Appreciation: "When The Innocent Die" by Anti-Cimex (1982)

(download the song here while it lasts)

There are some fans of thrash and hardcore that positively worship at the altar of Sweden's Anti-Cimex. I'm not really one of them-- as far as hard, fast music goes, my only true allegiance is always and forever to the first two Bad Brains records. By and large I never had great interest in the nails-on-blackboard treble attack of Scandinavian thrash monsters like Anti-Cimex, Mob-47, or Terveet Kädet. At one point I found the speed of Swede/Finn thrash, coupled with its ultra-low production sound, totally overwhelming. I could hardly find the drums, but when I could make them out I couldn't keep up with them, particularly with the paper-shredder din of the cymbals and the rest of the instruments raging around them.

Times change, however, and for some reason the older I get the more sense this music makes to me. Lord knows why that should be so-- by all assumptions this should be the soundtrack to demented, spike-haired, angel-dusted youth-- but I enjoy it now in a way I never used to. Not all the time, but as a treat once in a while. As the esteemed Simon Harvey once said of S.O.A.'s No Policy 7", it's like double-chocolate cake: delectable, but you couldn't possibly eat it every day (Simon later reported a period of listening almost exclusively to d-beat thrash, during which he said he was afraid that he had cauterized his sense of taste and would be unable to listen to "actual music" ever again. These fears were ungrounded-- he's been lately obsessed with the Pipettes and Camera Obscura [the Scottish pop band, not the San Diego emo band]).

Thus I recently downloaded copies of Anti-Cimex's legendary and hard-to-find Raped Ass and Victims of a Bomb Raid 7" EPs and discovered myself with some surprise truly savouring their blistering speed and sore-throat barking. And I was reminded that deep inside I've always had great affection for Raped Ass's opening track, "When The Innocent Die." It is, of course, textbook Scandinavian d-beat of absurd speed and gruelling production, and if you're not listening to it carefully enough you may mistake it for pure white noise. However, what thrills me to no end about this track of the most stripped-down Scandi-thrash is that 50% of its two minutes are composed of a shrill, brilliant, and utterly simple guitar solo. I decided this afternoon to count how many bars of the song the solo actually comprised before stopping at 16 and realizing that it is, in fact, a minute long and comprises half the song's entirety.

Initially it struck me funny that as a band as defiantly and perhaps unlistenably "hardcore" (in several senses of the term) would brandish such an absurdly long solo, that most disdained product of rock stars. But after several listens I got it, and thus realized why the song had always stuck out in my memory: the first half of the song is shrill, murky, and pummeling, but the guitar solo, composed primarily of simply repeated single notes that don't move around the neck much, cuts through all the mangled noise that precedes it, providing a guiding point that leads you over the bristling wreck of the rest of the song. It's a light in fog, a howl in the night, a knife through the dough. In the blinding focus of the guitar line, the rest of the song seems to rage and rumble away in the background, pounding now the subconscious and seeming less like a blasting wind as heavy, fluid wave. It makes perfect sense to me now.

Late-Summer Picks

It's been a busy time of late-- I'm a full time college teacher all of a sudden and have devoted most of my waking energy to coming to terms with that. So in lieu of a post of any significance, let me tell you what I've been enjoying over the last week or so:

Various - London is the Place For Me Trinidadian Calypso in London, 1950-1956 (Vols. 1 & 2). Phenomenal Calypso compilations with a fine variety of sounds and rhythms, really showcasing the genre's lyrical wit and depth alongside its totally hip-swinging best rhythms. Essential.

Sneaky Pinks - s/t EP. Muddy, snotty, catchy, and dumb as shit, there's more fun in the four and a half total minutes of this record than in the rest of everything I've listened to this summer. "Life Stupid, I Stupid" ably sums up the total achievement of recent months in a minute and ten seconds and the perfect couplet, "I want a blowjob / I want a hot dog."

Mary Weiss & Reigning Sound - Dangerous Game. Remember how amazing the Detroit Cobras were when their first record came out, how breathtaking it was to hear smoky girl-group vocals driven by grimy garage punk? Then remember how, no matter how good that first record was and remains, their later releases just didn't measure up, and you started to realize that they were basically just a really, really good cover band with a live set that was spotty at best? I can't have been alone in those feelings, because someone finally had the bright idea of pairing Mary Weiss of the Shangri-Las (they of "Leader of the Pack" fame) with Reigning Sound, latest project by Greg Cartwright (he of the Oblivians, the second best garage punk band of the 1990s) and having them perform originals, thereby instantly and thunderously rendering the Detroit Cobras obsolete.

