SINGLES ROUND-UP 2008:
PART TWO

The Lyres – Don’t Give It Up Now b/w How Do You Know?
(Dirty Water)

The Lyres were mainstays of the Boston punk/new wave/whatever scene at the dawn of the ‘80s and beyond, and I’ve been heavily into their track ‘I Want To Help You Ann’ on an old ‘Boston scene’ comp CD for a while now, so it was a blast to discover I could get my hands on this, the band’s first 7” from 1979, reissued through the record label auspices of London’s premier garage-rock true believers’ club night, Dirty Water.

And what a fucking brilliant single it is! Doing some reading up on the group, it seems that The Lyres gradually (d)evolved into a revolving door vehicle for frontman Jeff Conolly’s apparently unquenchable appetite for straight up Nuggets worship, but presented here in their original line-up, the band seem to be gunning for something altogether leaner and meaner than just drunkenly banging out ’96 Tears’ every night. Cutting a mean streak somewhere between the cooler end of early garage revivalism, tightly coiled post-punk dynamism and the Feelies/Clean continuum of post-VU drone-pop, they hit their bullseye straight off, working up proven rock n' roll elements in a cool and unconventional manner that just plain kicks ass. Guitarist Rick Carmel had a really distinctive, clean, tremolo-heavy sound, cutting through with sharp mod power-chords on the A and nervy Velvets rhythm on the B, sitting perfectly alongside Conolly’s minimal organ runs and vicious tambourine thwacks, all anchored by one of the best no-bullshit drummers that the factory that used to built great, anonymous no-bullshit drummers for punk bands ever produced.

Unusually for a late ‘70s act, The Lyres aim their material squarely at the dancefloor, with, in my hips opinion at least, great success. I swear, this band actually swing and drone at the same time, and both songs here are nightclub stompers in the ‘60s tradition. Correspondingly, Conelly tries for a garage-punk snarl in his vocal, but he seems to naturally err more toward a deeep Ian Curtis kinda voice, belting it out in a razor sharp monotone, sounding like he really gives a shit. He wasn’t smiling when they recorded this, that’s for sure.

Listening to ‘How Do you Know’ for the 79th time, it occurs to me it almost sounds like the sort of thing Joy Division might have come up with if they’d been way into The Music Machine. An absurd and unwarranted brain-wrong, I realise… I mean, can you even IMAGINE Joy Division listening to The Music Machine..? No, me neither. But some freak urge still caused me to write that, and hopefully that’ll give you some idea of why you need to go listen to The Lyres right away.

This is 100% proof party music, but it sounds like one goddamn serious party – perfectly formed, urgent, weird rock n’ roll. Regardless of what came later, there were no flies on these guys the day they recorded this; an absolute classic record.

http://www.dirtywaterclub.co.uk/
http://www.myspace.com/thelyres

Partyline / Spider & The Webs – split EP (Local Kid)

A split 7” from the respective 21st century projects of two of riot grrl’s finest, I bought this at that Partyline gig I wrote about earlier this year, although it actually dates from around 2003. As expected, Partyline rip through two slices of their ferocious, good times feminist hardcore chaos in about two minutes thirty, and I don’t need to tell you that it’ll be a sad day here at Stereo Sanctity when we find ourselves unable to enjoy a good bit of ferocious, good times feminist hardcore chaos when we hear it. ‘Ladies Room’ finds Allison Wolfe on her best, vicious scattershot form, taking a chainsaw to a hundred years of gender politics in ninety seconds, concluding with “..and always do your fucking dishes, yeah there’s all those dishes! Fuck your dishes!” Quite so.

Spider & The Webs were Tobi Vail’s new band, circa 2003, and I hope they’re still her well-established band circa now, cos their side here slays. Two great, skiwiff, punchy DIY pop songs, recorded rough and trebley with a two guitar / no bass line-up and Flying Nun-tastic reverb. Some killer group playing and a great vibe, and the songs are really gnarled up and catchy, like picturesque punk rock tree trunks. I hope they’re still at it.

http://www.partylinedc.com/
http://www.myspace.com/spiderandthewebs
http://www.localkid.co.uk/

The Pets – Let’s Go b/w I Want Fun (Douchemaster)

The Pets may have a picture of some girls on their record, but don’t be fooled. They are men, and palpably so. I recall the sticker on this one in All Ages made reference to The Voidoids and The Clash, and that’s spot on really; oblivious to any particular 2008 context, this is the kind of preppy, accomplished, powerpop-inflected punk you could easily imagine Seymour Stein writing a big cheque for back in 1978.

But wait, don’t turn it into an ashtray yet! Rest assured The Pets are responsible adults, and know that if you’re gonna press a 45 that cuts “Let’s Go” with “I Want Fun”, it is your duty to deliver on that promise, so all the dorkoid lyrics, middle eights and tasteless bass wonking you suspect they’ve got in ‘em are wisely avoided in favour of two fist-pounding, crowd-pleasing poppers, as gloriously obvious as the titles suggest. The lack of substance here would doubtless have Richard Hell wringing his poetical hands at what his legacy hath accidentally wrought, but no matter. If you played this to ten drunk people, it would make eight of them happy. Which is more than can be said for ‘Destiny Street’. SOLID, in a word.

http://www.myspace.com/thepetsoakland
http://www.douchemasterrecords.blogspot.com/

Popular Workshop – William, It Was Really Something
(Tough Love)

Nice cover concept on this one! No gross apocalyptic cartoons or photos of weird kids with guitars rocking out on the beach, giant cats, scary manga girls with rayguns or any of the things I usually like to see on record covers, true, but overall it’s a lovely design job from Tough Love – yellow vinyl too to match the paintjob on the band’s name. I think Sleevage would dig it.

