The under-appreciated: The Old Noise (2001) and Pyrokinesis (2003) by Jerk With A Bomb

The related bands Black Mountain and the Pink Mountaintops have received a great deal of acclaim from critics and fans alike-- that's fine. I haven't been totally taken with either band, and though I'd never say I disliked what they're doing, each plays too much in the mould of 70s rock and 60s psych for my tastes. However, I have nothing but love for their shared predecessor, Jerk With A Bomb, who released their last album in 2003 before regrouping into their two better-known progeny.

When JWAB passed through Montreal in May of 2001, I had no idea what to expect from them beyond a glowing recommendation from a friend recently transplanted from out West. We crowded into the tiny Barfly along with seemingly every other Victoria/Vancouver expat in the city and I was surprised to discover the band that had come so highly recommended was only a two-piece consisting of one guy with a guitar and another who simultaneously played organ with his left hand and drums with his right hand and feet. I'd seen my share of two-piece bands and generally found them acceptable but lacking--either they played two instruments well but left the absence of a third apparent, or they played more than two instruments at once, got confused, and sacrificed proficiency for the gimmickry of multi-instrumentalism. I wasn't, therefore, expecting to be blown away, which made my astonishment when the band began to play that much more acute. As a two-piece, Jerk With A Bomb was technically proficient enough that they sounded convincingly like three musicians, but more than that, the songs were great. They worked hard through their set, played encores to the wildly applauding crowd, and demurred to insistent demands for more that they were out of songs. A voice from the back of the room shouted, "You can't leave. We'll kill you." Chuckling, they bowed to audience pressure and repeated some of their earlier songs before the crowd would finally let them go home.

Live, JWAB was dense and intense. Their songs fit together perfectly and they played them with awe-inspiring skill, so much so that the whole crowd seemed to be watching carefully with consistent amazement that the band kept pulling it off. There were danceable numbers and the room shook for them, and slow mournful numbers to which we swayed, and thus the audience seemed to be in profound unity with the band. It would have been hard, at that point, to imagine JWAB outside of the setting of a tiny grimy bar filled with adoring fans hanging from every note.

On record, however, JWAB makes different use of space-- their arrangements are looser, sparser, sadder, but while their live performance was humble, in JWAB's recorded work there's a delicious contrast between lurching misery and the nihilistic cockiness of its delivery. This friction certainly gives the records their distinctive character. The debut JWAB LP, Death To False Metal (1999?), has some of this charm and is a thoroughly enjoyable record that borders at moments on pop and stands up well to repeated playing, but the band really grows into itself on their second record, The Old Noise, and their final release, Pyrokinesis, both of which hum with a distinct sound which would not be mistaken for another band.

Jerk With A Bomb got compared to a variety of other artists (Nick Cave, Smog, Calexico, etc.), most of whom they didn't really sound like, but while they share sonic qualities with other dark and rootsy bands, JWAB's sound is particular enough to be almost always recognizable. While there's enough range among the songs to prevent them from being boring or repetitive, they all roll out at a pace between a dirge and a shuffle, sounding funereal at either speed. The instruments are simple guitar and drums and organ with little embellishment beyond some echo and tremolo, and they play along a very particular line between country/folk and rock and roll. The sound is warm and organic and feels very intimate-- The Old Noise sounds convincingly like the band is playing in the listener's living room.

Thus there's a certain frankness as singer Steve McBean gasps, groans, whispers, and wails his lamentations, all of which sound wholly sick with grief, a sadness echoed all throughout the arrangement. The Old Noise is a heavily recorded record, with drums that sound cavernous, an organ like an open wound, and guitar that holds it back like gauze. The chord progressions seal the gloom-- the songs don't just flirt with minor keys, they writhe in them. Even a more upbeat number like "No Amount of Pills" is almost dreamlike in the depth of its helplessness, despair, and surrender. But rather than being overwhelming, there's a delicate balance between the anguish and the danceable that makes The Old Noise infinitely listenable. Every song sounds great, no matter how sad, and between engaging intimacy and fascinating emotional hollowness it practically begs for close attention.

Pyrokinesis adds a perhaps unnecessary third member, whose presence is not so obvious but probably contributes to the incredible murk that colours the record. More carefully recorded, the last JWAB album is louder and clearer and consequently runs between being more distinct and sparse than its predecessor and far muddier when the instruments all blend in at once. A few critics have recognized a "stoner rock" influence in Pyrokinesis, but to me that seems unfair-- so much stoner rock predisposes a stoner listenership by providing repetitive and derivative riffage wound around tired buttrock cliche, but this record remains fresh and true and sad. Even where the stoner sound is most evident, with tracks like "On the Rails," JWAB maintains its originality, toying here and there with elements of the genre rather than simply taking the mantle on and playing by the rules. Though it has several of rave-up numbers, Pyrokinesis seems like a slower album, and is even darker than The Old Noise. The album's key track is the six-minute trudge "Among Thieves," a song almost otherworldly in its despair, heightened by the power of its smudging, suffocating organ and the play between sparsity and density in its sound. It's never quiet-- like the whole album, even its quiet moments are quietly crushing-- but as it moves from the gentle spaces between notes to the huge warm waves of sound at its chorus, the interplay is just delicious. With this song JWAB perfect everything they had been working towards. They're in absolute top form here,-- "Among Thieves" is a perfect expression of sadness, disillusionment, and surrender that's uniformly strong and moving both in its construction and in the way it's played. It's a fantastic song on what is already a fine album.

