Continuing with my trend of posting streams of gritty garage rock, now we’ve arrived at Scraper.
This is the first full length release from the San Francisco garage punks. What makes this even more exciting is that the LP has been released in a super limited run of only 500 copies, through Cut-Rate Records. Unfortunately the bandcamp page only allows us to listen to 30 or so seconds of each track, but it is more than enough to let us know what kind of jams we can expect from the album.
The singer is clearly taking some cues from Joey Ramone (not at all anything wrong with that), and the guitars are coming through loud (maybe too loud?) and clear. Everything in the mix is overdriven to the point of distortion, and I actually had to check more than once to see if it was just some coincidence that both of my speakers blew as I was listening. (They hadn’t).
For those of you paying attention, it seems like San Francisco is the place to be right now, for the music scene alone. There’s Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees throwin’ down copious amounts of punk thrash, then there is White Fence, somehow lumped into the whole mess with his retro tape-noise laden Left Banke reminiscent tunes, and then there are the even grittier, unpolished acts that make all the aforementioned sound down right radio-friendly like Terry Malts and these guys, Scraper.
Head over to the Cut-Rate Records bandcamp page to listen to the samples and then grab the super limited album. You can also find Cut-Rate Records on Facebook.
As if you couldn’t already tell, I’ve been angling toward the noisiest, most abrasive music that I can find. The more messed up the rhythms, the faster the songs, the more angular and distorted the guitar parts and the less intelligible the lyrics the better.
Bbigpigg is currently on tour through the beginning of November and is also offering a five song EP, “Phantom Photography,” for free at their site. There is also another free download at their main site here.
Similar in overall sound to THIGHS, Bbigpigg takes their energy over the top and keeps it there. Something comparable in texture to At The Drive-In where it’s impossible to discern where one guitar ends and another begins. Everything is just a cloud of interconnected squeals and accents pinned to the ground by a rumbling bass. “Bitch-Hogg” takes a completely frantic approach rhythmically, with air-raid guitars cutting across everything in its path. Everything is just heavy as hell, and worth more than a few listens.
Check their site for tour dates across New England and make sure to grab that download.
Toronto thrash punk is alive and well, apparently. THIGHS sound like Tangiers having a seizure. The disjointed, monomaniacal, throbbing rhythms with ultra crunchy guitars and shouted vocals is nothing but pure energy and raw power. A song like “Tunnelr” covers a lot of ground in it’s 2 minutes, going from stomping, mosh inducing potential energy to the release that comes toward the end in the form of a 3 against 2 rhythm that sounds down right groovy coming out of krautrock-land where they began.
Each of the 9 tracks are similar in their sound: dominating bass pushed almost to the point of distortion, the guitar’s tentative grasp on pitch. Think the rhythm section of “They Threw Us In A Trench and Put A Monument on Top” era Liars with the guitar-as-extension-of-the-drums noise blasts of “Drums Not Dead” era Liars.
It’s actually remarkable how quick THIGHS goes from noise to total silence. The start-stops are so crisp and punchy, placing the intermittent silence at equal footing to the noise-stomp that encloses it, for example in the track “Horse.” A song like “Meat” pushes the mechanical kraut-rock sound to an industrial grind, driving that one chord into your head one measure at a time.
The self-titled album is available as a download on bandcamp for any price you care to pay, though I would suggest grabbing the limited edition (only 100 made) vinyl from Not Unlike for only $15. This should be on your turntable right now, loud enough so that the walls blow out while people 2 miles away call the cops.
Diarrhea Planet – “i’m rich beyond your wildest dreams.”
Not many bands (I actually can’t think of any off the top of my head) would be able to make use of 4 guitars and have it all make sense. Diarrhea Planet, on the other hand, are bringing shredding back to rock. And right from the opening of the album they aren’t afraid to let you know that they are not messing around.
“Lite Dream” moves from quadruple guitar solo, to straight up punk rock right before they march right into Iron Maiden territory. It makes sense to get as much use out of everything on stage as possible, so in order to do that there is a lot of stretching out, doubled guitars, solos, layered solos etc.