"Oh! Sombra!" by Electrelane. I'm a perennial Electrelane listener and play at least one of their records on a weekly basis. They're easily one of the best bands in the world right now and their records are brilliant. "Oh! Sombra!", off of their second LP (and redone on their B-Sides/Rarities disc) however, is something above and beyond everything else they've done. Absolutely spine-tingling and transcendent, it's a human cry of awe, sadness, and vulnerability. Seriously. Also: entirely in Spanish.

Demon's Claws - Satan's Little Pet Pig. I saw this band at what might have been its first show several years ago and was put off by what was, at the time, their uninspired Gun Club impersonation. I didn't see them again and didn't pay any attention to them until the wise young Shaun Anderson insisted I check out their new record, which it turns out is the best piece of country-blues based garage rock to come out of Montreal since the era of It Came From Canada... comps. "Hunting on 49" stands out as the best track, a sad and soulful wail-n-stomp number that's actually sincere. I'll be seeing this band live soon, I hope.

The Dream Syndicate - The Days of Wine and Roses. I avoided this band for years due to its unfair inclusion under the "Paisley Underground" moniker, but I'm glad I've finally found them. Mixing protopunk sounds with American Roots melodies, this record seems tailor-made for me. The 7+ minute title track album-closer sounds like "I Hear Her Call My Name" by the Velvet Underground folded into "Tombstone Blues" by Bob Dylan, and how could there be anything wrong with that?

That isn't all I've been listening to, but that's what's worth mentioning most just now. There'll be more later.

Hey, Montreal--

This weekend two of my favourite bands going will be playing shows back to back!

This Saturday evening, August 25th, Allston MA's mighty situationist bluegrass ensemble Bread & Roses will be playing a house show in Point St Charles (Metro Charlevoix) at 1981 Wellington Street. This is the first time they've played in Montreal since October of 2004, when my band (The Improved Binoculars, defunct) played our first show opening for them only to be shortly thereafter blown off stage by their performance at the back of the room. Those who've been following this blog for a while will recall my beaming review of a B&R show in Massachusetts back in the spring. If that show was any indication, the band is in fit and fighting form and will play a hell of a show on Saturday. Two local hardcore bands (?... don't ask me. Joan grabbed the show out from under me and set up the bill herself, saving me a whole lot of trouble) will open. Show starts 7pm sharp and costs a paltry five bucks.


The very next night, LA's danceable old school hardcore sensations Mika Miko will be playing at the Casa Del Popolo with local favourites Thundrah (at the beginning of their Eastern Canada tour), supporting the interminable hippie noise of USAISAMONSTER (mercifully, I believe, going on last). I glowed with joy over their debut LP on Kill Rock Stars, and all reports suggest Sunday night will be a heartstoppingly good set. There's one other band opening as well, and the show starts at 9pm.

I'm thrilled at the prospect of both of these! Hope you all can come out too!

In a garbage bag with Latin written on it that says, "It's hard to give a shit these days."

God willing, I find myself saying with certain frequency, I want to look as damned good as Lou Reed does when I'm his age:

(Photo from some stranger on the internet; thanks, stranger!)

Not necessarily because he looks good-- at least, in any sort of objective or quantifiable sense. I suppose there are people his age (65) who look a lot better, but when I get to 65 I want to look as much like Lou Reed looks right now as I can possibly manage. Because here's a guy who's been through more than enough, who has done what would seem immeasurable injury to himself through years of self-abuse subsequent to being abused by his family and electrocuted, like Carl Solomon, at Rockland, yet he looks... fine. He doesn't look great, but who wants to? Instead, he looks like a shrug, a smirk, and a snort, and it's glorious. He looks the way the best songs on his record New York (1988) sound-- wise, wry, and unconquerable.

I don't usually pay very much attention to anything he's done since 1973, but I grew up on Transformer and virtually everything the Velvet Underground ever recorded; I have much love and respect for that band and that particular solo record. I've never had much affection for Reed as a person-- until recently my feelings for him have been closer to contempt and dismissal. As I get older, though, I find I have a grudging respect for his utter unwillingness to endure what he feels to be bullshit, even if it does manifest itself in self-aggrandized arrogance. To paraphrase John Cale in a recent issue of Mojo, you can't really expect anyone to live the life that Reed has endured and turn out nice, even if that means you have to live with the fact that he's a jerk.

New York is, in a lot of ways, a jerk record, but in no way devoid of real, if scaly, emotion. It's arrogant and disdainful but largely of those things most deserving of disdain. The attitude of the record is akin to that of Hunter Thompson, who said of the Bush administration in one of his last writings (the first, however, to be relevant in some years), "I piss down the throats of these Nazis, and I'm too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them.” As many have said before, New York is a grown up record, marked by the cynicism and wrath of years of resentment. Thank god-- it provides dose of real feeling generally absent among the later output of rock-and-rollers of yore. As a document of aging, New York is phenomenal. Tracks like "Romeo Had Juliet" and "Dirty Blvd." are expressions of perspective from a personality sharpened, not daunted, by age.