"Those Hard Wrecks," the second last track on Pyrokinesis, is refreshing as a simple rock song that sounds almost like The Band or the Stones without ever forgetting the inherent gloom of the rest of the record (and the record before). It works here as a palate cleanser and should have been followed by a rich dessert of a final track. However, the title track which ends the album is its only minor misstep-- a short and halfway silly song, it seems unfinished and leaves the record on an uneven note. However, given the strength of everything that comes before it, this seems almost calculated to inspire the listener to put it on from the beginning once more.

I was disappointed to hear that Jerk With A Bomb were nominally breaking up, and doubly disappointed to discover their two offshoots were pursuing sounds that didn't entirely interest me, but it makes sense-- after Pyrokinesis it would have been hard for the band to continue putting out records without retreading material they'd already perfected. As such, Jerk With A Bomb's three records, and particularly their last two, are a complete package. They did very well what they set out to do, and they then moved on to other things. For that, I can only salute them.

Diary entry: Aug 1-3, 2006: America (Part One)

The massive heat of the past couple of days has been reminding me of exactly one year ago, when it was just as hot (if not hotter), and Ang and I, plus our friends Anne and Victoria, drove to Washington DC to see one of the last 3 Sleater-Kinney shows. I originally posted this account of the trip elsewhere, but it seems worth reposting if only in honour of the amazing heat (42c/106f humidex in Montreal yesterday afternoon). It's really long, so I'm posting it in two parts. Here:

----

So Tuesday morning, after too few hours of uneasy slumber, Angie and I wake to the alarm at 6am. We'd been stressed out the previous night trying to help get Greg ready to depart Montreal for indefinite travel and then dealing with a bunch of organizational stuff for the trip. We eat our breakfast and I have a cup of coffee and we take a taxi to the rental place with our huge bag of food, bag of pillows (thanks for the suggestion, Katie!), knapsacks, and sleeping bags. Anne arrives after us and we findout the car we were getting is not the inconspicuous sedan she'd booked, but an electric blue PT-Cruiser. Huh. Victo hasto run an errand for Anne, so she arrives last to find us sitting outside the rental spot in this absurd vehicle. Off we go-- first to drive around the city to run another errand, then slightly lost with the highways, and finally over the Champlain bridge.

Waiting in the huge lines for the border some woman in a minivan then hits our spotless PT-Cruiser at low speed trying to bud in line. She dents and scrapes the back but not too badly. As I'm getting her name and number and license plate info, she said, "I... I just couldn't believe that no one was in that centre lane." I said, "Guess they could tell there wasn't enough room, huh?" Border crossing is easy and then we're in America.

The driving isokay. I do it all myself because Anne hasbeen up all night the night before and she and Victo are sleeping comfortably in the back seats. Then Ang is also sleeping. There are a couple of moments when I am almost sleeping too, but rest stops and exciting US sodas and caustic snacks kept me alert. The farther south we get the hotter it becomes. I didn't realize it's this east-coast heatwave-- I just thought it was always like that down there. When we get out at the Kingston rest stop in NY, or the Walt Whitman rest stop (!) in New Jersey, the heat radiating off of the largely empty parking lot is like nothing else I've ever felt. Interesting set-up, I find myself thinking.

We arrive in DC just after 8pm. Mapquest gets us right to the club. By that point we've noticed that DC seemed kind of different than other places we've been-- the buildings aredifferent, for one, but there are also a lot of them boarded up, and the streets seem to go from looking really nice to really rough back to really nice in the same block or two. I've been warned by a couple of people that DC is a really heavy place and that I should watch my back, but what do you do with advice like that other than to feel a little more nervous than usual? We pull around the club and pass a bunch of enthusiastic fellows wearing fluorescent "SECURE PARKING" t-shirts trying to block the street and wave us into an old warehouse. "If they have to say 'secure' on their t-shirts," says Victo, "does that make you feel that secure?" The presence of "secure parking," however, convinces us that maybe we shouldn't park the shiny blue PT-cruiser on the street, so we see dudes in 9:30 Club t-shirts waving towards a parking lot (fenced in with barbed wire on top) and park there for $10. We ask the friendly lot guy ("You drove from CANADA? Welcome! Welcome!") about parking safely. He says, "In DC?" I say, "Yeah...?" He says, "Well, there isn't any place in DC where you can park safely on the street, so you'd probably want to park over night in a lot. If you can't, well, take your chances. There's a pretty good chance your car'll be left alone, but if not it might just be kids scratching it up or smashing the headlights or the windows." Huh.

