expresswaytoyrskull:

Columnage from Maximum Rocknroll #390 (November 2015), which you should pick up if for no other reason than the really great interview with Brazilian post-punk legends As Mercenárias! 

This is a music column, not a “my life as a punk” column, but regardless of that, I’m usually very conscious of only inserting myself into my writing in anecdotal ways, more often than not to connect threads of seemingly-unrelated topics or to briefly put statements and ideas into context, if only because I’m one of those reserved introvert types for whom talking about yourself is generally a completely panic-inducing form of social torture. That’s no small part of the reason why trying to maintain any kind of presence on social media has been a particular struggle for me lately – so much of what we know about what our friends (especially the long-distance ones) and extended community are currently doing, creatively or otherwise, is so closely tied to what we have access to through a screen. I’d started to realize over the past few weeks that attempting to process the constant noise of social media, while not necessarily actively engaging in it myself, was triggering this weird, irrational envy by nature of the fact that it’s easier than ever to compare your own accomplishments to those of the people in your social networks when they’re being presented to you in real-time, as opposed to periodic phone calls or letters passed through the mail over the course of several months.

There’s a reason that this is at all relevant to this month’s introduction, really. Rather than projecting my insecurities about all of the shows I’m not playing because of all of the bands that I’ve been unsuccessfully trying to start onto people whom I truly care about and want to support, I’ve been moderating how often I choose to have information filtered to me (breaking myself of the habit of constantly checking up on things as a nervous reflex), as well as being more intentional about how I choose to engage with a punk community of which I often think of myself as being a below-the-radar participant – specifically, coming to terms with the fact I don’t have to go to three shows a week in an effort to put myself out there and remain visibly involved if it’s just going to make me anxious and I’d rather just stay home to work on my more behind the scenes projects (like, say, writing this column). The downside to all of this is that while the break from all of that social and information overload has helped me get my shit together, it’s also made it more challenging to find out about and keep up with new music. Do you want to tell me about the noise-pop band just starting up in your town that I’d probably be psyched about, or trade mixtapes of female-fronted post-punk deep cuts? Get in touch with me, seriously!

I’m really glad that the pipeline of long-lost subterranean post-punk and untrained mutant pop bands from far-flung towns in the early-to-mid ‘80s whose recorded legacy exists only as home-recorded tapes wrapped in cut-and-paste photocopied covers and small-run, self-released singles hasn’t completely dried up yet. Dutch trio Catastrophe Bizarre put out a cassette in 1982 called Melodien Für Schöne Stunden, which their label Limbabwe has made available for free in a digital capacity on their website, and will be of utmost interest to all of you fellow scholars of gnarled, anarchic art-punk racket. The early records of fellow Dutch rabble-rousers the Ex are one natural point of reference for the staggered female vocals (from guitarist Zip), barbed wire guitar scrape and sharp angles cutting through “Entertainment” and “Furniture”, while the slow-burning, methodical rhythmic repetition and dude-raving-at-the-microphone (courtesy of drummer Mieke) on “Oh Lonesome Me” and “Samstag in Venlo” hit some of the classic targets of the Fall as well. Like so many obscuro-DIY bands of the time, Catastrophe Bizarre held it together long enough after their lone tape surfaced to contribute a handful of songs to a compilation (Limbabwe’s Alle Honden Blaffen LP in 1983) before splintering, although there’s an amusing “where are they now?” mini-documentary produced by Dutch BGTV called No Future Nu (2): Punk in Roermond that you can watch online, where they tracked down the members of the band in 2012 (thirty years after the release of their first recordings!) to reflect upon their punk pasts. I don’t speak Dutch, so most of the dialogue was lost on me, but there’s some killer archival footage of early basement rehearsals that transcend the language barrier. A mandatory download if you find yourself gravitating toward the wing of Crass Records-style anarcho-punk with more of an experimental, free-for-all post-punk messthetic rather than, say, the D-beat/spiky jacket faction. (limbabwe.com/downloads/catastrophe-bizarre)

Maybe it’s a symptom of the notoriously polluted waters of the Cuyahoga River (which has caught on fire multiple times), but Northeast Ohio, and Cleveland in particular, has produced a completely staggering number of flipped-out post-punk and cracked weirdo-pop groups who have perfectly mirrored the post-industrial decay of their urban environment. It’s a cohort that, of course, includes Pere Ubu’s wobby post-punk theatrics, and their drummer Scott Krauss also split his time with Neptune’s Car, who recorded one single in 1980 that was tilted toward a strain of wiry, Midwestern egghead pop that slightly predates the likes of the Embarrassment and Great Plains. The knotted, elliptical guitar work on the A-side’s “Baking Bread” lies somewhere between Television and the more arty side of Mission of Burma, with guitarist/vocalist Doug Morgan (who was in Cleveland’s severely underrated Lou Reed-worshippers the Human Switchboard for a spell) doing his best nervous Tom Verlaine yelp. On the B-side, “Lucky Charms” is power-pop turned inside-out, underpinned by rubbery post-punk bass and some hyperactive guitar rave-ups with the slightest hint of jangle, sort of like the Feelies covering the Nerves. Soul Jazz Records put out this really great compilation LP in their Punk 45 series this year called Extermination Nights in the Sixth City! Cleveland, Ohio: Punk and the Decline of the Midwest 1975-82, including all of the usual suspects that you might expect (the aforementioned Pere Ubu and the Human Switchboard, the Electric Eels, Rocket From the Tombs), and while Neptune’s Car didn’t make the cut, that just means that they can be your nice little Buckeye punk secret for at least a little bit longer.