Musically, Popular Workshop do thoroughly decent indie-rock of the kind that smart boys who are good at music like to do, capturing yet again that awkward moment in which the jagged, twisty funk-inspired approach that once signalled post-punk shock becomes straight indie default, familiar as a cup of tea. Not that there's anything wrong with a nice cup of tea. The band are tight as all hell, and the singer sounds nerdy and kinda desperate. For a few moments I even thought it sounded like The Embarrassment – which is HIGH PRAISE INDEED, to make up for the tepid praise above – but… no, too polite I guess. Music that hedges it’s bets when to work it should be all over yer fucking face, and so forth. Sorry guys. That hurt.

http://www.myspace.com/popularworkshop
http://www.toughloverecords.com/main.htm

Sex Vid – Tania EP (Dom America)

Fuck me. This puts everything else I’ve written about here into cruel perspective.

From Olympia WA, but pitched about as from the K empire as it’s possible to get, Sex Vid – profiled by singles column godhead Doug Mosurock here – play unrelenting, brutalist hardcore, combining it with the grim aesthetic sensibilities of KVLT black metal and a plain-speaking sense of sheer disgust and dissatisfaction that cuts straight through the layers of affectation common to those genres, leaving a core of fearfully powerful music that pins you to the fucking wall.

Despite the implicit/explicit violence of every aspect of this disc, there’s no macho chest-beating to be found here, rather a sense of quick-moving fragility and fierce intelligence common to all truly great, outsider punk rock. Songs are deliberate in intention and execution, instrumental lines are primed to cut their way into your ear-brain like a scalpel and stay there, without ever taking the easy route of obvious melody, much like the hallowed riffs of prime-era Darkthrone or early Emperor. And the noise, christ, the sheer volume – even brought to us via the limitations imposed by basement four-track recording, cheaply pressed vinyl and the worn out needle on my cheap-ass mini-hifi, the feedback roaring from these guys’ amps, the deathdealing WHACK of the drummer, is near physically frightening.

Lyrics are similarly pulverising – brief, ambiguous, fascinating and sometimes even audible sans lyric sheet (quite an achievement for a band this fast and distortion-heavy). Delivered with a kind of strangulated, desperate honesty, Sex Vid’s songs offer entry into the kind of dark, dark headspace that’s been off limits for grown-ups to wallow in since being reduced to a joke by the goth contingent at around the same time myself and the members of Sex Vid were going to nursery school, but to hear vocalist Judd yell through “Maybe they’ll put your skull on an altar / maybe they’ll shove your head on a stake … don’t bother asking Dad about ‘Nam / next one’s gonna be even worse” on ‘Misprint’, like a man calling judgement on the whole upcoming century, makes my nerve-endings shiver on the same wavelength as listening to Lydia howling through ‘Orphans’ for the first time way back when.

I hope I don’t give the impression of being taken in yet again by some mysterioso, underground hype scam, but there’s no arguing with music like this, and it’s thrilling and unnerving to know this band are out there in the wilderness, recording quick, cheap and loud, meaning what they say, and not giving a shit whether you know who they are or not, let alone whether you approve. It’s like getting a happy holidays postcard from a character in a post-apocalyptic atrocity movie – “you’re already here, you just don’t know it yet”.

Appropriately perhaps, neither band nor label have a myspace or web presence, and googling them probably won’t end well, so…. happy hunting.

ShiSho – Will Punch You EP (Filthy Little Angels)

Now this is a strange one. Basically, Shisho sound as if some American hipster-type parents have worked out some goofy songs in the vein of Prewar Yardsale or Moldy Peaches, and coerced their young children into singing them. Ok, I suppose maybe the nature of the kid / grown-up collaboration was a little more open than that, but still, you show me the five year old who can play smooth acoustic guitar and concoct lyrical gags about Jerry Lewis. But, if you can get past the fact that sitting at home listening to a record of some primary school kids singing weird lo-fi songs for pleasure is FAIRLY UNCOMFORTABLE, at least two of the four songs here are actually really enjoyable, and not as insufferably cutesy as one might fear.

‘America Will Punch You’ takes a surreal child’s-eye-view of U.S. foreign policy horror, and is actually pretty damn hilarious, whilst ‘Punk Rawk Boy’ and ‘The Thing That Only Eats Hippies’, are, oddly, both Dead Milkmen covers, the latter reinvented as a self-explanatory bedtime story rapped over a a minimal drum machine pre-set, the kids giggling with glee as the beast in question gobbles up David Crosby and spits him out, and the punks come out to celebrate. Mum and dad, I can tell you’re raising these kids well. The remaining track is a pretty cringeworthy faux-disco oddity that goes on way too long, but for a teach-the-kids-about-music project that got out of hand, there’s a real good fun feeling to ShiSho that’s hard not to appreciate.

CORRECTION: a look at Shisho’s myspace confirms that the band are actually two sisters, and that they recorded their songs themselves, and have started their own label to help promote other ‘kid bands’. So I unequivocally apologise and withdraw my above accusations of grown-up involvement. Seriously, how cool do you have to be to start your own DIY record label when you’re, like, TEN? – it’s off the scale. Much respect & good luck to them!

http://www.myspace.com/shisho
You can download this EP for free from: http://www.filthylittleangels.com/

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I'll be rounding up a final few singles, probably proof-reading the above post a bit, and hopefully sorting out various emails which have thus far remained rudely unanswered, after returning from the End Of The Road festival this weekend, and a few subsequent nights of great, exciting music type stuff. But just wanted to make sure I posted some stuff before departing. See ya soon!

Labels: Partyline, Popular Workshop, Sex Vid, Shisho, singles reviews, Spider and the Webs, The Lyres, The Pets

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