We get inside and discover the 9:30 club has a kitchen with food, which we eat with the kind of gusto only possible when you've had nothing but peanut butter sandwiches and rest stop snacks for 14 hours. The Rogers Sisters go on and we watch-- they're better than when I saw them in Montreal, but I'm not that interested. Far more interesting is my looking around the crowd and realizing that as far as I can tell, there are no black people in the room. On our way in, we've seen almost entirely black people, and I recalled hearing that DC is black by a pretty large majority. Why, then, is the show crowd almost entirely white? What is it about this music that determines it wouldn't appeal to black people? I'd wondered that kind of thing before (like when I was at the Loud House with Teacher Mike and he saw a black dude in one of the bands and said, "Hey, cool, for once I'm not the only black guy in the room!") but it never seemed as predominant a consideration as in DC, where we've seen hardly any white people until we get to the venue, at which point we see only whites. I'm feeling distinctly uneasy about this, saying to Ang, "Do you get the feeling like we're a part of something much bigger than we understand, and that it's a bad thing? Don't you figure there's something really wrong with this?"

Gear-tech people are setting up SK's stuff and we've positioned ourselves early to the left, in front of Carrie's amps (Vox! Just like I play! Only not nearly as well!), and the techs are getting everything tuned and set. Then a guy in a 9:30 Club t-shirt who's previously been testing the mics comes on stage and says to the crowd, "How you all doing?" The crowd cheers. He says, "I suspect you're not going to be in such a good mood when I tell you what I have to say. The transformers for the club are completely overheated and overloaded and the fire marshal is here. By his order, the show tonight is cancelled. We need to evacuate the building immediately by the BACK, away from the transformers, because we need to shut down power to the whole block as soon as possible to avoid a possible explosion."

As Greg predicted when I told him this story, I kind of knew this was going to happen. You don't drive 12 hours into the worst heat you've ever experienced to have everything work out. That's not how things work. As we file outside without saying anything, I hear a fellow behind me complaining about how far he came for this. I say, "Man, I came from Montreal for this. 12 hours in a car." He says, "Montreal? That's nothing. I flew in from Calgary." I say, "Whoa, you win. Ouch."

We're dying of heat, we haven't found Angela, the person we were supposed to stay with, nor Mary Timony, who Anne needed to swap a snare stand with, so we get into the car, turn the air conditioning on, and sit a second in silence.

"That's it," said Victo. "Something really, really good had better happen. Things don't get this unlucky without something good happening. Something has to happen."

...continued in next post.

Diary entry: Aug 1-3, 2006: America (Part Two)

We sit in the air-conditioned car a while as the parking lot empties and debate what we could do next. Victo wants to go to NYC the next night even the show's been sold out for months. She says we might be able to get tickets on the street for some insane markup. I'm not sure I can pay for that. She says she'll loan me the money but I'm still uncertain, more about whether it's worth the effort to forestall defeat after driving 12 hours for nothing. We get out of the car.

Though Victo has been talking over cel with Angela (guitarist of DC band Partyline; Anne and Victo opened for them a week or two ago) who we're supposed to stay with, we haven't actually met up with her yet. We file out to the area near the front of the club (though the street in front is full of firetrucks and fire marshal people directing people away) and take a seat on a curb, four of us in a row, chins in hands, looking as dejected as we feel. We see Ian MacKaye and Guy Piccioto walk by, also looking unimpressed with the situation. Then a cheery looking fellow rolls up on a bicycle.

"Hey guys," he says, "What's going on with the show? Is it over? What's with all the firetrucks?"

Victo looks up and says, "Jerry?" At this point I realize that I've seen this guy's band before-- he's in French Toast with James Canty and I recall their show at Casa in 2002 descending into an all-out dance party which they extended by improvising jams when they ran out of songs: a fine time. I find out around about 30 hours later that he was also the unofficial fifth member of Fugazi. Cool. French Toast had played earlier this winter but I skipped the show for dumb reasons-- however, Victo and Anne's band opened for them and put them up that evening. Jerry says, "Victoria?! What are you doing here?"

We're introduced. Victo tells our sad story and Jerry agrees that this is, indeed, a stone-cold bummer. He also explains that DC's built in a swamp, which guarantees that even in the evening, the crushing summer humidity never breaks ("And the winters suck too, but you should see this place in the spring and fall!" he assures us). We're noticing this. It's 11pm and it's still hotter than I've been all year. But more importantly, when Victo tells Jerry that we're considering NYC (which I, secretly, am not), he says, "Listen. Give me your cel phone numbers. I don't want to guarantee you anything at all, but I'd like to see if I can try to do something for you. I've known the band for years and years and they're great people, so I'd like to find out if there's any chance at all they could maybe put you on the guest list for the New York show. It's a shame that you'd come all this way and not even see them." We are incredibly grateful for this, but it doesn't sound like the kind of thing that'd work out. Jerry heads off and we're fully appreciative of him, but we're feeling pretty bummed.

Finally we meet Angela, who is, frankly, kind of bizarre, but in a very friendly and welcoming way. We cram her into the back seat with Anne and Victo and head back to her apartment, about five or six blocks away. It's an interesting area, and I can't get a grasp on it. There are a lot of houses and apartments that look nicely-maintained, but as I look more carefully I realize there are also a lot that are boarded up or totally overgrown and falling down. I'm always a little on edge when I'm in big US cities and I'm never sure if that's justified or not-- we talked this over in the car later and concluded that we're just not used to being places where guns may be a part of the equation, so we assume there are guns everywhere and freak out accordingly. The area looks okay, more or less, though-- there are some friendly looking folks out walking dogs and generally not seeming frightening, so I figure I'm overreacting.

