A.Cave #2 — MUSIC FOR THE OTHER HEAD
15 underground releases—Bend The West, Devo Death, Model Home, DRLN, Population II, Watt, Reuber, Staraya Derevnya, Tarkamt, Volk Soup, Strafe F.R. & more...
BEND THE WEST - A Feast
Bend The West is one Oliver Iacono, a Melbourne/Naarm-based musician who plays just about everything. Following up the excellent JECT EP, A Feast continues his winning formula. Much like the previous release, Iacono keeps this EP at a cool 4 songs—a digital 12”, if you will. “We Like It In The Nighttime” is catchy disco-punk that flirts with the sleazy side of the tracks, but finds itself safely under the covers by the time the last round is called. Where JECT had a XTC filter thrown over it, A Feast presents itself like a friendly Fad Gadget, indulging in a kitchen-sink surrealism that narrowly avoids being ground into paste in the dispose-all. “Prettier Than Despair” patiently builds its case, demonstrating real skill in the way it withholds an obvious pay-off. It’s a real pleasure and relief to hear home-recorded Aus music that doesn’t come packaged a dozen at a time. Some enterprising label should press Bend The West on to real wax, and you don’t even have to pick out bits of shell to do it.
DEVO DEATH - s/t
A case could be made that Halloween cover bands are representative of the death of culture, and, more specifically, punk culture. I can hear you now—”Hey maaaaan, I just wanna have fun wit’ my frenzzzz and play some songs we like and like, don’t you like FUN man, like FUN, bro. It’s just a gas! I love pretending I’m in Nirvana or the Misfits or the Strokes or Spyro Gyra or, check this out, the CRAMPS. We’re thinking about doing the Gun Club this year to really switch it up.” There’s nothing worse than hearing some losers meander through what used to be a cataclysmic Black Sabbath cut or some well-adjusted LCD Soundsystem fan attempting to slur their way around a Fall song. All while wearing an outfit inspired by The Royal Tannenbums (sic) or, hey, is it time to bring Pulp Fiction back? Because I wanna stick this hypodermic needle in my chest. Or actually my ears. The main thing I always think is—You spent two months practicing these songs while your three year old band still only has nine songs and 8 and ½ of those are garbage. Quickly followed by—Playing superior songs certainly hasn’t improved your songwriting one goddamn iota. To the naysayers naysaying my naysaying, I say to thee—DEVO DEATH. DD is the new platonic ideal of the cover band with a twist, and what a twist it is; hell, it’s right there in the name. Yup, you guessed it, Devo covers in the style of Christian Death. (What’s next, Remo Voor covers in the style of Christian Lunch?) Everyone knows that Devo wrote fantastic songs and played them meticulously, but what if you turned on the fog machine, wrapped them in a cloak and forced Rozz Williams to sing? Lenny Smith absolutely nails Williams’ quavering whine of a voice, casting Devo’s smart/goofy lyrics in a sickly, pale light. The music by Andrew Stromstad perfectly filters Devo’s songs through Christian Death’s gothic punk and it’s shocking how well the combo works. It almost makes me regret selling Only Theatre Of Pain to buy groceries, but hey, even vampires gotta eat (not true—undead ed.). I guarantee that you’ll never hear “Blockhead” the same way again. Bravo, ghouls, clap clap.
p.s. The only way I’ll give a shit about your Halloween cover band is if you cover Trout Mask Replica in its entirety.
p.i.s.s. The album was released on Sept. 9th, 2023 but the liners say it was “RECORDED/MIXED/MASTERED OCTOBER 2023.” Spooooky-ooky. Only Rod Rooter knows the truth.
D.R.L.N. - Broadcasting LP
Is Indianapolis the next Cincinnati? Never in the history of the written word has such a sentence been constructed, but these are strange times indeed. I feel a subsonic rumbling from this most centrist of American cities, like they might be on the verge of a small-scale underground music renaissance similar to the one Cincinnati has seen over the last few years. I’ll admit that I am surprised at how much I dig this D.R.L.N. album that came out last spring. That acronym may be unwieldy, but it’s still miles better than Doppler Radar and the Local News, which sounds like the first act on a five band pop-punk bill at the local skate shop. After a decade (the 1990s) of hearing every other indie rock/post-hardcore band blatantly rip off Fugazi (the other half was corpse-fucking Slint like it was their last day on earth), it’s actually quite refreshing to hear D.R.L.N. go full bore into the Inner Ear of their mind and come up smelling like roses. Singer Maxwell Denari has a Guy Picciotto-like voice, bending it around the mic, swallowing spit and dripping sweat. The band recalls the noisy, skeletal Fugazi of the Steady Diet of Nothing era (sidenote: incredible that people underrate this album; fools!). “Rat Catcher” blindsides you with an articulate rage, ignoring the treadmill to bite the hand that feeds. Hope you got your rabies shot. “River Fishing” is punishingly agile, twisting and turning like a drunken bike ride through the back alleys, just barely avoiding wiping out in a spectacular wreck. “Power Static” is Hoover three decades down the line, while “Dracula” goes straight for the jugular. “On The Street” wraps things up with plenty of righteous riffage amid the stops and starts. This is real Indie rock!
