Of course I have heard of 100 FLOWERS, the latter-day mutation of the URINALS, but I’ve never spent time with their stuff. This single—which consists solely of a HEAVEN 17 cover and remix of same—does not make me want to go back and explore their catalogue. Try as I might to respect my elders, I just cannot muster any enthusiasm for this one, which sounds like the outro music to some ’80s teen comedy. Sorry, dudes—tried, can’t.
This is my kind of weirdo rock. The two songs on this 7″ are in different styles. The A-side “Gratoit Crawl” is a mad, drug-induced sounding jam. It’s all over the place, noisy and lo-fi. I want to just play it again and again. The B-side “50’s House Blues” is a more straightforward bluesy garage rocker. It repeatedly mentions potato vodka which makes me giggle and also has the great line “I’m as useless as can be.” CHRISTOPHER ALAN DURHAM is from outside of Detroit and is formerly of ROACHCLIP and the BIBS. Cool stuff.
Synth punk/post-punk pioneers GENERAL LABOR recently released these two tracks on a 45, and you need to hear them. “Illuminator” is a noisy, mid-paced song with strange harmonic and electronic drum noises that seem to come out of nowhere and dissolve just as rapidly, and while “Tastes Metallic” is less noisy, it is equally as enticing with its shifting instrumentation. The two songs form an intense emotional juxtaposition, with the former being pensive and tense and the latter being almost dreamy and relaxing. If you like things like SUICIDE or A FRAMES, then you’ll most assuredly be into this.
This is the new single from OPTIC SINK, a band that takes a very minimalist approach to synth punk and who released their debut album in 2020 through Goner Records. Side A, “A Face in the Crowd,” reminds me of OMD’s “The New Stone Age” being channeled by the URINALS, while Side B, “Landscape Shift,” could have come straight out of Mute Records in the late ’70s, but not really, because it’s timeless—it actually inhabits a dimension of its own where some transhumans invited you to dance in a club that is a white room floating in the eternal ether of creation. It is really good.
For fans of the GUN CLUB and JEFFREY LEE PIERCE, this reissue is a must. RED LIGHTS, from what I can find, formed in 1978, two years before the GUN CLUB, and recorded this five-song demo that largely went unheard. Even at nineteen years old, PIERCE’s voice was just as iconic as it was anywhere in his career. The blues-heavy, cow-punk sound of the GUN CLUB was still to be reached, though, as RED LIGHTS touched on reggae in “Kitty,” and is otherwise very pop-heavy, in the vein of his Debbie Harry worship (“Debbie by the Christmas Tree”). The opener “Jungle Book” garnished the most fame, being covered by a number of bands including the LAST on their 1980 Look Again LP (featuring Vitus Mataré on keyboard, who was on this original demo). The recording shows its age in sound quality, but if PIERCE and the GUN CLUB play an integral role in this whole punk thing, then RED LIGHTS is surely a stepping stone in the history books. Copies are limited, so get yours today.
It’s hard to believe that Roy Vucino’s RED MASS project has been around for fifteen years now. An amorphous collective that can manifest as ten people on stage or just Roy at home with his four-track cobbling together lo-fi collage rock, RED MASS keeps you guessing as to what kind of mask they’ll be wearing when you pick them up for date night. On this 7”, they look backwards to the garage-adjacent rock they kicked their run off with. The title track recalls Vucino’s alien-in-our-midst contemporary Timmy Vulgar, but that unmistakable SEXAREENOS strut confirms that this is Vucino through-and-through. “Millionaire” nicks the guitar lick from GREAT PLAINS’ classic “Letter to a Fanzine” for a compact screed dissing the financially-advantaged, while “Addicted” finds Vucino and HPENNY DIVING’s Chantal Ambridge laying down a heartache-laden duet. Here’s to another fifteen trips around the yellow mass up above.
From ranting on ALEX CHILTON’s Like Flies on Sherbert in 1979 to drumming for the PANTHER BURNS, Memphis noisemaker Ross Johnson lives to rabble another day on this single with CLOUDLAND CANYON. It trades the psychobilly stomp of Vanity Sessions, which JOHNSON recorded with Jeffrey Evans in 2014, for the psychedelic and experimental sounds provided by CLOUDLAND CANYON—synths, looping sound bites, drum machine and distant guitars. While the prefix “psych” transfers from one project to the other, so does JOHNSON’s ability to spout strings of confessional complaints and late-night reveries. “Women, Money, Children” on Side A chugs along with a desert-rock sort of feeling; bass and drums keep a steady pace for fuzzy little guitar leads under JOHNSON’s bar room logic of “Why is it that the ones you want, don’t want you / And the ones that want you, you don’t want?”—the otherwise straight-driven rhythm swerves in endless diatribes that lead to places like “Radio Free Europe” by the songs’ end. “I Know Why They Leave” on Side B forgets the rock beat for a programmed sound of synth percussion like a dark section of a FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD song, with the dub production of LEE SCRATCH PERRY sung by a drunk Phil Alvin. If you enjoy lyrics from the patriarchy of rock’n’roll yore and the aforementioned blender drink of whatever’s happening on the B-side, then belly up to this release.
