We March The Dirty Curty Selections LP
Athens, Ohio’s WE MARCH existed for most of the 2000s, and, during that time, they were one of the most ferocious and exciting bands in America. Not that anyone really gave a fuck, including the band. They knew they were great, but they also reveled in self-sabotage. Sometimes these impulses go hand in hand. But to those who saw them tear up a room, it was hard to shake the fact that you’d seen something meteoric blazing across the sky. They played their rotten little hearts out as singer Zaxon Campus hung from the rafters and bled all over the place. If you were smart, you grabbed one of their self-released CDs, three full-lengths in all. But outside of a pair of 7”s, there wasn’t much WE MARCH wax. WE MARCH didn’t have cool punk labels swooping in to bottle up their desperate punk—pitched perfectly between rural and urban mayhem—for the wider world to get a handle on. A lot of bands go to sleep at night wishing that they could sound like a cross between the STOOGES and NEGATIVE APPROACH, but WE MARCH is the only one who woke up transformed into a take-no-prisoners groove machine (barring EASY ACTION, of course). Hell, WE MARCH even turns WEIRD AL’s DEVO-inspired “Dare to Be Stupid” into a PAGANS-style romp, completing a rare Ohio triple play. By their final album, 2007’s Creator/Destroyer, WE MARCH was still pumping out POISON IDEA-style ragers, but they were also writing songs like “Ethnic Electric,” which starts out like a SUN CITY GIRLS jam before unleashing the full force of the band, and “Soul of the Desert,” an imposing, monolithic cut like the kind DESTRUCTION UNIT would start delving into a few years later. All of these tracks and more are on The Dirty Curty Selections. So who was Dirty Curty? He was band founder (along with singer Zach Fuller) and guitarist Curtis Frey, and he passed away shortly before this long-overdue, well-deserved collection came out. RIP, motherfucker.