We go into Angela's apartment building and I'm desperate for the relief of air conditioning. So when she opens her door and we discover her apartment's about 10 degrees hotter than outside, I'm perplexed to the point that my brain almost shuts down from the confusion. Doesn't everyone in an absurdly hot climate live in air conditioning? Even the rougher looking houses on the street all seemed to have air conditioners in the windows. Angela, it turns out, has an air conditioner after all-- it's just cheap and doesn't work, but in honour of helping it try, she's shut all the windows (or they may be sealed-- we're not sure). She doesn't have ANY OTHER FANS. All she's got is one air conditioner dribbling lukewarm air that is indeed colder than the air in her 4-room apartment, but then most things would be.

We decide to go to the Black Cat club to have something to do, but when we get there our mood does not improve, particularly since some jerk figures it's funny to put all of Dig Me Out on the jukebox. Angela's off talking to friends and the four of us are glumly staring at the wall, so we decide to head back. Walking back up some large street that looks like it'd be pretty safe during the daytime, we're unsure of how safe we actually are. A family of six or seven is making their way towards us pushing shopping carts and carrying bags full of belongings-- my thought is they're homeless, but Ang figures since it's the 1st, they're moving (at 1:30am). This further drives home the fact that our problems are indeed of the first-world variety: driving 13 hours to go to a concert that gets canceled seems a ridiculous concern compared to the apparent lots of some people we're seeing on the street.

There are a lot of dudes just kind of hanging around and staring what feels like aggressively and I'm not sure whether this should or shouldn't be unsettling. People seem to just hang around much more in the states than in Montreal-- it's rare to walk around a major intersection at home and see five or ten or fifteen dudes just leaning against buildings, utility posts, or mailboxes, watching people go by. It might not be threatening at all to get stared down by some of these guys, but I'm just not sure. We go to a 7-11 that's entirely out of bottled water and are walking towards Angela's place when we pass a homeless dude who's drunkenly yelling, "I'm half white! I'm not dangerous." This is half-directed at us, but the guy's kind of ranting, so Ang and Victo and Anne walk past him. As I pass him he says something to me, so I respond by asking him how he's doing. He says, "I'm homeless, I'm harmless, and you're the first person who's talked to me all day." I say, "I'm real sorry to hear that, man." He says, "I'm half white." I say, "Doesn't matter what colour you are, so long as you're a decent person." He extends his hand and we shake. "You're right. You're a nice guy. It's real nice of you to talk to me," he says. "My name's Pierre. I'm a person." He pulls out his state ID and shows me. "See," he says, "I'm just a guy. How come your friends all just walked by me?" I said, "I don't think they thought you were talking to them." He says, "That's very rude, just walk by someone like that. You're a good person, but they aren't." He's starting to be more aggressive. I say, "Hey, they're good people. We've had a real long day and things aren't going very well for us." Pierre is annoyed at this and getting more aggressive about why people might not respond to him. I try again to explain that we've had a rough day and he says, "Your day's rough? I'm homeless!" which we concede is, by all means, a great deal rougher than we've had it. Pierre starts demanding to know why Ang and Anne and Victo didn't talk to him and they say they're sorry, tired, etc. So he starts demanding that each of us give him fifty cents. I dig in my pocket and give him what little change than I have, as does everyone, just hoping we can walk away before he gets more aggressive than he's becoming. We don't have much money between us and he's not impressed with his. He starts making comments about "rating" the kindness of each person, all the while telling me, "Not you, you're a nice guy, but these people...", which makes none of us comfortable. The whole scene is bizarre. We really just want to get back to where we know where we are.

Pierre lets us go, muttering that we make him ashamed to be half-white, and we turn down the street where we're heading to discover that the smoke we've been smelling the last couple of minutes is a car on fire in the middle of the street at the end of the block. There's a group of unfriendly-looking toughs around it, tending to it somehow. Anne and Victo begin saying, "We'd better go check that our car's okay," to which I reply, "No way, man. Our car's three blocks away and around that corner. It's fine." They say, "Let's just go check." I say, "Those dudes down there don't look very welcoming and whatever the deal with the car is, whether they're starting it or putting it out, they've got it under control. They don't need our help." Ang agrees with me, and Victo and Anne decide maybe we're right, so we let ourselves back into Angela's strange apartment, the sparse decor of which has been chosen out of the absolute ugliest of Salvation Army cast-offs. There are only two chairs in the apartment and it's the least welcoming home I've ever seen. Yet it's a place to stay, generously offered by someone who's nearly a stranger, and I'm sure glad we're not sleeping in the car.

