Noise for Zeros

Ray / Half-Decayed 7″
Faye Records, 1995

We live in weird times. Record shops close by the dozen, but there’s vinyl at your local Best Buy and nearly every obscure, fractionalized sub-genre that sputtered through speakers for a few brief moments over a decade ago in maddeningly short supply gets resurrected and posted by one of a handful of people who remember or at least give a shit. So while I mourn the closing of many record stores and often long to flip through the stacks of those long-gone music mini-meccas, I’m also grateful to live in a day and age when a lazy Google search or bumbling web surfing yields a score that many years of crate digging never procured. Such is the case with this long lost math rock group, The Great Brain, whose Algorithm CD I came across while catching up on some of the fine postings over at Built On A Weak Spot. For years, I anxiously awaited an album by this Chicago group after hearing this 7″ release, but I never kept tabs on them in those dark, pre-internet days, so I never even knew that they’d managed to get an album out. At the time, the midwest was full of math rock bands usin’ their noggins to complicate and control the energy of hardcore punk with deconstructed riffs precisely arranged and played with a musical virtuosity that most punk bands couldn’t (or wouldn’t) achieve. What makes The Great Brain noteworthy is that they were able to keep a frayed, loose edge to their sound that most bands of similar ilk would smooth and/or polish over. Their sound has a gut-level umph to it that many bands of the genre lacked. “Ray” falls somewhere in between the loose jangle of Pavement and the jazzy aggressiveness of St. Louis greats The Dazzling Killmen, pairing catchy choruses with shouted bursts of nervy noise. The flipside, “Half Decayed,” completely ditches any hint of math rock with wavering twangs of oddball guitar that simmer into a straight-up, collegiate guitar rager. Check ’em out, and if you’re ready to hear The Great Brain get Captain Beefheart weird on you, give their Algorithm CD a spin…

The Great Brain – “Ray”
The Great Brain – “Half-Decayed”

The Great Brain’s Algorithm at Built On A Weak Spot

Year Future 12″ EP
Gold Standard Laboratories, 2003

The sadly defunct GSL label had an amazing streak in the early 2000s, cranking out landmark releases with a diverse roster of the era’s best bands including The Locust, Mars Volta, !!!, Chromatics, GoGoGo Airheart, I Am Spoonbender, Sunshine, The Vanishing, and many more — many of which will likely be featured here sometime in future. The GSL aesthetic was ever-shifting and adventurous, from lush prog rock to icy neo-goth to hip-hip and weirdo noise, all somehow capturing the anarchic spirit of punk before punk became a commodified cultural trinket to be consumed at your local Hot Topic. Label head Sonny Kay’s good taste always warranted consideration, so after a string of notable bands featuring him as a member, like Angel Hair and my faves, The VSS (who’s essential Nervous Circuits album recently got a deluxe re-issue treatment on the Hydra Head label), I was primed to hear his latest band, Year Future. Their debut is probably the best representation of the band’s potential, along with their Hidden Hand 7″ released about a year later. And as much as I love these two releases, their debut album, First World Fever was a tedious mess I can barely listen to, a huge disappointment full of clumsy lyrics mixed front and center, dully spouted for 40-some minutes in Sonny’s whiny monotone shout. His “singing” style can be grating on the earlier releases as well, but there they were at least buried in the mix and work as an oppressive force without drowning out the band’s interesting and dense swirl of echoey guitar and synth. At their best, Year Future connected the dots between proto post-punk groups like Warsaw-era Joy Division, Public Image Limited, The Birthday Party, and Killing Joke, to the jaded Gravity Records-era post-hardcore bands like The VSS, Clikitat Ikatowi, Antioch Arrow, and Heroin. Check out some of Year Future’s finest recorded moments from a pair of tracks from their 4-song debut EP below…

DOWNLOAD:

Year Future – “All Of Your Eggs”
Year Future – “Some Bodies”

LINKS:

Year Future bio on GSL
Buy Year Future releases

Delving deeper into the legend of Los Marauders, the Nehring brothers (aka Nobody and Edward T. Action) streamlined their rockabilly sound with the more conventional and cleaned up band The Roughhousers. And while the aggro trash punk elements of the Marauders were removed, the Roughhousers could still tear it up and were one of the funnest live bands to see in the mid-90s, serving up loads of entertaining stage banter and hopped up, sweaty, roadhouse rhythm and blues. Unfortunately, they rarely made it out of Iowa City and even more unfortunately, very few recordings of the band exist. In fact, I believe these two tracks from a pair of local scene compilations are the only releases this should-be legendary group put out.

