[N.B. - Just in case any real life friends happen to stop by, please be aware that this is a post I've had scheduled for a couple of weeks, and I forgot it was going up until today. Everyone else - please ignore that and read on... for reasons I won't go into here, it could be the last post here for at least a *little* while.]

So - a long, whiny, inconclusive and generally pointless post to reward anyone who’s dutifully continued checking this blog over the shaky empty patches this year. Thanks, you’re welcome! Here goes….

Last summer, I went to see that band Fuzz, with that fella Ty Segall playing drums. I held no pre-existing animosity toward the band or its members, but sad to say, I thought they pretty much sucked.

Not to sound like a musical proficiency nazi or anything, but the musical chalice of which Fuzz were knowingly partaking - that being ‘70s style heavy rock / metal - requires certain skills that are not easily acquired. Ineffable, time-worn virtues that we may term ‘chops’, ‘groove’, ‘instrumental interplay’ etc – that is where the heart of the music lies, and unfortunately these men largely failed to ‘bring it’, in the parlance of our times. Basically they sounded like what they presumably are - garage-punk guys who one day decided “hey Black Sabbath is totally cool, let’s do stuff like that”, and, lacking the walk-the-walk badassery of the musicians who have wrestled that quite demanding music into shape over the course of years of practice and dedication, their attempts remain just that – attempts. A well-intentioned goof, without much in the plus column beyond a truly monstrous guitar sound (achieved by means of splitting the signal between about nine different combo amps, much to the chagrin of whoever was in charge of hiring and transporting their tour gear, I’d imagine).

Their record is marginally ok, but for anyone with a love and understanding of this kind of music, that live performance (monumental racket aside) was strictly ‘local opening band’ level stuff, and seeing a capacity crowd going nuts for it when so many more convincing purveyors of ‘70s Heavy (Mount Carmel, for example) remain obscure was a fairly depressing sight.

Around the same time as that performance, I randomly purchased a 7” on the Mexican Summer label, because I liked the cover art. Returning home and throwing it on, I discovered a perfect riposte to that Fuzz show. “Now THIS is how you combine punk and heavy!”, I might have yelled, had anyone else been unlucky enough to be in the room at the time - and indeed it is. The single was ‘Scavenger’ b/w ‘Wastin My Time’ by Zig-Zags, and without descending into spittle-flecked superlatives, let’s just say that it’s a goddamn rampage, and that if you like this sorta thing, you should get a copy. Mixing a loose, live-in-a-cement-mixer recording and a fairly demented, fuzz-drenched atmosphere with a vicious, forward-moving swing and primo power trio bludgeon, the A-side in particular is like a showcase for everything Fuzz lacked. It’s really great.

Roughly a year passes, and I note there’s a new Zig-Zags LP out on In The Red. And guess who’s producing it? Ty Segall, no less! Boy, this should be fun. Again, I must reiterate that I have nothing against the guy, I’m sure he’s a lovely human being. But musically speaking? Myself and ol’ Jonathan Livingston (as I hope someone calls him) just do not see eye to eye.

Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem - I could just ignore him, the way I ignore the vast majority of successful contemporary musicians. But the fact that he keeps popping up and making waves within genres of music that I like, and working with bands that I like, keeps on drawing me back in - and thus the way he seems to keep getting everything just a little bit wrong (IMHO) proves quite irksome, with his production aesthetic on other people’s records being a particular bugbear of mine.

In this respect, the Zig-Zags LP may be the worst casualty to date, as the murky-yet-thrilling KBD basement splatter of the 7” is replaced by a militantly dry, over-compressed sound, resulting in the kind of rock record where it sounds like all the instruments have been recorded clean and separate, then dipped in fake, designer distortion, further marred by frequent use of a really regrettable cheesy phaser effect, whilst the vocals hang awkwardly on top, feigning the necessary ‘attitude’ whilst sounding isolated from the live-room roar that needs to drive and empower them. Not a good look.

BUT, as any Husker Du fan will tell you, there’s more to a record than the frrkin’ *production*, and the Zig-Zags single was so strong, they can rise above, right? At this point in our timeline, I’m streaming online (cos I don’t know about you, but the era of hopeful blind buys is over), and let’s see now… opener ‘Brainded’ [sic] is a rather ominous, mid tempo Sabbathian riff exercise – it’s ok, but track # 2, ‘The Fog’ - POW! Now this is the one! Fucking hell, this is BRILLIANT. Blasting off at pop-punk velocity with a full-spectrum power-chord churn and lyrics kinda vaguely inspired by the John Carpenter movie, what we’ve got here is a basically a classic-era Misfits song with Sabbath guitars on top. Not the most eloquent description ever penned perhaps, but ‘nuff said, I hope, and I’m pulling the trigger on ordering this LP RIGHT NOW. Third track, ‘Magic’ is just as good, hammering home that “anthemic horror-rock” feel as the lead overdub shreds and howls, and I’m filling in my debit card details over at Norman, ready to go.

