on being a close-minded bastard...

FUEL - MONUMENTS TO EXCESS

It wasn't like I used to hate pop punk, per se. I was just ambivalent about it for the most part. With the arrogance of the 16 year old who told all the kids who discovered Tool when stinkfist made it into the triple j hottest 100 that year to 'listen to Quicksand man, they totally did it first', I considered it immature or something fucking re re like that. Starter music, before you got into the more sophisticated 'hardcore' and 'emo' indie rock stuff I was reading about in well thumbed copies of status, nothing left and second nature, and listening to over and over again on tapes warped by the shitty rewinding function on my two dollar shop walkman.

And bands I used to go see and fucking love, like that one brief shining period where Bodyjar had like four good songs, and Caustic Soda, and the almighty One Inch Punch? Fuck off, they were something better. In my outer eastern suburban arrogance and ignorance I was the only one (well certainly the only one in my high school, that I knew of or cared about anyway) that knew about them. They were mine, secret, and therefore much more credible.

Then I heard the MXPX song 'chick magnet' and my condescending ambivalence about pop punk turned to utter, furious hatred. What the fuck WAS this bullshit? Some stupid walking bass part that's one of the first things you learn in the cheesy bass lines to piss off yr parents 101 book, and a horrible guitar sound and the guy could actually sing?! What a bunch of shit! And suddenly the people who beat me up with metal fence stakes for displaying such obvious signs of homosexuality as 'not liking football' and 'not drinking' were into this music?!! And it was all down hill from there. Bands like The Ataris, Saves The Day and New Found Glory make me want to vomit in rage. (Sorry Cam, but they do). I'm sure there's a lot to appeal to people who're into it but there's nothing punk rock about it to me. It's all so fucking clean, and produced, and fucking boring. It was (and is although I don't really care about it anymore) the antithesis of punk rock to me. Punk was about avoiding being slick and eaily digestible. If you were going to write pop songs, I reasoned, you could do them all lo fi and cool. If you were going to play fast upbeat shit, you could do it like Lifetime and cool. Fuck this clean, pretty, striving to be pure, often chrisso stuff. I was on some next level Winston Smith shit dude; I HATED purity and prettyness in music. Punk was the life-saving refuge for social outcasts and this crap seemed to associated with everything that was boring and conservative and therefore oppressive and alienating.

Fast forward a couple of years and not much has changed. Hell in 2008, right now, not much has changed. I don't actively wish for bands like that's deaths anymore but I do dismiss them as utterly irrelevant to what I'm doing and/or music for people that would've beat me up in highschool. And If you like that music, I'm totally not dissing you or yr taste or saying you can't be into this stuff and the ebullition back catalogue as well. 26 is far too old to be 'judging' people based on what music is important to them or saying their experiences aren't just as valid for them as mine are for me. I'm just detailing my own complicated relationship with the music that's a disturbingly large part of my life. For better or worse I was totally all about aesthetics.

To some degree I still am but Fuel's monuments to excess was part of the step in turning me around. This record is pop punk as all fuck. Seriously, holy shit. Fuel was one of my more later experiences of the genius of Mike Kirsch. I got into Bread and Circuits, whom seriously changed my life, then Navio Forge, then Torches to Rome, then Fuel. I'd always read about them as the band that all the older kids said Hot Water Music was ripping off. Hot Water Music's forever and counting was the soundtrack to the years 18/19 for me, as not only was I dealing with all the being an adult shit but coming to realise that something seriously wasn't right in my head. I got a HWM fire/water thing as my first and so far only tattoo. A band that inspired (though they deny it) them? Fuck yeah, sign me up!