Inside, it's no cooler than it was. We're spreading sleeping bags out on small available area of the floor to give us something to lie on and lie down as Angela arrives home. She's sleeping in her bedroom with the window sealed, no fan, nothing. I can't believe it. It's very giving of her not to stick us in there, but it's not that much cooler where we are. Somehow I manage to fall asleep-- having been awake since 6am on three hours sleep helps, but within an hour I wake up, absolutely certain I'm about to throw up. There are streams of sweat all over me and I've been asleep-- I"ve never been this hot in my life. I get up and stand in front of the air conditioner, which allows me to get a full lungful of cooler air, but I still feel sick. Finally I stagger through Angela's room into the bathroom, where my body decides that maybe I don't need to puke after all. I stagger back into the room where we're sleeping, lie down, and am immediately on the edge of vomiting again. I consider my options: garbage pail in our room, the smell of which would make sleep impossible for all. Bathroom, waking Angela-- faux pas. Kitchen sink: might not be able to wash it down. These thoughts do not temper my nausea. I stand in front of the air conditioner again considering it and see that Ang's awake. I tell her I'm sick and she gives me a bottle of water that's remained hot from being in the car. It makes me feel a little better, pushes back the lump of bile-infused matter that's rising in my esophagus, but doesn't take the nausea away. I say, dramatically "This is about the worst night I've ever had." She says, "Me too." I don't say it, but all I want to do is leave, get in the car, drive to a cheap motel with air conditioning, and shovel the four of us into one room-- except I don't feel safe enough outside to walk to the car with all our knapsacks and sleeping bags and pillows. There's a police helicopter circling around and around above us, spotlight trained all over, and it doesn't make me feel any safer. It's the strangest feeling of being trapped, one that I realize at the time i was probably overstating, but nonetheless I don't't feel good choosing between fear and advanced discomfort. Finally I manage to fall asleep and miraculously sleep until after eight.

After Angela leaves in the morning (she is truly kind, after all, and she's been as helpful as she could), we unanimously decide to leave DC forever as soon as we can. Turns out we all had the motel idea; we all didn't say it both for fear of offending Angela, and fear of going outside to where hard-looking dudes were setting cars on fire. We end up arguing over whether or not we should immediately try to get money back for our tickets. I say we should wait until we're home, but Anne wants to work it out while we're there. Everybody snaps at one another, fuelled by hunger, exhaustion, crankiness, and anxiety. Finally we go out for breakfast and when we have food in us we start to feel a little better. We agree that the best thing is to go straight home to Montreal, cut our losses, not mess around with NYC, and chalk it up to an experience we can learn from.

[incidentally, three months later I notice that Partyline has filmed portions of a video in the room where we slept (the parts where they seem to be playing in a house). All of the musical equipment visible was in place when we stayed there, leaving us only a tiny portion of floor in front of it all. That's no complaint-- Angela not only gave us a place to sleep, but offered us the room with the air conditioner in it, which makes her damned kind in my book. But it did make the accommodations a little cramped.]

We finish our breakfasts and wait until noon in the sweet coffee shop that's playing some sort of classic soul radio station (I could stay there for a long ass time), hit up a drugstore so Ang can get some migraine medication we don't have at home and I can get some hard-to-find pomade, and roll over to the 9:30 club, where we do, in fact, get our ticket money back. Huh. We get in the car and away we go, on the road, heading home. We're feeling a lot better with full bellies and the knowledge we'll be home soon enough.

Just past our first rest stop (we're making pretty sweet time), my cel rings. I pick it up (I NEVER do this while i'm driving, and felt bad, but I wanted to make sure we got it). It's Jerry. He says, "Where are you guys? What's the plan?" I say, "Were somewhere in Maryland and we're heading back to Montreal." He says, "You don't feel like risking it in NYC?" I say, "Well, we didn't know what the odds were, and i have to work tomorrow afternoon, plus we have to have the car back by seven."

Jerry says, "Because I just got off the phone with Carrie, and it actually looks pretty good for New York." I said, "What? Really?" He says, "Yeah, she really wants to help you guys, but she's not sure if she can. Chances are pretty good, but it's a matter of whether she can add four extras to their guest list. They filled it up a long time ago so she needs to get in touch with club and find out whether this will mess with capacity, but she's going to try. Does that change your mind at all?" I say, "There's a good chance of that. Can I ask the car?" He says, "Sure, call me back." Two minutes later we call back and tell him we're going to New York. He says, "What about getting back tomorrow?" We say, "We'll drive all night, it's fine." We figure that if we get there at 8:00 and we're not on the list, it'll only take us until 4am to get home. He says he should know even within a couple of hours, so we could be home earlier than that if it doesn't work out. On we go.

