rock club that his mum has told him never to go near because the patrons might EAT him. Fascinating, repulsive, violent, wrong and irresistible.

Side # 2 actually lightens up a little, playing to the gallery by slowing down for some headbang/mosh pit worthy groove sections on almost pleasant chord sequences, and demanding yet another ‘Flag comparison with good ol’ Rollins shout-alongs on the choruses of “I Give Up” and “Ain’t Got No One”. That said, Total Abuse’s gallery is probably largely comprised of leering indie tourists such as myself in search of total destruction, so you can’t blame ‘em for wanting to give us the finger and give the h/c faithful what they paid for.

http://www.myspace.com/totalabuse
http://www.myspace.com/evenworserecords

Vivian Girls - Moped Girls b/w Death
(For Us)

Yeah, it’s yet another non-album 7” from Vivian Girls, yet another one they’ll be able to shift by the bucketload until the hype spotlight moves elsewhere. And why not, eh? It must be nice to be able to immediately press your latest creations onto little artefacts like this, knowing you’ve got the interest & appreciation of a sizable audience to make it worth your while. And it’s not like there’s a quality control issue or anything – the tunes are still great! In fact, for all that they may be derided in certain quarters as lazy, self-satisfied so-and-sos, VGs are becoming a pretty consistent and prolific outfit, maintaining an admirable cruising speed as regards the essential band-business of making lots of songs, and making them all good.

Their second album is due out in a couple of months, and word is that, in classic 2nd album tradition, it’s going to be a more nuanced affair, slowing down the frantic punk of their earlier material in favour of more classic rock/pop inspired slow-burners. Seeing as how regular readers probably got pretty sick last year of hearing me harping on about my love for the first album’s stunning “Where Do You Go To?”, this strikes me a potentially welcome development. It’s also a shift in tone that seems to be clearly signalled by this 45, with both sides staying strictly mid-tempo, both featuring hazy, uncertain guitar solos and hinting at a beguiling mixture of self-conscious girl group pop (‘Death’ has a beautiful Shangri-Las spoken opening) and hypnotic desert jangle, executed with the kind of singular, indefinable spirit that made fans of this band fall for them in the first place, and that their detractors will likely be scratching their heads over for all eternity. I mean, yeah, obviously I could tick the same crit boxes as them and acknowledge that the Vivian Girls music is formally unremarkable, technically adequate at best, that they probably haven’t done the legwork to justify global indie-fame… but do you think I care, when their music makes me shiver, changes the weather, throws pictures into my mind, makes things better, the way pop music should?

Sadly, it’s the recording that lets them down to a certain extent here though. Put bluntly, these sound like big songs recorded on the cheap, sounding flat where the the LP roared. The lo-fi approach is cool n’ all, don’t get me wrong, but as the Girls move toward a sound with less flat-out distortion, more harmonies and more subtle, reverbin’ depths, I don’t know if the old ‘one take / one mic’ set up is really serving them best.

http://www.myspace.com/viviangirlsnyc
http://www.roughtrade.com/

Wake The President / Je Suis Animal split 7”
(Electric Honey / Lucky Number Nine)

I think I quite like Glaswegians Wake The President. Quite is odd, because they sound a lot like The Smiths, and I hate The Smiths. I guess it’s a bit like how I really liked Camera Obscura’s first album back in the day, despite the fact I (at the time) hated Belle & Sebastian. An example of an unassuming little band taking on the more easily enjoyable elements of the sound in question, without the preciousness or cultural baggage of their precursors perhaps? And crucially in this case, without the distraction of an overbearing vocalist whining on incoherently like a self-important parish priest cursing god for the indignity of having to deal with two blown tyres in the same week. (Hate mail welcomed in the comments box, Moz fans – I loves ya really).

So yes, Wake the President are definitely perched at the more tweedy, un-rocking end of the indie-pop spectrum, so it is to their credit that here they turn in neither a snorefest nor a groanfest, but a really nicely turned out, toe-tapping couple of minutes of this-sort-of-thing, thankyouverymuch. The singer’s delivery is natural and engaging, the rhythm section is all prim and bouncy and the tune is pretty catchy. The guitarist wants to be Johnny Marr so much it hurts, but unlike Johnny Marr, he turns in a wicked little solo towards the end. File under “hard to dislike”.

Je Suis Animal’s side is an altogether more curious prospect, marrying early Sonic Youth ‘building the tension’ guitar lines to an arch, sing-song Laetitia Sadler style female vocal that seems almost entirely disconnected from the band’s backing. Music and vocal proceed to stalk each other as the track develops, the guitars appearing to triumph at around the two minute mark with a dramatic stabbing-you-over-the-dinner-table Blonde Redhead noise-out, before the singer reasserts herself with another run through the song’s cyclical chorus, and we’re out. I say, this doesn’t seem like very ‘indie-poppy’ behaviour at all! Count me officially INTERESTED in whatever Je Suis Animal are up to.

http://www.myspace.com/wakethepresidentband
http://www.myspace.com/jesuisanimal
http://www.myspace.com/luckynumberninerecords
http://www.myspace.com/electrichoneymusic

Labels: Je Suis Animal, Psyched To Die, singles reviews, The Vivian Girls, Total Abuse, Wake The President