Pre-listen interest piqued by the accompanying notes mentioning the involvement of members of the INTELLIGENCE and WOUNDED LION, along with a check of the credits noting TELEVISION PERSONALITIES and CAPTAIN BEEFHEART covers, proved something of a red herring. A pleasant surprise, then, to uncover a twisted collection of distorted synth un-pop. Mechanical rhythms and analog blurts (accompanied by occasional organic instrumentation, including a sax break provided by MIKAL CRONIN) are the foundation for the dejected laments and spoken word passages of an artist’s soul at odds with modern society. (The Casiotone update of the TVPs “Jackanory Stories” is a listenable enough version of an already-fantastic song.) Glitchy and unprocessed, an homage to bedroom tape experiments and the first dabblings of ’70s/’80s synthesizer pioneers, Our Album crackles with surface noise and ideas.
This is a really lovely single. Tongue-in-cheek power pop that brings to mind NATURAL CHILD, SPACE PHLEGM, and even a little bit of early ROLLING STONES. Incredible production here as well. Everything sounds clean and natural. I love hearing poppy music like this that isn’t compressed to all hell. This might not enter the rotation of the typical MRR reader, but I’m smitten by it. For fans of Matador Records and people who think indie music peaked in the mid-’90s.
A very belated first vinyl appearance for the MARILYNS, a group of Memphis women (and eventually, a male drummer) who, in defiance to the plastic artifice of the mid-to-late ’80s, kicked out a joyous mix of early rock’n’roll grit, ’60s garage stomp, and primitive punk. The tremolo-twanging Girls in the Garage shimmy-shake of “I’m Glad I’m Not a Man,” recorded in 1988 with an expanded six-piece MARILYNS lineup, has a skeletal, sneering spark that’s like Patti Paladin and Judy Nylon of SNATCH if they’d come up in the Paisley Underground alongside the PANDORAS, and even doubles as a CYNDI LAUPER diss track (“Cyndi Lauper / She’s so stupid / Says girls just want some fun,” amazing). B-side “I’m on Acid,” from the the MARILYNS’ quartet incarnation in 1984, is even more raw than the flipside—a ramshackle pop jam balanced on a tangle of post-VELVETS guitar strum, collapsing drums, and budget synth effects, sounding very much like it should have been sandwiched between the CANNANES and BEAT HAPPENING on an early K Records cassette comp, Let’s Kiss/Let’s Together-style. The fact that there’s only two tracks here is such a tease; I demand more MARILYNS now.
The URINALS started Happy Squid to release their debut 7” in 1978, but this 1980 label sampler effectively foreshadowed some of the scattered directions that the members of the band would follow as they drifted further away from ramshackle punk into the ’80s, from their soon-to-be reinvention as tense post-punks 100 FLOWERS to the moody college rock of DANNY AND THE DOORKNOBS and TROTSKY ICEPICK. The EP leads with three tracks directly from the URINALS family tree, starting with a perfect half-minute of the parent group’s primitive bashing (“U”), followed by DANNY AND THE DOORKNOBS’ “Melody,” a dark, lo-fi punk jangler like the URINALS gone Paisley Underground, and then an organ-buzzing improv noise instrumental called “Get Down, Part 4” by ARROW BOOK CLUB (actually the URINALS incognito). For the remaining three tracks, things are turned over to a handful of URINALS peers from the L.A. underground—VIDIOTS (featuring Rik L Rik on vocals) offered “Laurie’s Lament,” a speedy, Dangerhouse-style burner that’s weirded-up midway with a PERE UBU-ish synth break, PHIL BEDEL’s “Caterpillar Stomp” is squelching, instrumental post-DEVO synthwave, and NEEF rounds things out with a lengthy (the EP’s entire B-side) neo-musique concrète jam. Punk to waaaaaay beyond punk in just six degrees.
Two tracks of dirty, bluesy garage rock punctuated with DANIELS’s distorted, drawled vocals and punchy harmonica playing. The HUNGRY HEARTS are Texacala Jones, Marco Butcher (JAM MESSENGERS), Cypress Grove (played with Jeffrey Lee Pierce and Lydia Lunch) and Luis Tissot (JESUS AND THE GROUPIES). It’s a messy, raucous affair that sounds as if it was recorded in the early morning hours before the sun rose. It would have been fun to attend this party.
This punky pop band out of Los Angeles was active in some form or other from 1979 through 1990. The project centered around sisters Kriti and Kelly Callan (daughters of actress K Callan, who voiced Hank Hill’s mom, Tilly, on King of the Hill from 2000 on!), but also featured, at times, Steve Wynn and David Provost of DREAM SYNDICATE, Kjehl Johansen of URINALS, and David Nolte of the LAST. Early on, they played a brand of jangly pop that seemed to be heavily influenced by sounds coming out of the UK DIY scene (see their great 1983 debut Betsy’s House). Over time, though, they morphed into an act somewhat adjacent to both the Paisley Underground and the Valley-friendly new wave pop rock scenes of the day, failing to fully fit in with either. Their commercial success peaked in 1987 after signing a record deal, putting out an LP, and having a couple of tracks featured on the soundtrack to the comedy slasher Slumber Party Massacre II. What we have here is a reissue of their 1986 self-released fan club EP, which they put out to the disdain of their record label. It kicks off with a cover of “No Such Thing” by AGENT ORANGE, stripping it of all the aggro posturing and proto-thrash production that was requisite of a gang of teenage boys putting out punk music in 1981 and replacing it with sweet BANGLES-esque harmonies and a bare-bones Teenage Shutdown-ish production. It absolutely rules. So much so that I don’t feel the need to go into the remaining three tracks to let you know the release is worth picking up…I mean, they’re fine (except for “Businessman’s Wife”, which sounds like a generic 1987 rootsy bar band number)—Kjehl Johansen even helped write one! They’re just barely notable next to this cover. Limited to 300 copies, so grab one fast!
