Reviews

Negative Glam

Mars Mars Archives Volume 3: N.N. End LP

Collection of live recordings of the No York epitome. It’s live in a barely-produced way, not making favors for the listeners who have to get into both MARS and this recording quality. MARS was the type of No Wave band that focused a lot on guitars. It feels in general as though we were teleported into the body of a guitar—that is how loud it is. Instinctively primitive or thought-out compositions, I cannot tell, but it is as experimental as art, which makes people feel uncomfortable. So heads can be scratched to what the fuck is happening here, but all you need to focus on whether you enjoy it or not. It’s super noisy, chaotic, destructive, sometimes violent, sometimes dreamy guitar music. It’s dense but not fast, as repetitive as meditation while never getting boring. Songs sound like someone just recorded how rusty iron bars were drawn around on a rustic surface while some disturbed person was yelling in the back. Or a car was beaten with baseball bats while people had intercourse in it. But it is a record; therefore you can enjoy all these surreal soundscapes from the safety of your home, or be brave and take it out to anywhere with your portable listening device. The idea is that you are just as free as MARS, who here are collecting some of the extremes of being human and playing it through who knows what. You can study art and have some highbrow opinion of what they do, but really if you like noise and you think life is crazy, then take a try with this record.

Stare Kits Live in NYC 1979 LP

STARE KITS were an enigmatic, art-leaning minimalist punk quartet that operated on the periphery of New York’s late ’70s no wave scene—their first show was actually on a May 1979 bill with the similarly-disposed (and also debuting) UT, two strange and striking flowers simultaneously sprouting from the same overgrown garden plot. It turned out to be an incredibly short-lived project (six whole months and three live performances), with a legacy that has largely survived through the web of what its members would later go onto to do, namely vocalist Angela Jaeger relocating to London and joining DROWNING CRAZE and PIGBAG after STARE KITS’ split and drummer Amy Rigby forming the SHAMS in the late ’80s before a lauded singer/songwriter career. This LP marks the first proper STARE KITS release, with Side A pulled from live tracks recorded at two of the band’s three gigs at the Lower Manhattan post-punk/experimental music hub Tier 3 and rehearsal versions of six of those eight songs making up the flip. The raw, feral energy of the live takes gives them an almost universal edge here—“​If It’s Red It Can’t Be Black” is STARE KITS at their most classically no wave, as Angela’s vocals waver somewhere between spoken, sung, and incanted over a completely tumbling and halting rhythm, while the doomed guitar-and-poetry intensity of “I See Them From My Window” almost prefigures MECCA NORMAL, and standout “Strength Accumulate” strips bass-driven, UK DIY-style post-punk to an absolutely paper-thin extreme. A footnote in the grand scheme of things, to be sure, but still one worth investigating.