Reviews

Spacecase

100 Flowers Fascist Groove Thang / FGT RMX 7″

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.

Christopher Alan Durham Peacetime Consumer 7″

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.

Optic Sink A Face in the Crowd / Landscape Shift 7″

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.

Red Lights Red Lights 12″

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.

Red Mass A Boy and His Robot EP

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.

Rubber Blanket Our Album LP

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.

V/A The Happy Squid Sampler EP reissue

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.

Walter Daniels and the Hungry Hearts Out at Dusk / Where’s the Pain Point 7″

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.