I spend a lot of time thinking about getting older, and too often my feelings are grounded in dread. From time to time, I need to be reminded that there's more than one way to get old, and that it's entirely possible to be on your way to 70 and still look as cool as you sound. I will count myself lucky if I get to the age of 65 and wear my years so well without varnish or apology.

(Photo from Reed's website; don't sue, I'm broke!)

My all-time favourite record:

It took me 11 months to find a copy of Television's Marquee Moon in 1998. Someone (Joel Taylor? Darren Peacock?) brought it over to my house and played it for me in the fall of 1997 and from that point on I was obsessed with finding it, but it had been out of print for years and required a lengthy search. I could, perhaps, have ordered it, but at that point mint copies were going for $50-$60 on collector websites, and besides, I wanted to seek it out until I had it in my hand. There's a thrill in that you can't find through mail-order.

Like a lot of bands for whom I searched obsessively at one point, I had always been aware of Television and had a couple of tracks that I liked on compilations. They were a band I knew I'd eventually get a record by and like, but I was never driven to seek them out, at least not until whoever it was stopped by my apartment one afternoon after shopping at (Montreal's late) Disquivel and dropped the platter on my turntable. In about twenty minutes they went instantly from a band that seemed promising to the greatest music I'd ever heard. Over the next year, I made weekly trips to every used-vinyl store in town looking for the record and turned up nothing, growing gradually ever more frustrated and conversely convincing myself that the more I worked to find it, the harder it would be for it to live up to my expectations (as certain other highly sought-after records had likewise failed). Finally after ten months of searching, the venerable Simon Harvey found a copy for me in Toronto and handed it off to me as I passed through town en route someplace else. Unfortunately, I squirreled it away so safely that I neglected to bring it with me on my departure and left it at my pal Zoe's house. I could have had her (or Simon in the first place) mail it to me, but that took away part of the quest element of it all. Two months after that, Darren alerted me that he'd seen a copy at Disquivel and I rushed over post-haste to snap it up.

I can't say anything critically about this record that hasn't already been said, and I can't give it more praise than it already has. Everyone who's serious about art rock, NY punk, guitar rock, or "alternative" music agrees it's a masterpiece and that's for good reason. It's hard to say anything worthwhile about something great that everyone likes, and truly the only statement about the album (beyond Nick Kent's famous NME review) that still bears repeating is Patti Smith's description of Tom Verlaine's guitar playing as "sounding like a thousand bluebirds screaming."

But I will tell you this: I'm not one of those vinyl people, really. I like getting records on vinyl when I can and at times it seems like they sound better than CDs, but I'm relatively easygoing about format (I still have 200+ cassettes) so long as I can hear the song I want to. Even so, Marquee Moon makes the most sense as a vinyl LP, and the day it makes the most sense is a day like today, a sunny but breezy Saturday afternoon in late summer upon which you might go out for breakfast or might stay in and read the Globe & Mail but either way you have a good strong cup of coffee, probably espresso, and when breakfast is done you make a second and you put this record on and lie down on the sofa. This sofa should be near the window and there should be enough air coming it that it's not too hot and you can smell the world outside, hear the various things that are happening (whether you live downtown like I used to when I got this album or outside of downtown or in the suburbs or the country, whatever incidental sound around you will be made perfect by the music), and taste your coffee with the freshness of late summer air. Then you turn the stereo up and you listen to the first side, then the second side, then the first side again, then the second once more, then you flip and continue until some sort of obligation forces you to finally (and regretfully) leave the house. You can read--something you feel good about, not just the paper or anything for work or school--or you can not. You can stare at the record with its famous Robert Mapplethorpe cover photo of the band, and wonder at great length about the intensity of their veins and whether any of them were close to healthy when the photograph was taken, and you can wonder whether the album is expressing something about the state of their health, or whether it's a statement against health. You can stare and wonder about all kinds of things; you can even start to drift off for a while, and then drift on again. But you must listen-- after nearly ten years of consistent enjoyment of Marquee Moon, this is the best means I have found of enjoying it absolutely. And the most amazing thing is that it's never gotten tired, never boring. Despite having played this record more than anything else I own, it still manages to thrill and surprise me, every time. A record this good demands a certain purity of enjoyment, so I strongly advise you to listen to it at least once in the manner described above. It won't ever disappoint you.