Fuel - whom if you were wondering, aren't the band post-grunge radio rawk band that produced that song shimmer or any of that crap - were a bay area punk rock band in the early 90s, apparently inspired by Fugazi/DC but coming from the same scene that produced Green Day, Crimpshrine and Aaron Cometbus, and distinctly filtered with that kind of vibe. So when I first put this record on and listened to the palm muted guitar chords of disengaged I was like 'okaaay...this is cool. Wait what the hell is up with these vocals?! Oh man this is...well they're yelling sort of out of tune and shit and that's cool but this is way less 'emo' than I expected'. Next song, 2:52 (instrumental), a, just that, instrumental. 'Oh god listen to those guitar leads, this song is so happy! I mean it's kinda wonderfully amateurish in the way it sort of goes out of time and stuff but shit...I can imagine people doing mad pop punk jumps to this!'. I was conflicted.

By the last song on the first side, cue to you, was perhaps more what I expected. Pop punk still, but in the way that trying to write songs to sound like first two eps Fugazi always ends up sounding like pop punk. And that cool two note harmonic lead thing? That rules. Vintage Kirsch. Wait, what's going on here? Change in the middle of the song? OH SHIT! The song burst into an amazing fast part, complete with out of tune backing vocals and raging lead and holy shit I'm literally up off my chair in shock. That was, to that date, one of the coolest things I'd ever heard in a song. This was worth flipping the LP and catching the second side. First song on side B? The name is.

One of the things I've hated - since I went from stupid kid who didn't care to jerk who alienated all his highschool friends with his politics to whoever I am now - and don't think I'll ever come to accept from people is people saying (unironically, or without the 'it's either laugh at it or I'll cry' un-pcness of most 'pc' people) 'gay' to mean shit's bad, or calling someone a homo or whatever. I just fucking hate it, even if you say 'ghey', or go like 'but it used to mean 'happy', the meaning's just changed again'. It's like, no, that's not the fucking point, the meaning has changed because 'gay' is socially constructed as bad; and so therefore the meaning still comes from hate. I tried to articulate that in songs so many times and it never came out. And then I'm listening to this song called the name is about racist or homophobic jokes, asking "where do you find the humor in that? I've got a name for that. The name is 'hatred'", and suddenly this record fucking made sense. Not only did it do that but it gripped me by the heart and gut and mind the way other later Kirsch bands already had and made me think, and feel so amazed and so fucking empowered and energised by music that was fucking saying something that I identified with. And I was getting those feelings, that shortness of breath and 'holy shit I could stay up all night listening to this' excitement from a band that was fucking pop punk?

And that's the moment I realised my stupid attitude had probably cut me off from some incredible music that was just as powerful, innovative and moving as my the musical palette that I thought was more 'grown up'.

The thing I love about a lot of good hardcore punk music, particularly in the 90s but just in general, is really how amateurish it is. Listen to why can't you see. They're fucking rapping in that song dude! But fuck in 1990 in that scene if you had this kinda white boy funk meets Fugazi thing going on in a song and a lot of words to say, why the fuck not do it? Rap meeting guitar music and honkys hadn't turned into stupid faces and MiZPeLLed BaNd NAymez yet so there was no warning sign on that road. And if the thing you were trying to say was so simple, if yr politics were charmingly naieve and all like 'look, I mean, come on, this is just plain common sense, be nice to each other people' well what the fuck is wrong with that?

I've always loved bands - ie Milemarker - where I can see the aesthetic, the thing that they're going for, so fucking clearly that I don't care if they don't quite get there and honestly they suck a little bit (ie Milemarker). Fuel is kinda like that for me. It's not 'sophisticated' and it doesn't fucking have to be. If you wear yr heart on yr sleeve genuinely, then outside of that moment you are going to come across as very dorky. But if you're true about it, you don't care. This record is fucking dorky and so fucking cool. When HWM came along a few years later building on the two guitars / two vocals and a simple positive message punk rock thing, I can now see why they had the impact they did. It was like the promise of bands like Fuel and the things they hinted at coming together just that bit more. And every time I feel really bummed out on music great 'honest', whatever that means, bands like this make me realise that it is truly the greatest thing that I've been able to experience.