MODEL HOME - export
P CAIN - 7
Thanks to the Disciples label, I jumped on the Model Home train early and I have yet to throw myself off. The duo of Patrick Cain (electronics) and Nappy Napa (voice+FX) keep on releasing a mind-boggling amount of material which, against all odds, is good-as-hell to freakin’ sick-as-death. We’re talking backyard/basement warp-sucked crunchy AF digital lo-fi tape-blasted cheap hardware jungle gym ninja routine antic groove thru a Moog filter high holy day fish-fry goodness to the nth power. Export is an ultra-limited tape made for Domicile in Tokyo, a “modern-rustic shop featuring select underground music-label brand apparel & accessories.” Lucky for them, they’ve got good taste in tunes, so I’ll hold my tongue about selling hoodies with graphics that look like Da Share Zone rejects. As usual, Model Home opens up their toolbox and starts rearranging everything in sight, conjuring a strange but eerily familiar world in a few minutes flat. Thirteen minutes per side is plenty of time for Napa to harness his weirdly conversational flow (although he mainly just sounds like he’s talking to himself) to Cain’s organically evolving beats before they settle into something resembling a groove. All of those buzzing sounds and whiplash noises give you a sensation that you’re actually under a roof-size petri dish and a couple of extra-dimensional beings are sizing you up for…....something. Could be good (telepathic powers) or could be not so good (sucking your brain out of your eye socket). This is electronic music that sounds as alive as a free improv group scritching and scratching away at the local cafe. By the time we get to the cup-rattle percussion, irregular beats and pitch-shifted vocals of “Space En Ur Heart/Let Et Go” on the flip side, we’ve gone all the way through the looking glass. If the Butthole Surfers had channeled their mania into monosynths and 808s, they might have ended up in the same territory.
Under his solo guise, P Cain just put out his seventh digital release and it’s about time someone started smashing these on wax (we’re probably due for a MH box set while we’re at it). I love the way Cain builds beats; “safe outside” takes vintage drum machine sounds and puts them to work, giving shape to the understated vocal snippet and stereo-zipping synths tearing about the place. Much of 7 takes place in beatless space like the dripping, flickering “4 u.” “Kno” closes things out with a dank beat workout and what sounds like an acid bass line that got stuck in the 3D printer.
POPULATION II - Électrons Libres Du Québec
It’s honestly perplexing why this Montreal power trio isn’t 3x more popular, at the very least. While only their second proper LP, Free Electrons From Quebec (—translator ed.) is another absolute belter. Population II are named after Randy Holden’s 1970 solo psych masterpiece for a reason, and they live up to whatever lofty expectations your private press-worshiping ass brings to the party. Following their slightly more mellow 2020 album À La Ô Terre on Castle Face, this one wastes no time in establishing that they can pull balls-out, brain-scour rock moves as well as anyone on the planet. These cats accomplish more in four minutes than most psych bands do after a 15 minute jam. “Lune Rouge” sounds like a lysergic take on Thin Lizzy, while “Rapaillé” adds a near-disco groove to the band's repertoire. “Beau Baptême” throbs and quivers so beautifully that it could be dropped on to Freak Out Total Vol. 3 (iykyk) with none the wiser. In addition to the phenomenal bass playing, another thing I love about Population II is that they sing in their native French, your monolingual self be damned (I yam guilty). Now, pour l'amour de Dieu, if only Population II’s 10” lathe cut from 2018 would get a more durable re-release; that sucker is a face-melter par excellence.