I should mention I'm doing all the driving because Anne doesn't like to drive and I'm more comfortable in urban areas. Plus I've slept better than anyone else, miraculously. We arrive in NYC via the Holland Tunnel in rush hour-- we're right downtown, following instructions Ang's copied off of Mapquest, in the most intense traffid I've ever seen. Stuck at an intersection, we see three plainclothes security dudes holding plastic handcuffs chasing another guy out of some brand-flagship store through four lanes of traffic. They tag him in a gas station, but he somehow gets away, and they're all running, only in the heat they seem only capable of a slow jog. It's unreal: they look like they're play-chasing him or reliving a scene from memory in slow-motion. We turn the corner, make another couple of turns, jockeying for position with cabbies who make Montreal taxis look like paragons of etiquette, find the club, and finally locate a place to stop behind it. We still haven't heard from Jerry, so Victo calls him. We listen to the conversation-- it starts out kind of sad and uncertain, and she's asking if he thinks we should pay to park the car if we're not sure we'll be able to get in. Halfway through her mood lifts and suddenly she's cheery, and she ends the conversation by saying that he's doing the nicest thing anyone's done for her all year. Turns out halfway through the conversation, James, Jerry's bandmate, got a text message from Carrie saying, "You're on-- 4 peeps on list!" We don't know this yet, but everyone in the car is yelling at the phone, saying, "Thank you Jerry for whatever it is Victoria's so happy about!"

Following this we find an great parking spot, leave the car, find an auxiliary cable for Victo's ipod that allows her to connect it to the car stereo (which she's been coveting for the entire trip, and pleases her greatly), and head through Tompkins Square Park to Kate's Joint, this tremendous vegetarian diner that Philippe had told me about ages back, where I get a non-turkey club sandwich and Ang gets fried unchicken, mashed potatoes, and gravy. It's fantastic.

We walk to the venue, get to go to the head of a huge long line, and go directly to the front left of the stage in front of Carrie's amps. We could have done without the Rogers Sisters again, and the wait for SK is long, but when they come on stage it's all amazing. They open with "Start Together" and the whole floor is bouncing up and down with the crowd. We're in front of the PA, so we hear the band largely from being directly in front of the equipment, and I realize from our proximity to Carrie's amps that she's responsible for all of my favourite guitar lines in all my favourite songs. I'm in awe of her ability-- she takes risks with open strings and notes just on the edge of being in key that she pulls off masterfully. Her playing has the effortless perfect expression of Mike Watt's bass playing or Richard Lloyd when I saw him with Rocket From the Tombs. It's phenomenal. They're dying on stage with the heat and we are too-- Carrie says at one point that the whole room is like a sauna minus the flipflops and strange men in towels. It only gets hotter-- I'm wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt that I'm progressively unbuttoning and i notice toward the end that the three pieces of paper in the breast pocket have turned to pulp from my sweat. I'm dizzy and keep thinking that I have to be able to get us out of NYC and should take it easy, but the show is too damned good-- they play every single song I want to hear except for "The End of You," which I can see is actually listed on the set list for their 9-song encore, but they leave out, assumedly because it's just too fucking hot. Carrie looks like she's lost about ten pounds by the end, and it's not like she's got a lot to lose to begin with. There's an atmosphere of ecstasy in the crowd-- the spontaneous handclaps in the choruus of "Turn It On" are mindblowing and I feel high with the music and the insanity of the previous two days, thinking back to Victo saying that something good had to happen and thinking, "did it ever."

We stagger outside, and my legs and feet are cramped to the point of limping from standing for four hours. At a food market I get a bottle of "vitamin water" with caffeine, a can of Rock Star "energy drink," and a bottle of water. For some reason I don't drink the water, but gulp back the caffeine-and-flavour water and the horrible "energy drink," which is just dumb, a decision that I'll regret when I'm throwing up at dawn into a ditch behind an 18-wheeler at a Robert-Frost-picturesque rest stop in northern new york (poor diet, exhaustion, and carsick from moving to the back seat when Anne was driving). We follow mapquest directions given to us over the phone by Kate who used to live in Montreal, get a little lost, but make it out of the NYC, get significantly more lost but eventually also make it out of New Jersey. I cede the wheel to Anne sometime between four and five when I'm seeing trails off of every lit in front of me. At 8am, we arrive back in Montreal, slurring our words and staggering tired, exactly 48 hours after we left. Whoa.

Happy to be home to our cat and our lovely, welcoming house, Ang and I fall asleep around nine. The end.

Not a music post, but...

I'll be making more music posts soon, but in the interim I should mention that my dear, old friend Alex, whose idea it was for me to keep a blog of music writing in the first place, will be appearing as a contestant on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire this Friday night, July 27th. I'm not sure if they tape these things well in advance or whether they play them the evening of their taping, but either way, he'll be in the studio on Friday and, being a fine gentleman and talented writer, I encourage you to wish him well at that time. Winning on a game show is, as he put it, the only effective way of saving for retirement these days. Good luck, Alex!

Appreciation: Nightmare Scenario LP by the New Bomb Turks (2000)

(Photo by the venerable Shawn Scallen, from his website)

Between 1992 and 2000, Columbus Ohio’s the New Bomb Turks were the best punk rock band in the world. Fortifying the purest, most energetic rock and roll with a combination of smirking attitude and literate wit (the group members met in the English department of Ohio State University), they were more fun than hardcore, raged harder than any garage-band, and their wry wit made the pedantry of political punkers seem puerile.

The Turks’ 2000 release Nightmare Scenario is not their best record—that honour belongs easily to their first LP Destroy-Oh-Boy!!, famously described by MRR’s late Tim Yohanan as the perfect blend of 50s rock and roll, 60s garage, 70s punk, and 80s hardcore. Their second LP (Information Highway Revisited) and first singles collection (Pissin’ Out the Poison) are also very strong contenders for best-record status. But in many ways, Nightmare Scenario is their most interesting album.