I actually sold my LP copy of this earlier this year. At the time I didn't have a working record player, and instead had a massive bass amp repair bill to try and cover. And for some reason (probably the no turntable amp bit) I was going through this phase of getting everything I had on vinyl on CD. I mean I mostly listened to music in the car anyway, right? DUMB. But as soon as I got my cash for the LP, I walked over to the second hand CD section and got the copy of the Fuel discography CD (on broken rekkids and I think out of print) that was sitting in there. I wasn't going to walk out of that store leaving that LP without taking those songs home in another format.

Hype it up much? Don't care, it's late and I'm a little blazed. And I've listened to this record three times in a row, and I know when I go to bed I'll feel all lonely and shitty like I always do, and when I get up and go to work tomorrow I'll feel fucking stressed about all the files on my desk and the uni papers waiting for me back here at home. But I'll always have records like 'monuments to excess' to put on and just go 'fuck yeah...dude...fuck yeah...'.

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=f0af379cc9071c94ab1eab3e9fa335ca68550b2a285fa1aa

Fuel - 'monuments to excess', ebullition no. 23 (originally released as s/t on cargo), 1990.

SIDE A - disengage / 2:52 / some gods / remains to be seen / cue to you

SIDE B - name is / why can't you see / actualized / habit / not up for sale

what you might want, they'll take it awwaaaayyyyy...'

HOOVER - 'THE LURID TRAVERSAL OF RTE. 7'

There are certain bands that I would, if I were so inclined and not perpetually unable to save money, get tattoos related to or pay more than the original price for shirts thereof. These are the bands that are just so ingrained as awesome in my head that like, it's just an unquestioning fact. A pillar of my own existance. The sky is blue and this band fucking ruled. If you asked me to name these bands I'd probably give you a list after some careful consideration, and perhaps discussion of the way Hot Water Music completely sucked arse after 'no division'. If you forced me to name some bands off the top of my head you'd get exactly four. Mike Kirsch played in three of them. The fourth is Hoover.

I first heard Hoover when I was given a mixtape in 1997. The song was electrolux and I was like 'wtf is this band give me more please'. I got a tape back with Hoover's lurid traversal of rte. 7 on one side and Harvest's living with a god complex on the other. My music taste being slanted towards dumb tough hardcore as it was back then (and still is, yeah, you got me) I listened the shit out of the Harvest side and really only gave the Hoover one a couple of spins. I mean it was like, yeah, I liked it and all but fucking Harvest man! Then I lost it approximately four weeks later anyway. Somewhere 'neath the rotting floorboards, in the rat infested underworld that lies below the year 10 lockers at vermont high there's a killer tape waiting for someone to find it.

(If someone wants to burn or link me a copy of living with a god complex I'll be forever in their debt too).

So 97 to '08 pretty much my sole experience of Hoover - apart from remembering that this record was pretty great when I heard it - was the song breather resist on the all the presidents men compilation LP that old glory records put out. And that song, the 'demo version', actually apparently recorded as part of a live radio set (which I just recently found out Briohazard's brother probably recorded, which is pretty weird in a small word kind of way), is pretty much THE BEST FUCKING SONG IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD EVER MAAANG. They actuall re-recorded it for an odds and ends EP they did following their first reunion in '97 and I've never listened to that version. The shitty production on the original is just too perfect. I remember sitting outside some shitty nightclub in adelaide, talking to a guy who played in one of those three Mike Kirsch bands, about music, about how awesome Hoover were, and about that recording, and he said 'that's the way that song was meant to sound'. Indeed. The poor, bass heavy audio quality, dubious mix, the way the slide guitar comes in out of nowhere and destroys the clean guitar, the almost non audible vocals and the quiet droning of some recording of a preacher talking in the background are like some cosmic, planets aligning, next level mystical shit dude.