DOWNLOAD:

The Rough Housers – “Hit Da Floor”
from Herd Mentality compilation CD, Feedlot Records, 1997

The Rough Housers – “The Feet You’re Standing On”
from Land of Dirt compilation CD, Feedlot Records, 1996

Every Fuckin’ Song We Know CD
Teenbeat Records, 1996

In every independent music scene across the country, there seems to be at least one band that plays some variation of old school rockabilly. Whether they have the standup bass, 1950s greaser style, or some reverbed hollowbody guitar action, there’s always a token group that looks to the primitive R&B past for inspiration. Groups like the Kingpins, The Crows, The Rev. Horton Heat, and countless others fill this niche, but only a few really stand apart from the pack and add something to the mix that keeps them from being a tired retread of the past. Iowa City’s Los Marauders took the rockabilly template and fucked it up enough to create an entirely different beast. Just as The Cramps mutated rockabilly into psychobilly with the rawness of punk, Los Marauders kicked up the tempo and aggression and pushed it into the hardcore realm. Singer Nobody’s throaty vocals (achieved by chain-smoking cigars) aren’t too far removed from the hoarse barks of Negative Approach, and Johnny Aztec’s ultra-revved up guitar kept their sound miles above the mundane. They could kick out some fairly conventional rockabilly too, but they always had an edge that kept them at the top of the rockabilly heap.

DOWNLOAD:

Los Marauders – “Wild Women”
Los Marauders – “Got A Rock”
Los Marauders – “Green Martians from Mars”
Los Marauders – “Wreckin’ Machine”

LINKS:

Los Marauders on YouTube
Los Marauders on Teenbeat Records

The Lights Are Getting Dim LP
Fat Possum Records, 1999

Goddamn I love summer. Even when that nasty midwestern humidity sets in with that thick, earthy, weedish smell that permeates everything outside air conditioned safety zones, when you can literally sit in a chair, do nothing and work up a major sweat. I understand not liking it — it can be quite unpleasant after all — buy hey, I’ll take this over frigid cold anyday, and that’s what I love about the Neckbones. Hailing from Oxford, Mississippi, the Neckbones know about hot, stanky heat and they’ve captured that heat perfectly in their sultry blues punk. Like most jaded fucks, I cringe at most bands trying to do the “punk blues” thing, since there are few that have hit that mark well and tons of retread garage punk bands that attempt to ape some classic blues and R&B elements and end up sounding like tedious facsimiles of the real deal without any heart. Cooking up some righteously bluesy riffs and vocals, plus some maracas, organ, piano, and even some sax courtesy of Jack Oblivian, the Neckbones are as real as it gets when you’re needing some down home, hot ass, greasy Southern-fried blues punk. A Boston Phoenix review called them “a cross between the early Rolling Stones and The Dead Boys,” which I agree with wholeheartedly if you add The Stooges as a midpoint reference to their lineage, since the Neckbones pack an Asheton-sized guitar whallop into their songs. Just sample the 3 tracks below from their classic The Lights Are Getting Dim album and get ready to have a new soundtrack for summer.

DOWNLOAD:

The Neckbones – “Cardiac Suture”
The Neckbones – “Goodbye Ramona”
The Neckbones – “You’re All Winners”

LINKS:

The Neckbones on MySpace
The Neckbones on Fat Possum Records

Loser / Cooking With Gas 7″
Sub-Pop, 1989

Talking with a friend this weekend, we recalled a time when the term “grunge” didn’t conjure up images of ridiculous designer flannel and lame ’90s-style hard rock, before the gnarlier aspects of the term were sanitized and rationalized for mass consumption. For us, Seattle’s Tad embodied what grunge was really about: loud, burly, heavy dirtpunk for weirdos — in short, ugly music for ugly people. Long before every mall in America was teeming with teenagers sporting Doc Martens and flannel shirts, flipping their locks and blathering about Pearl Jam, Tad was punishing eardrums with gut-rumbling dirges that mainlined the colossal buzz of the Melvins and late-period Black Flag (they released a single featuring covers of Flag’s “Damaged I” and “Damaged II”) into a backwoods freakshow that made grunge scary. Their God’s Balls and Salt Lick 12-inchers are essential noise rock classics and this, one of many classic Tad singles on Sub-Pop, showcases the true grit of grunge.

DOWNLOAD:

Tad – “Loser”
Tad – “Cooking With Gas”

Identification Code:
5271-4984953784-06564 LP
Dead Beat Records, 2008

I was sold on The Daily Void from the git go, being the twisted, sci-fried mutation of Chicago’s blistering Functional Blackouts. And after picking up their raging HoZac and Florida’s Dying 7″ singles, I knew that an album’s worth of their Crime-damaged paranoia punk would be A+ essential listening for modern noise mutants. With stabbing stereo shards of guitar piercing a tightly-wound rhythm section and snotty, robotic vox sneering songs with titles like “(You’re Not A Man) You’re An Insect”, “You’ve Been Erased”, and “The Man Without A Face”, The Daily Void give their apocalyptic primal punk sound a modern cybernoid edge that reveals an Orwellian view to life in the age of Twitter.