The receipt I still have says I bought Nightmare Scenario on April 28th, 2000, the week it was released. I had followed the Turks religiously from the first time I saw them in spring of 1996 at Oliver’s Pub in Ottawa. It was my last year of high school and I’d bought Information Highway Revisited several months before during a visit to Montreal, where I knew I’d be moving at the end of school. I was restless to start the real life I’d been waiting my entire adolescence for and that record only further whet my appetite for growing up: it seemed to me at 18 like a very adult record, full of brash swagger, earnest confidence, and sidelong cleverness that sounded like what I wanted out of being older.

Shortly thereafter my pal Luke, who sat next to me in history class (and now fronts the mighty and very much Turks-influenced garage combo the Million Dollar Marxists), taped me Destroy-Oh-Boy!!, and that album’s wit and delivery instantly marked my attitude toward both rock and roll and growing up. On the day at the end of the summer that I moved into my first apartment and prepared to start university and adulthood, I celebrated by unwrapping a copy of the Turks’ latest LP Scared Straight, a record which anticipated many of the mixed feelings I’d soon encounter about getting older, being alone, and facing down the passage of time. Around then I began to look at the Turks as somehow channelling messages from my future. The more I listened to Scared Straight, the more I wondered how lyricist Eric Davidson could have guessed so much of what was on my mind. When At Rope’s End came out in 1998, I bought it on the day it was released (as I had its processor), arriving at the record store before they could even unpack the records from the box in which they’d been shipped. It, too, admirably caught the spirit of my day-to-day being, the uneasy comfort and experimentation of getting through school and coming into one’s self. I couldn’t wait for the band to tour, and once they’d been through on tour I couldn’t wait for their next record to drop—they were my band, and every record or frantic, fiery live show seemed to me to explain so many things or, at least, remind me that I wasn’t alone in the face of those things that couldn’t be explained.

At the beginning of the summer of 2000, I finished school and moved temporarily into an empty room in a friend’s downtown apartment left vacant for the season. It wasn’t my place and no part of it felt like home: experience has since taught me that salmon-pink décor rarely foreshadows the coming of the best of times. On the day of my last class of university, I savoured my achievement for a scant four hours before I had to show up to my job as a dishwasher/busboy at a busy dessert café. The dreams I had of instant achievement and a clear path to the future—to which I’d stupidly held on so long—seemed amputated and were remembered only as phantom pains. Very soon I would be without an apartment in a record year for housing shortage, stymied in my desperate search for a better job, and beginning the spiral of realizing my future offered nothing me in particular.

But first, I got the new Turks record—featuring ex-Gaunt drummer Sam Brown replacing Bill Randt who apparently left to get his MA and become a teacher. The album cover foretold the mood of the record—a blurry, largely dark image in black, orange, and purple of the band silhouetted by what looks like a massive column of flame on a night street. The design seemed sombre and intense, but had nothing on the music itself. Beginning with angry cymbals and insistent 16th-note bassdrum kicks that lead into the revving of Jim Weber’s jet-engine guitar, the record floors it from the first track with the breakneck-velocity rock and roll of “Point A to Point Blank.” The sheer power of the opening of this record brings to mind, more recently, the exhilirating thrust of "Colour Removal," the opening of Fucked Up's Epics In Minutes LP-- a power unsurprising in a band as as heavy Fucked Up, but startling in a band like the Turks, whom most in 2000 were expecting would follow the lucrative hip-swinging script of garage rock. Recorded almost entirely in the red (its sonic details blurred in a wash of noise that mirrors the bleak high-contrast image on the cover) and significantly louder than any previous Turks release, the album sounds destructive, and by no means in production alone. “Point A to Point Blank” is a torrent of contempt for garage-rock culture (then heading towards its MC5-worshipping apex, though still a couple of years ahead of trucker-hats), writing off that core group among the band’s fans as “playing dress-up white trash” with “all the groove and move of a full-up parking lot.”

What’s striking about that opening track, however, is that it doesn’t strut or boast in its ridicule of garage-rock culture—instead, it lunges straight into existential scorn, damning songs about “hearts done wrong” as meaningless in the face of spiralling panic and reminding the listener that “Cute Satan tattoos only hold up for so long” when “The only thing that lasts for me / dies every day.” Gone, suddenly, is the wink-nudge cynicism of previous records, or the good-time party rock of the band’s earliest releases. The speed and desperation of Nightmare Scenario sound reckless, drunk, and terrified, its music the sound of someone trying frantically to outrun the inevitable. The ominous choice of “better dread than dead” in the opening track’s chorus sums up the nausea underlining the entire record.

That’s not to say that there aren’t slower tracks, or that every song on the record is serious—they aren’t all, but even among those not sick with dread there’s an attitude of defeated pessimism very different from the cynical joshing I’d come to expect from previous Turks records. “Spanish Fly By Night,” the album’s silliest throw-away track, still sounds unsettled and ill-at-ease. Most garage-rock bands brag of being “born to lose” as though every one of them is shouldering some share of Johnny Thunders’ spiritual burden, but here even that stock pose is enriched with the reality of being horrified at the purposelessness of life. The entire world-view of the album is embodied in its title: this is all about the nightmare scenario of there being no meaning or pleasure in being alive.

