The Walking Timebombs
Thursday, April 30th, 2009Hey O.J. / White Bronco 7″
Double Naught Records, 1994
Wrapping up the Pain Teens theme this week, here’s a post-Pain Teens project from guitarist Scott Ayers which extended his layered, noise-damaged psychedelia into a slightly more experimental realm. Years of sampling and tape loop manipulation elevated Ayers’ masterfully stitched together compositions to a whole new level, as demonstrated on the B-side track, “White Bronco” where news clips of Dan Rather make a perfect compliment to the tense pulse of violin and percussion. His sinister edge is softened with a little humor — albeit very dark humor — as the A-side is a molestation of Jimi Hendrix‘s “Hey Joe” tweaked to lampoon the debacle of the O.J. Simpson media circus. My edition of 1000 is hand-numbered #32 of 1000, and I suspect all are numbered #32 since that was O.J.’s jersey number.
DOWNLOAD:
Walking Timebombs – “Hey O.J.”
Walking Timebombs – “White Bronco”
My last posting hit the spot, so here’s another single from the notorious Pain Teens. Perhaps we’ll make this Pain Teens week to help meet my self-imposed minimum quota of 4 postings a month. I’ve got lots of their stuff to devastate you with, such as this dizzying 45. “Sacrificial Shack” once again finds the Pain Teens knee deep in the horrors of humanity with a nauseating, yet somehow seductively swirling track that paralleled the early ’90s fascination with serial killers and mayhem. It was released the same year The Silence of the Lambs hit theaters after all. The flipside is a fantastic cover of a Zeni Geva song, funneling the Japanese band’s oppressively pounding primal riffs through buzzing, woozy layers of noisy muck.
There’s something undeniably appealing about sinister music, especially when it comes to rock, and it doesn’t get much more sinister than the Pain Teens. Dark, disturbing, and steeped in the hazy, narcotic fog of Houston, Texas, their music has the acid-fried punk psyche of Chrome plus the weirdo noise experimentation of fellow Texans The Butthole Surfers tightly wound held together with an industrial-sized, relentlessly bombastic rhythm section. Those elements alone make the Pain Teens a fairly interesting band, but the real power of their sound comes from singer Bliss Blood, who’s disarming, female vocals prevent them from being just another off-putting band of testosterone-laden misanthropes. In fact, without her voice and the perfectly assembled layers of pounding noise, riffs, and tape loops, it’d be hard for anyone but the dimmest of sickwads to subject themselves to their tales from the darkest side of humanity. Just dig the seductive qualities of the 
There were only 300 of these babies pressed on Lawrence, Kansas’ Priapus label and it’s about time you heard it. During the mid-1990s, the idea of ‘post-rock’ was quite the hot item with bands like Tortoise, Sea and Cake, Gastr del Sol and others mixing electronic and scholarly elements to sprawling rock compositions. That’s the category Hypershperian seemed to get lumped into, which doesn’t quite fit their freewheeling sound since they weren’t quite as fussy about their songs as some of the headier bands of the era. In fact, they had more of an “out there” vibe you’d find in bands like TFUL 282 or the more grandiose moments of The Flaming Lips and Brian Eno‘s early work, mixing and piling up sounds into a churning sonic stew that pulls you in instead of foisting itself upon you like some of the post-rock groups. The A-side features their best song, “Epic Majestic,” a vintage synth-soaked gem that stumbles along like a lazy stroll on a summer night, loose around the edges and just gnarled and weird enough to make things really interesting. The B-side kicks off with “Activation,” which stacks up nicely to the Stereolab catalog with minimal Moog giving way to waves of warm electronics and an increased density. “Hubris,” the final track, is a sparse indie rock-style duet featuring rolling basslines and electronic piano, which brilliantly culminates into a locked groove. Hyperspherian managed to put out a CD (only “Epic Majestic” from this 7″ appears on it) that doesn’t quite have the magic of this record, but it’s worth a listen if you happen to come across it.
Back in 1995 when about 85% of the music released on punk labels was Buzzcocks or Green Day-inspired pop-punk, Flipside magazine’s record label released a second helping of Babyland’s electrojunk punk, which promptly ended up in cutout bins by the dozens. It’s a damn shame too, because what Babyland brought to the turntable was co-opted in the later ’90s by a punk scene that shifted away from the safe confines of pop-punk to the wild possibilities of Screamers and Suicide-inspired synthpunk of the later nineties in bands like Subtonix, The Vanishing, Replikants, ADULT, Black Ice, Sixteens, The Lack, and the whole Digital Hardcore scene that came to light with the popularity of Atari Teenage Riot — not to mention the overall acceptance of synth elements in punk with early 2000s groups like xbxrx, Lost Sounds, Digital Leather, Phantom Limbs, etc.