Then I had to go and do something or other, so I put off previewing the rest of the album until the vinyl arrived. Bad move, as it turns out. Blasting through the guitar amp hooked up to my upstairs turntable, the aforementioned songs still sound great. After that, things take a slump, but we’re still motoring nicely. ‘No Blade of Grass’ is a snappy, light-weight number that gets by on a nice melody (no lyrical connection to Cornel Wilde’s movie adaptation of John Christopher’s ‘The Death of Grass’, sadly – I think it’s more of a weed reference..). ‘Tuff Guy Hands’ is an alright punker (‘pleasantly gritty’ say my tasting notes), and ‘Down The Drain’ ends side A on a minor highlight with a lengthy instrumental section layering firestorm guitars over relentless Lemmy bass, rather in the manner of something off that Drag City Purling Hiss LP from last year, evoking at least some of the spirit I enjoyed so much on the ‘Scavenger’ single. Nothing particularly breath-taking on the album’s second quarter then, but none too shabby either.

After spending a few minutes enjoying the droning locked groove that finishes the side though (nice touch), we flip to side B and, hmm, much of it is a bit ‘in one ear, out the other’, more or less… most of it’s pretty alright, and there are a few memorable numbers, but with music this short on subtlety, if it doesn’t hit you between the eyes the first time round, there’s not much point going back again to check.

In general, Zig-Zags seem to be moving away here from the gnarlier heavy rock moves evidenced on their single, ruthlessly cutting down on solos, fills and multi-part riffs in favour of a straight up punk chord-wall, ploughing forward with a a pure, plasticised brainlessness that often has them sounding like horror/metal orientated cousins of The Spits or Mean Jeans. Sometimes they’ve got a bit of a Kiss-captured-by-thugs fist-pounding glam/hair metal thing going on (cf: ‘Soul Sound’), other times they add a dash of Venom-esque thrash, pushing toward that same metal n’ roll nirvana achieved by Satan’s Satyrs on Wild Beyond Belief!. And they very nearly get there too, with only iffy production, middling song-writing and a faint whiff of ironic distance wiping them out on the last lap. A pity.

That said, I haven’t tried listening to this album whilst drunk…. maybe that would help get Zig-Zags over the finish line? It’s quite possible. Sobriety probably represents a poor lens through which to evaluate this kind of full spectrum ug-rock.

As mentioned, when the formula really hits good – on ‘The Fog’ and ‘Magic’, primarily – the results speak for themselves. Misfits, Fu Manchu, Roky Erickson… you know - happy times. For the most part, lyrics here are a hap-hazard collage of pure knuckleheaded horror / party dude cliché – sometimes bordering on the unwholesome, but more often just plain fixed grin stoopid. If for some unfathomable reason you’ve never seen all-time cinematic classic Psychomania on late night TV*, Zig-Zags have kindly boiled it down to its brutish basics for you on the their song of the same name; “I was buried alive / I was buried on my motorcycle / I’m the livin’ dead / I’m the leader of a biker gang / I don’t give a shit”. Yep, that just about covers it.

“Murphys law really is a bitch / find yourself dying in a ditch”, they reflect elsewhere. “In your dreams I’m the silver saviour / face to face, the exterminator”. Dumb to the point of haemorrhage, you’ve gotta love it, and the way they actually print all this stuff on the LP sleeve as if they expect us to pore over it like ‘Stairway to Heaven’ or some shit is wonderful too, complete with a range of spelling and grammatical errors that remind me of Billy Childish’s heroic disregard for the perils of dyslexia.

It is stuff like this that occasionally has me reassessing my initial evaluation of Zig-Zags’ pose as clever-stupid contrivance. Occasionally on the album, we find suggestions that this band is coming from a more damaged and brutal place than many of their peers. Indeed, the best song on side 2, ‘I Am The Weekend’, stands out by virtue of the fact that it is actually kinda disturbing - a bit like listening to ‘53rd & 3rd’ for the first time, realising that beneath the goof lies something a little more hard to shake.

It’s pretty far removed from documentary, I’m sure, but nonetheless, there’s something a little bit deranged about the way the song alternates darker-than-dark verses (“I tried to hold her down / make sure she was alive / her mouth began to foam / I saw dead in her eyes”) with a bellowing, Friday night idiot-chant of the title on the chorus, the connection between the two never quite resolved. “I would have stayed and help / but things ain’t goin' right / I am still on probation / this was my only night”, the song concludes. Jeez. I mean, I don’t want to make too much of it, but the shift in tone between chorus and verse here is just plain weird, and seems to take things a little bit beyond the usual comfort zone of the band’s jean-jacketed Burger contemporaries.

Elsewhere though, things descend all too easily into paint-by-numbers slop as the initial adrenalin fades. Aforementioned moments of jarring weirdness aside, it’s all too easy for Zig-Zag’s horror-80s-white-trash-skate-dude thing to become a shtick, and no listener of taste wants to scrape that kind of shtick off a record they plan on playing more than once.