All of the demos and tapes that I’ve been spending the most time with lately seem to share the same attention to the twin guiding principles of minimalism and angularity laid down long ago by the post-punk advisory committee (UK DIY division). Gauche are a modern day Washington, DC dream team, with members of Priests, Neonates and Flamers (among others) combining forces in a veritable mind-meld of off-kilter, contorted genius. Multiple female voices overlap in roundabout patterns and repeat certain lines as insistent mini-manifestoes on their Get Away With Gauche cassette, from the haunting chant of “I know I can’t survive like this” in “Pay Day,” which dissects the inequity of our modern systems of labor, to the dual declarations of “don’t build it if it can’t fall” and “we pay the price” that punctuate “High Rise” along with some of the most jagged, staccato guitar this side of vintage Gang of Four, who were similarly skilled at knocking out fiery class war anthems that you could still dance to. Evoking riot grrrl within the context of modern female-dominated musical projects is always sort of a risky (and typically lazy) proposition, but reverberations of the incendiary, primitive spark that was central to so many of the bands historically linked with riot grrrl and its aftershocks (think Huggy Bear or DC’s almighty Slant 6) can definitely be heard in the stripped-down punk tension and impassioned calls-and-responses of “Copper Woman” and “Boom Hazard”. Buy it now or regret it later. (g-a-u-c-h-e.bandcamp.com)

New noise from my ex-home state: Austin, Texas’ Polio Club have their gaze fixed firmly toward the rich history of fractured, art school-warped post-punk clatter from three or four decades past. An eight-song cassette simply called Polio Club Tape appeared this summer, with the soft-spoken vocals and low fidelity, bass-propelled minimalism at the center of “Poison the Well” and “Phases and Faces” almost passing for degraded demos from an alternate universe Young Marble Giants with a live drummer. There’s a slightly different take on the early ‘80s Rough Trade-oriented sound on “Mercury Retrograde” with its skittish percussion and shadowy male vocals intersecting with joyously raw female shouts at the forefront, suggesting the shambling kitchen-sink approach to post-punk experimentation that the Raincoats fully embraced in their Odyshape/Moving era, and the droning, low-fidelity sprawl of “Eastern Medicine” is centered on some stripped-down, tom-heavy Mo Tucker drumbeats and dramatic Nico-esque intonations that reimagine Polio Club as the Velvet Underground with the hindsight of all of the moody, literate post-punk bands that ultimately formed in their wake. I’ve spent the last month or so completely bewitched by this tape, and I feel like a lot of its subtle charms defy description here, but needless to say, I’m more excited about this band than I have been about almost anyone else I’ve heard this year (polioclub.bandcamp.com)

Back in my other former stomping grounds of Western Massachusetts, Feeding Tube Records has just reissued Shitheads in the Ditch, the 2014 OSR Tapes release from New York’s all-female cubist noise wranglers Palberta, this time in LP format. Ani, Lily and Nina each rotate between guitar, bass and drums, combining totally loopy vocals (sometimes from a single voice, sometimes with the trio ecstatically shrieking in unison) with scratchy, strangled guitar lines and choppy spin-cycle rhythms, while simultaneously maintaining an almost disorienting sense of spareness and space. The minimalist, atonal no wave lurch of “Bring Your Friends to Dine” and “All the Way” makes me think that these ladies might have a few Scissor Girls and/or Erase Errata records in their collections, but they’re equally likely to careen right into Kleenex-like shambling post-punk territory, sometimes mid-song in the span of just a few seconds (the frenzied “Superstore” being but one example). Much like the Shaggs, Palberta sound like they exist in a completely non-linear orbit of their own creation, but while the Wiggins sisters’ falling apart at the seams avant-pop was the result of a total lack of exposure to the typical conventions of popular music, Palberta simply just don’t give a fuck about the way that things are supposed to be done. Infinitely weirder (and more wonderful) than any current bands full of self-proclaimed “weird” hardcore boys. (palbertapalberta.bandcamp.com)

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Send me letters and music! Analog: Erika Elizabeth / 2545 E. Burnside Street #203 / Portland, OR 97214 / USA; digital: ripitupstartagain@gmail.com; radio shows for your listening enjoyment: expresswaytoyrskull.com

Listen to Erika. She speaks the truth.