The most memorable songs are the ones that confront the awful dread head-on, like “The Roof” which offers that “what comes natural to us” is “sucking up car exhaust.” Sure, the song suggests, you can “[kill] time by climbing up the roof” when you’re feeling bad, you can throw bottles if you like, but don’t ever forget that “you can look north, south, east, or west and never see anything.” Again, the thought of suicide appears: “We stand there daring to jump off, but stand still anyway” in the “late summer wind.”

Bunched together at the end of the record, the last five tracks mount to an apex of hopelessness. From “The Roof” on, the album forgets any subject it brought up after the first track and returns again to playing bleak music about feeling useless and devoid of meaning. “Your Beaten Heart” spits bile at a second-person “you” that given the rest of the lyrics on the record can only be self-directed—noting empty eyes, and lamenting the act of “gasping for breath fighting old despair” before finally demanding, “Do you even know your name anymore?” In “Turning Tricks,” Davidson admits that he can easily be both whore and pimp, but will in either case just “piss the money away.” Yet, “There’s no apology in this tramp’s pants,” even as he compares himself to both Judas and Mary Magdalene.

It’s the last two songs, “Wine and Depression” and “Quarter to Four,” though, that nail the lid down on the coffin the rest of the record has been preparing for hope, and lower it into the ground. “Wine and Depression” shakes with maracas and a head-swinging beat but celebrates “self-inflicted pain” as it admits that whatever fun a drunken stupor might offer will pass soon enough, leaving you alone to face the insurmountable foe of empty sadness that seems only to make you more aware of how little you matter. As “Quarter to Four” closes the record, it does so at the same surging velocity as the album’s highest points, elegizing “another wasted night” in an anthemic chorus that weeps, “I want to say something, I’ve got nothing to say. Close my eyes, don’t want to see the sun coming up on my history.” Summing up the entire thrust of the album so far, Davidson shrugs, “Resignation is bliss,” before confessing, “I never brake when I hit the skids on a wasted night.” The futility of any attempt to dull the pain is trumped by the impossibility—for whatever reason—of suicide, though. “We can close our eyes and let our hands pretend that we can kill this life,” says Davidson, “But for now let’s curl into this wasted night.”

Only at the last line of the record did I get, on first listen, a sense of what the reason behind it all was: in the most oblique reference, Davidson says, “Living by night in a lonely place, my father was Nicholas Ray.” Ray was the director Rebel Without A Cause among other classics of lost adolescence (notably here, They Live By Night and In A Lonely Place), but in trying to decipher the meaning of that I noticed the line at the bottom of the liner notes dedicating the record to Joseph A. Davidson, with a date of death in late summer of 1999, followed by, “Thanks Dad. –E.D.”

The dread foretold in the record caught up with me soon after and carried through as I found a new apartment, a better job, and came to realize that my problems weren’t just where I lived or worked but far deeper and more difficult to rectify. True to its promise, as much as I listened to Nightmare Scenario over those months, it did nothing to make me feel better. If anything, it reminded me that however bad I was feeling, I could only feel worse, and eventually would. At the centre of what years later I would look back on as “the crisis,” I saw the Turks play at the Jailhouse Rock café, which was my favourite venue to see them in. The show was typically incendiary and fun, with Davidson goading the audience, mocking, hugging, kissing, and sweating on whomever he picked out between charging manic back and forth in front of the band, off and on the stage. He looked like he was having a great time and I was glad, despite the fact that outside of that night’s show I wasn’t having much of a good time myself. After they finished their set, I stopped Davidson as I always did after shows to say thanks and remind them to come back to play my town again soon.

I said my usual bit as I shook his hand, but at the end of it, added, “I just want you to know how sorry I am to hear about your father.” Davidson, who was sweaty and exhausted and had previously looked distracted, looked startled, then took my hand with both of his and looked into my eyes with an expression of seriousness.

“Thank you for saying that,” he said. “It was really hard and it still is, every day.”

Never sure how handle the subject of death, I edged around asking how his father had
gone.

“Multiple sclerosis,” he said sadly, still shaking my hand and staring intently at me. “It had been downhill for years and years and it just got harder and harder. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

Maybe that explains the record’s plunge into the darkest of subject matter, or maybe it’s just one of a number of factors. What’s strangest about Nightmare Scenario, though, is that beyond all of its thematic darkness and claustrophobic noise, it’s a great rock and roll record that’s fiercely played and tight as hell. It demands to be played as loud as you can manage it and it’s easy to dance to, unless your goal is dancing to forget. The Turks released one final LP followed by a third singles collection following this one, but neither was up to their previously high standards. How could they have been? At the twilight of their career, Nightmare Scenario set a high-water mark for existential-crises-expressed-in-garage rock not reached again until 2005 with Max Danger’s tracks on the Deadly Snakes beautiful swan-song LP Porcella and finished the arc from the boastful conceit of youth to the hesitation and dread of beginning to grow up.