You may have heard about these guys before if you are a fan of Titus Andronicus (and why wouldn’t you be?) whom Diarrhea Planet opened for last year when Titus was touring for “Local Business.” I remember Patrick Stickles tweeting over and over again about how these guys would knock it out of the park night after night, but there was no way for many of us to know what he was talking about because they were pretty much just getting started. Now it turns out that Stickles was right. He was very right. The New York Times even agrees, as does NPR, who featured them on their All Songs Considered podcast.
Long story short, these guys are blowing up and you need to get in on the ground floor, it’s worth it. For a full album of guitar assault that knows how to make use of its resources, while at the same time managing to control songs to the point where they don’t go too far. Apparently it is possible to have a band like this with a minimum amount of wankery going on.
This live clip of “Kids” says it all. It starts out delicately enough, but it’s really only holding back before all hell breaks loose.
They are currently out on a seemingly never ending and constantly expanding tour (I’m actually leaving my apartment right now to see them here in Eugene) with support from NYC’s So So Glos (founders of Shea Stadium) and putting on a fantastic, amazingly energetic live show. More on that later.
The album, “i’m rich beyond your wildest dreams.” is pure rock and roll. I’m already sick of various sites saying that they are “equal parts Weezer and Whitesnake” as NPR does, or something similar that evokes the name of some crappy corporate rock hair metal band from the 80s. Whitesnake has nothing to do with this music. Whitesnake were a product of money-grubbing, coke-addled music execs in the 1980s. Whitesnake, in short, sucks. They sucked then and they suck now. There is no point in listening to them at all. But I digress.
There is a purity of the song writing here that takes more from the punk/DIY aesthetic than it does from the hair metal aesthetic. Sure, on the surface there are guitar solos all over the place, there’s finger-tapping, there’s palm-muted eighth notes on the lowest string (tuned to D or even C sometimes) but those things don’t add up to “hair metal.”
A song like “Separations” has a lot more to do with catchy hooks and punk attitude than anything else. Let’s not discount the fact that these guys can play. There is not a single second of insincerity on this album. “Hammer of the Gods” is more punk than it is metal. The entire album walks the line in that way, which places it firmly more in the Misfits camp than it does with Whitesnake. There is a lot more going on than what it sounds like after listening to one guitar solo doubled in thirds. Everything on the album is done because it makes sense to the song, everything serves the song. We know this because not every track on the album is structured in exactly the same way. Some have verses and choruses, while others have extended intros followed by a verse and an extended outro (see “Ugliest Son”). At no point does anything sound out of place or arbitrary due to trying to jam ideas into a form that doesn’t make sense for that particular song. The same can be said for the album as a whole; there aren’t any songs in the sequencing that are placed there because, say, they needed an upbeat 1st single and then a slow song for a 2nd single (that a band like, say, Whitesnake would do. And maybe that is one of the reasons that they are pointless to listen to, Whitesnake I mean. They are so of the time. Everything about music like that and albums like theirs is that they are very “of the time.” Taken out of context, or listened to in 2013, those albums can’t connect with us anymore because they just don’t make sense anymore).
Diarrhea Planet is currently on tour practically non-stop, criss-crossing the country until the middle of December and it seems like they are adding dates into all the free time they can. If you live anywhere between Sand Diego and Portland, Maine it’s only a matter of time before they are in a town near you. Get out there and see them, say hi, and buy the album. It’s currently available on CD and Gold Vinyl (with download code) from Infinity Cat.
Taking the garage punk aesthetic to unexpected places and mixing it with an early rock and roll sensibility for melodic pop hooks, Terry Malts succeeds in making fun, catchy noise with the occasional biting social commentary. It’s all apropos of punk rock.
The first thing that immediately struck me is how much the singer’s voice sounds like that of Joey Ramone’s, and I should apologize because once you start to hear it that way it will be impossible to hear it any other way. The comparison was something that my mind would not let go. Uncomplicated songs with straightforward structures are not something that the Ramones invented, but Terry Malts takes the form and sound — as an archetype — and runs with it. The songs on “Killing Time” not only have more lyrical depth, combined with variety in the tempo and rhythm department, but are also given room to breathe. The band allows each track to develop in its own way by either cutting back and building up the dynamic again or with the addition of a squealing, messy guitar solo. Perhaps a better idea of their sound would be to place it in terms of the noisy garage punk bands Male Bonding or Dum Dum Girls.