Thanks in large part to that song I had an idea in my head of what Hoover sounded like. Like I was talking in the previous post of the idea of a bands sound rather than the actual sound. Hoover was quiet/loud/quiet, perfect for the crackling of wax on the turntable and somehow linked in my head with dark rooms and out of focus powerlines. Maybe I'm autistic and relate to music in terms of visual cliches. But over the past nearly a decade Hoover have been present in my subconscious mostly as the band that wrote breather resist, that had that particular sound and feel, that I didn't even own any records of but it was such a definite fact, I almost didn't need to own the records. It was something so buried in the back of yr head that you just know it's the truth: Hoover were an amazing band.

So chucking on lurid traversal... after finally entering the digital age a couple of months ago and downloading the bastard, I was a little suprised about the first song being so upbeat and spazzy. But by track 3, electrolux, the stop/start fuzz bass awakened memories of lying on my floor listening to this record on sunday afternoons, with the blinds drawn and electric fan dimed to combat the stupid heat of summer, and wondering how the hell such amazing music could exist. How could bands be this tight, this dynamic, and create such an incredible, powerful sound? How could music groove and yet not be shitty university funk? How could these guys take what Fugazi did and build on it when all my 16 year old's attempts to do the same sounded like ska? This was punk rock yet it was so fucking different to all the punk I knew. This was subtle, beautiful music, yet in no-way streamlined or watered down.

Electrolux is a pretty good example of the amazingness of this record. Listen to that shit and then consider that this music was made in 92/93, only two years after repeater came out. Listen to that fucking bass distortion and wonder how the hell they nailed that amazing fuzz sound when everything I've heard resembling 'fuzz bass' on records for the next 15 years has never come close. The song shows the DC/Fugazi influence pretty well actually. The bass part is all kind of evil and dark sounding, somewhat chromatically neutral. Then a definite major key octave guitar part comes in over the top, doubled on both guitars. Something that doesn't quite make harmonic sense but sounds so fucking cool, and a definite trick of repeater/steady diet of nothing era Fugazi guitar playing. Something I also totally hear in Alex's playing in Former Republics which definitely makes them rule harder.

But the definite stand out of the LP for me is the song letter. This is second only to breather resist in defining the sound that occupies the niche in my head marked 'file under Hoover and influenced bands'. Hell this shit didn't start with them, and in terms of guys talking over a guitar building up over a repeating bass line it goes back as far as Moss Icon at least. But these guys on this record got it nailed so tight. It's like, I dunno, math rock or post hardcore or something. It's music I relate to as buildup music. Repetitiveness, heaps of space, guitars that come in and out. Sudden stops and complete crazy freak outs all of a sudden. Hell Slint got there first anyway. But (admittedly great) bands enjoying a posthumous revival like Indian Summer, or random moments of sudden awesome like that 'blue skies, arrival...' clean song on the State Secedes record definitely owe some small debt to lurid traversal of rte. 7. Hoover didn't invent it but they set the bar pretty fucking high pretty early on.

Unfortunately maybe these guys listen to their own well deserved praise too much. Hoover reunited in 1997, and again in 2004 where they apparently kinda sucked, and are playing shows again with a reunited Bluetip this year. I would probably no shit cry if I heard cuts like drugs, letter, electrolux or breather resist live, but some things really are best left in the past. Hoover's music has been with me now for a good chunk of my life and is so inextricably linked to the certain experiences, sensations and memories that all great music that you grow with should provoke in you, that I just don't know man...In those live songs and this LP, Hoover achieved perfection. There's no need to recreate it.

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=f0af379cc9071c94ab1eab3e9fa335ca6ee6b9a543ec1ed5

Hoover - 'the lurid traversal of rte. 7', dischord records no. 89, 1994/5(ish?)

nb I've never owned this LP, and never had a copy of the correct tracklisting so I'm assuming this is all cool. Also this might be in print from Dischord still? If you like it, fucking buy it.

Distant / Pretender / Electrolux / Shut / Route 7 / Regulator Watts / Father / Cable / Letter / Cuts Like Drugs / Return / Private / Drive

this shit is so 2003 dude...