LINKS:

Download MP3s at RCD LBL
The Daily Void on MySpace
Dead Beat Records

Stand Behind Me / Quiet Line 7″
Amphetamine Reptile, 1994

Worldwide LP
Dead Eye Productions, 1992

One of the most overlooked gems of the impressive AmRep catalog is this blazing single from German noise rockers Party Diktator, featuring one of the most hyperactive bassists you’ll ever hear. And by hyperactive, I certainly don’t mean funky goofball slap bass, or the notoriously overdone bass Crime was guity of, but instead, totally raw, pulverizing, full-throttle, crackpipe-smoking bass that gives Party Diktator an extra aggressive snarl. Sounding something like the precision of the Jesus Lizard rhythm section crossed with the textured, noisy, beefy spasms of another AmRep favorite, Hammerhead, this record totally rips and yet somehow never received the attention given to lesser bands of the genre. Perhaps the fact that their other records were harder to find domestically, or that they never toured the U.S. (as far as I know), Party Diktator never ascended to noise rock glory in these here United States.

So after being primed and pumped up about this band, I sort of expected AmRep to release an album proper, as they’d done for many other kickass bands in the mid-1990s, introducing under-the-radar bands like Hammerhead, Guzzard, Today Is The Day, and Chokebore to the relative noiserock masses, but alas I never saw anything else from Party Diktator. Apparently, Roadrunner Records released an album in 1996, called Dive Bomb, but it wasn’t widely distributed in the U.S. as far as I can tell and I’ve never seen a copy. And then one day, after dedicating an afternoon to digging thorugh the massive vinyl stockpile housed at Jerry’s Records, I stumbled across Party Diktator’s 1992 debut album Worldwide. At that point I never knew such a thing existed, so it was quite the find and made digging through an ass-ton of the worst records known to man well worth the trouble. As you may expect, the songs and recording on Worldwide aren’t as strong as the AmRep single, but it is surprisingly good, considering that it was released a 2 years earlier.

DOWNLOAD:

Party Diktator – “Stand Behind Me”
Party Diktator – “Quiet Line”

Party Diktator – Worldwide LP (45.6mb Zip)

LINKS:

Party Diktator on MySpace
Party Diktator info on I Heart Noise blog

How The Winter Was Passed 7″
Three Little Girls, 1993

Although not as essential as their sole album Rusty, this rarely-heard single from one of Louisville’s indie rock supergroups offers a snapshot of this legendary group in larval form. I was lucky enough to experience Rodan live during their short existence and they left a huge impression on me that’s never been overshadowed by its members’ later bands, like June of 44, The Sonora Pine, Rachel’s, The Shipping News, and Tara Jane O’Neil‘s solo work, even though they went on to acclaim and a prolific catalog of releases. Rodan was often dismissed as a Slint knock off, which was understandable since they were also from Louisville, and they also employed many of the same tools Slint was famous for, like dramatic dynamic shifts in volume and complex song compositions. But where Slint could be harrowing and introspective (Spiderland) or erratic and irreverent (Tweez), Rodan maintained a steadfast composure that was fully realized, beautifully crafted, and in effect, delivered with more force than their Louisville brethren. This may or may not be a good thing depending on how you feel about Slint, but in my opinion, any group that’s able to even approach the sonic terrain Slint mastered is well worth checking out.

DOWNLOAD:

Rodan – “Milk & Melancholy”
Rodan – “Exoskeleton”

Electric Troubles LP
Vinyl Solution/Sub Pop, 1987

Anytime I play this, or Les Thugs’ other smoker, I.A.B.F. (International Anti-Boredom Front), someone inevitably asks “who is this?” At their prime, this French band’s sound contained the full-on speed and energy of hardcore punk blown out to form a massive wall of sound that could be mistaken for My Bloody Valentine‘s Loveless sped up to 45 rpm, contrasting an huge blur of guitar with catchy, echoey, harmonized vocals. Just check out the shocking intro track “Dead Dreams” that starts with a quasi-Native American chant and snaps into a tidal wave of roaring guitar that doesn’t let up until the end of the A-side. And even though they toured the U.S. a number of times, sung in English, had good distribution through reputable labels over the course of 15 years, they never got the recognition or fanbase they deserved. Les Thugs’ later albums are decent, and although they’re driven by a huge guitar sound, they don’t quite have the fullness and instantly memorable early albums, which are absolutely essential.

DOWNLOAD:

Les Thugs – Electric Troubles LP (42.3mb Zip)

LINKS:

Official Les Thugs website
Les Thugs on Sub Pop