Terry Malts buzzes with a guitar tone that seems to have been taken directly from Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade and it’s that haze from which the entire album takes its tone – bass heavy, and at times overridden with feedback and echoed vocals. The buzzed out “Not Far From It” is a perfect example of this sound. With “I’m Neurotic,” the droning, repetitive and spacious grinding guitar riff pervades, though the simple, pared down lyrics are more the focus on this track. Repeated statements of “I’m neurotic, that’s what she says, I won’t let it go to my head. Maybe she’s right” not only works to highlight the fact that he is, in fact, neurotic, but therefore that “she” is right. Efforts specifically directed towards preventing it from going to his head are only doing the opposite. The music reflects the neurosis that commandeers all attention and focus.
“Nauseous” picks up the pace significantly. It’s far more catchy with a quick tempo, and perhaps even borders on “sing-along” inspiring with the hook “na-na-na-na-nauseous”. This is all combined with an ability for capturing the aura of early hard-core punk like Black Flag, mixed with a bit of the early rock and roll-influenced fun. Those two characteristics seem, on the surface, to be diametrically opposed, and I can’t think of how they could be working together — but according to Terry Malts they can, and do on this track. By placing the lighthearted melody of the vocals against support from heavy, bass-driven, guitar noise that is thrashing about in the background they manage to make work something that would seem like an option in the first place.
Terry Malts - "Killing Time"
A doo-wop, early rock and roll sound also pervades “No Good For You”. If you could imagine the guitars being a little cleaner, and putting the vocals up front more, then I think this song would easily find a place for itself on the Top 40 back in the late 1950s. Not to beat the Ramones references into the ground, but it seems like this is what they were trying to conjure from themselves when they worked with Phil Spector. Instead, they more or less ended up turning out the same music that they had been all along, which is certainly not a bad thing.
Some of the lyrics on “Killing Time” push the boundaries with plainspoken, forthright social commentaries. The track “Not a Christian” is at once a slam to Christianity with lyrics such as “A prayer is empty air and no one’s listening” and a statement of personal beliefs with “There is life and there is death, I live my life, I do my best”. It’s over almost as fast as it began with no room left for ruminations or arguments. Similarly, in the biting social commentary category, is “Mall Dreams”, a diatribe against modern consumerist culture. When the line “Who are you when all you do is consume?” is sung the conviction of the statement isn’t made any less contemptuous by the bouncing rhythm and uptempo character of the song. It happens to be a happy track on the surface but the lyrics beg for deeper inspection.
“No Big Deal” lyrically lands more on the personal side of things, sarcastically trying to cope with a break up. “No big deal, that was just my heart you ripped out” – sings a sullen voice that seems to be accepting of his fate while still managing to put his full pain on display. The squeal of uncontrollable feedback also permeates this track, the guitarist seemingly unable to hold it back, and unwilling to turn it down.
Squarely in-line with punk ethos is “Can’t Tell No One”, a straightforward rocker with rapid fire vocals. “People try to tell me what they think is right for me….but I won’t listen to them, won’t take their advice, I really wouldn’t have it any other fuckin’ way” is the most punk-rock line on the album. The rigid, uncompromising raising of the middle finger directly into the face of everyone within shouting distance serves as a very nice contrast to a lot of the other songs on “Killing Time” that are more obviously making use of the old school rock and roll influence.
The album really is about balancing those two extremes: the birth of rock with the noise and attitude of various strands of punk — from the garages, basements and dingy clubs across the country.
[audio:http://quartertonality.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/03-Where-Is-The-Weekend.mp3|titles=Where Is The Weekend]
[audio:http://quartertonality.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/10-No-Good-For-You.mp3|titles=No Good For You]
![Terry Malts - "Killing Time"](http://quartertonality.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Terry_Malts_Killing_Time_21.02.2012.jpg "Terry Malts - "Killing Time"")