CALVARY - 'OUTNUMBERED IS OUTFLANKED'

So after Mr Hyde and the Jeckyls called it quits the first time around (much to everyone's relief), no sooner was Ross on a plane back to ol' blighty than we were talking about doing another band. Now bear this in mind, like so many other atrocities undertaken in those heady days, it has to be understood in a specific context; IT WAS ANOTHER TIME: 2003. 'Sassy' was in and bands like the Red Light Sting were more than just a dust covered relic of the dollar bin. 'Dance punk' was not only 'in' but somehow considered viable and interesting. Oh the embarassing naivete of youth!

But yeah Dave, Pete and myself decided to embark on a mission to create music in a simillar vein to what Mr Hyde was doing, i.e low-brow and fun as fuck to drunkenly dance to. The soundtrack for a summer spent sweating on wooden benches at 101 while yr dinner from across the road at Feast On slowly congealed into a solid mass that would painfully induce colon blockage the next day. Or drunkenly kicking out cieling tiles at the Green Room while bar manager Al egged you on. Or sitting upstairs at Soak not watching any of the bands you paid to see because you couldn't be arsed going down into that dank as shit basement. 2003 alright. We'll all deny it but we were going for something totes cutting edge for that time, punk meets disco. Hell Pete was probably going for something more like that first Black Eyes LP but I do remember a drunken conversation (at Goo no less, 2003, lol, etc) about starting a 'banging house' band. Lewis from music swop shop joined on guitar. We were called Jam Clawed Vin Duude. We played one show with Black Level Embassy in Soak's basement, then it died in the arse. Perhaps for the better. I still remember some of the basslines for that band and they wouldn't sound out of place on the Rapture's echoes. Hah remember when everyone said that album was amazing, power ballads and all (2003, lol, etc)?

Point is I got introduced to some amazing music in this time. Some of my fondest memories of 03/04 revolve around sitting in the tiny living room of Hyde's old place off Lygon street, LPs strewn across the floor as he introduced me to amazing band after amazing band. In a situation that's probably going to show up on this blog fairly often, Pete and I were doing a band, and he showed me like a zillion records in an attempt to point my music writing in a good direction. Hydro is one of the people that has influenced my music taste the most over the years and I've always been enriched for the experience.

Apart from the first Black Eyes LP, the other record that really jumped out at me over those evenings in Hyde's living room (probably following dinner at vege orgasm, 2003, lol, etc) is Calvary's outnumbered is outflanked.

At the time we were all talking about starting dance punk bands without trying to actually say the words 'dance punk', or mention Disco beats, or DFA bands, or anything like that. So vague ideas and throwbacks to post punk got tipped a lot, like Gang of Four and Wire. Look back on it now and all the Gang of Four 'influenced' bands sound more like an idea of what a Gang of Four song would sound like than anything they might've actually released. So when I was mumbling something about 'you know, Gang of Four, Wire...' to Pete he promptly turned around and put this record on. The drumming, he said, reminded him of Wire. The record wasn't what I was expecting. Instead of 12 variations on the theme of 'damaged goods', I got this blast of mid 80s dischord style melodic hardcore. No shit, this sounded like a teenage Guy Piccioto singing, over music that I would've sworn (except for the fidelity) was recorded at inner ear.

Calvary took the best parts of that 80s revolution summer sound, compressed it all down, and absolutely nailed it. The Wire comparison is actually pretty apt. The drumming is kinda stilted, mechanical and jerky, whether that's a deliberate undertaking in an attempt to evoke the 'anti-rockist' spirit of post punk bands that rejected the idea of a 'feel', or whether it's simply because the dude couldn't play very well, I don't know. The thin bass and guitar tones owe a lot to early 80s post punk recordings as well. The\discordant open string blasts sound like something off Television's first record, rather than the gibson guitars into marshall amps band they really were.