Not sure quite how to put this, but when early ‘80s Danzig launched into a verse singing “demon I am / and face I peel!”, the great thing is that you believed him, or at least believed that he believed himself. Too often on this album though, Zig-Zags sound a bit “going through the motions”. The production and dumbed down playing doesn’t help, but somehow, despite vague intimations of hard times and learning difficulties, these guys aren’t quite engaging my monster-kid empathy circuits enough to break out the “gabba gabba, one of us”, y’know what I mean?

(Closing track ‘Voices of the Paranoid’ proves particularly lamentable in this regard – a goof-off Black Sabbath parody played so broad, complete with karaoke Ozzy vocals, that it sounds more like something cooked up for a radio comedy show than the work of a decent band paying tribute to their idols. A real low point.)

So, sigh, I dunno, maybe I just have unrealistically high standards, but what can you do with these things except follow yr instincts?

As much as I hate to conclude by circling back to the Ty Segall issue (because he was only pressing buttons on the desk for chrissake), this is just such a perfect example of the frustration I tend to get from everything he’s involved with. An all respects, this is ALMOST a great record. It’s NEARLY there, it has a handful of perfect, kick-ass tracks, but…. not quite.

More sympathetic production, looser/wilder performances, stronger song-writing – any one of these things could have tipped the scales and got them there, and I could have been bubbling over here with unchecked enthusiasm as I headbanged by way through the album for the twenty-eighth time. But none of those things are there, so that’s not gonna happen.

Truth is though, it usually takes a pretty special band to maintain top shelf quality across an entire LP when playing this kind of break-neck, subtlety-free rock, and the fact that these guys didn’t quite manage it is nothing to be embarrassed about.

Basically, I think bands like Zig-Zags are maybe just victims of the chronic over-saturation of recorded music that we are subject to in the modern era. By which I mean: you know all those times you’ve bought a newly reissued collection of material from some cult ‘60s garage band or Killed By Death punk outfit who did a handful of utterly sublime, mind-destroying compilation faves? And you know the way that those collections always front-load the ‘hits’, then follow them with about a dozen fairly average, business-as-usual examples of the band’s chosen genre that might have been better off left in the vaults, thus ironically succeeding in actually REDUCING the band’s reputation, taking a previously extraordinary unknown quantity and rendering them ‘normal’ – showing their workings, rationalising their influences and intentions..? Well, listening to the Zig-Zags LP could be seen as a similar experience, only here we get it hot off the press without a 30 year time-lag.

If they’d been around back in the dark days of the pre-digital era, when getting any kind of listenable recording to people’s ears was a bit of a challenge, maybe that wouldn’t have been a problem. Maybe a lot of these songs would have lived and died within their natural habitat in the band’s live-set (where they truly belong, and where I’m sure they all rule), rather than languishing in boxes of unsold product in In The Red’s warehouse after a brief wave of one-sheet regurgitating blog hype is cancelled out by the invisible cloud of “hmm, decent band, but the album was a bit of a let-down” word of mouth.

Imagine if none of that had ever happened though; imagine instead if some furtive collector instead passed you an ultra-rare acetate of the ‘Scavenger’ single in some darkened alley, and desperate internet searching eventually led you to mp3s of demos of ‘The Fog’ and ‘Down The Drain’, as laid down in the one afternoon the band could get near a studio, before they disappeared forever into local scene myth & legend. THEN we’d have revelation-time. THAT would be where an I-JUST-DISCOVERED-THE-GREATEST-FUCKIN’-BAND reputation would be born, not here, with the come-down of a basically alright but under-performing debut LP, quietly released on the same Monday as about 300 other such superfluous artefacts.

*Hey, wait a minute, am I really saying life was better, back in those terrible days when air-brushed major label schlock filled the racks, when men in white coats controlled the studios, and when incredible, life-changing bands like Pentagram and The Zeros and Mars subsisted for years without ever being given the opportunity to record a proper album..?*

Um… no, I guess I’m not suggesting that. And yeah, arguing that we should somehow head back in time is always a silly idea. We are where we are, and must move on from here. As usual, I don’t really know what I’m saying. I have no big point to push here. Just thinking out loud.

The Zig-Zags record is still worth a listen. I know I’ve taken a pretty negative tack in this review, but if you like this kinda music, you should still check it out, because about 50% of it rules, and that’s 50% more than most modern rock records. But if there’d only been a bit less of it, it could have been so much more....




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* Befitting its status as clearly one of the greatest motion pictures ever made, it is spiriting to note that ‘Psychomania’ has actually become a bit of a staple reference point in underground rock in recent years; from my own record collection, I count samples or lyrical tributes in the work of such diverse artists as Electric Wizard, Black Time, The Heads and Gunslingers, and I’m sure there are others out there.

Labels: album reviews, Zig-Zags