Yet there isn't a single disco beat or reference to dancing on either side of this LP. Those mid 80s DC bands were influenced a crap tonne by english post punk (listen to Embrace and try and tell me that's not true), and Calvary were like the next step on from that. If you drew a line through pink flag and end on end, then took it all the way through the 90s, outnumbered is outflanked would be at the end of it, alongside records by contemporaries like the Shivering and descendants like Bullets In. (But both those bands' shit is still in print so I'm not uploading it).

The band did feature Matt Weeks (Current, Dearborn SS, council records, etc) and you can read about the band history on the council site, http://www.councilrecords.com/ I'm not really gonna bother with those details on this blog. Rather I'm gonna self-centeredly talk about what these records mean to me, because you know they're records that uh, mean something to me. Yeah.

I think this was the first record I bought from the new Missing Link premises, which is a bit of pointless trivia for you. And I can say that from that day to this I reckon I've listened to this once a week. Hype can't ever ruin this record for me, it's perfect. Like I said, they nailed it. I mentioned above the 'idea' of what a song sounds like, like if you had to describe a band's sound without mentioning specifics, or if you wanted to write a song that sounds like something they could've written? The guitar break in order no. 270 IS what Rites of Spring sound like to me. The instrument sounds on this record are incredible, and this record was the first step in me learning a 'less gain is more' approach to guitar tone. Listen to how fucking heavy according to these visions and dreams gets when the whole band plays in unison, even though their guitars are far from saturated with distortion. 'Less is more' is pretty apt for this whole record really. While other rocking, melodic hardcore bands might have a whole shitload going on, or rely a lot on guitar effects and tricks, this is all pretty straight up. Listen to the start and end of gala affair and relise that shit's done with a delay pedal and two guitars, nothing else. Even shit that the desperately wanting to be trendy kid that I was at the time would've automatically said 'what the fuck? fuck you, no way!' and dismissed as completely dorky, like fucking surf guitar, makes this record. The arpeggios in it's sport and melody through the very roots of words are fucking rad, some of my favourite moments on the whole record.

Lyrically the record takes a lot from the Rites of Spring side of things rather than say Embrace. More for want of than no more pain. It's kinda vague, kinda maybe cryptic. And that's served this record well for me because I find lines still jumping out at me five years after I got this thing and suddenly clicking and making sense.

As I said above, I can't destroy this record with hype, it's definitely a huge influence on me. It's influenced the way I play guitar a tonne in the last few years. Ex Spectator have a song that goes down on our setlist as 'calvary'. So many other bands that before I saw as seperate things, outside of influence and a little bit impenetrable, suddenly made sense to me. The connection between post punk and emo hardcore made sense to me and opened up a lot of older music, made me more receptive to shit that previously I'd dismissed as disco beat crap for hipsters.

Calvary also put out a 7", the will of the way, and a demo. Some stuff is downloadable from the council site and the 7" is still in print and worth yr eight bucks. Many people actually consider that their best record and while it's technically more competent I guess, nothing tops this LP for me. Some records, many of the ones that I'll write about on this blog, absolutely define a time and place and a part of my life when I listen to them. But outnumbered is outflanked is kinda timeless for me. Sure it's located in that living room of Hyde's where I got introduced to this record, but I flip this so often to this very day and it still remains fresh. I was just blasting this on the way home from work a few hours ago, yelling and gesticulating at other drivers; "it only LOOKS as if it hurts, but that's exactly WHAT I WANT!".

Enjoy.

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=f0af379cc9071c94ab1eab3e9fa335ca4a95a31e341f277f

Calvary - 'outnumbered is outflanked', council records no. 20, 2002.

SIDE A - order no 270 / reluctance - insertion - regret / writhe / according to these visions and dreams / heart murmur / gala affair

SIDE B - 111 (outnumbered is outflanked) / it's sport / revenant / torrential / worth a thousand dark words / the very roots of words