REUBER - Rueckschau
I had never heard of this dude until Staubgold put out this collection. Apparently he was doing his thing in the early part of this century (spanning 2000-2010), but it sounds like 1975 up in here. Do you like Cluster? How about To Rococo Rot? Asmus Tietchens? A lot of ground is covered here, but my favorite stuff is the Cluster-like confections. A lot of people want to sound like this, but few get it right. Reuber’s got it down pat. Dive into yesterday…
THERESA SMITH/ERIC CECIL - Foot/Dangling
You may have seen either of these two rocking out on a stage at some moment in time, perhaps even together in the late, great Ballroom. Busy Signals? Home Blitz? Don’t pretend you’ve never worn a horizontal stripe in your entire goddamn life. But fun time is over. So let’s say you know the rock, but did you know that both of these guitarists can write, like actually write, really write, full sentences even! Brutally short or tantalizingly winding. Cecil is especially adept at conjuring an atmosphere of bone-deep dread. But not in a horror sense, or at least the “cosmic” horror trap that a lesser writer would lean into. This ain’t Thomas Ligotti reading for the Shadow Ring. Smith doesn’t speak, she is making subtle noise of amp hum, curling around Cecil’s words tentatively the way a cat will rub its face before committing its entire body. At times you expect the buzzing and swelling sounds to reach a crescendo, but that would be to miss the point. This is a story you are listening to; not to, in fact—in on. Perhaps not horror, but undeniable terror. Cecil has a disturbing knack of rendering seemingly ordinary scenes with an almost alien perspective. He can describe walking down the street on a cloudy day and it’s as if you’ve never seen the sun before. If Cecil doesn’t want you to know what the sun looks like, feels like, then you’ll have no idea what you’re missing. It’s glorious, even when it hurts. Always from the shadow side of the street, all of these observances from the far side of the street, the hallway, the boiler room, the jail cell. Cecil’s protagonists (dubious nomenclature) usually seem to have started existing just moments before we’ve tuned into their frequency. They are learning what it is to be human, or to understand that you will never be human, that humanity is an impossibility, in real time. These men are hapless innocents that are all guilty as hell. “Foot” circles endlessly around a unique type of body horror; maybe this is a new genre—existential gore. More succinct, nearly song-like, “Dangling” builds in tension as Smith’s synth stalks Cecil’s deadpan narrative. Chillingly effective. A simulacrum of life after rock after death, after all.
STARAYA DEREVNYA - Blue Forty-Nine
I got hip to this ensemble via their 2022 album Boulder Blues, which is a tour de force of acid-fried improv psych folk with a Nurse With Wound approach to sound manipulation. Just a great fuckin record, I gotta say. This new thing on Blue Tapes (the title is just the catalog number) was recorded at London’s Cafe OTO and is kind of like the album made flesh. They do “Bubbling Pelt” and the title track from Boulder Blues, which sound fantastic, wholly original yet in such a lineage as to be almost instantly classic. Immediately after “Boulder Blues,” the group launches into “Gallant Spider” which almost seems like a live remix of the previous song, but it’s more that the set swings together so effortlessly. You never know what sounds are coming next, which is where that NWW vibe/namedrop emanates from; this music surprises you while still providing plenty of emotional release within song-like structures. Moments here make me imagine what it would have been like if Biota suddenly started writing songs one day. There’s that sense of intricate music as natural phenomena. Sometimes it also sounds like Amon Düül with a little more structure and a few more instruments. Mostly it just sounds completely fucking awesome. Come to America and freak out the squares.
SWEEPERS - Demonstration
I’m a tough sell for a gimmick band. I like a lot of goofy bands, but that’s different than a gimmick band. Like, for instance, Personal and the Pizzas. What the fuck is that? Not only is the gimmick dumb as fuck (look it up yourself), but they don’t even fucking rock. That’s the unforgivable sin. I’d rather listen to fucking Screeching Weasel, and that’s saying a lot. Nothing good, but a lot. Anyway, you could just listen to Liquor Store’s “Free Pizza” and call it a day. Or skip all the bullshit and put on the fucking Devil Dogs, like a real rock n’ roller. Anyway, I’m not even here to talk rock n’ roll! I’m talking punk—the fast, nervous, jerky kind. The kind Sweepers excel at. The gimmick is cleaning. They whip out brooms at gigs and tidy up the place, which seems like a nice service all things considered. You should give them a little extra from the door if they play your place. They are from Philly and wear all white, so it’s like if Ruin ran a “no toxic chemicals used”-style cleaning company (I almost worked for one of those; buy my own overpriced supplies? no fucking thanks) instead of being weird hippies (Ruin is sick btw). Sweepers play super-tight clean-toned punk like the massive Minutemen fans they probably are; guessing there’s a Uranium Club record or two in the stacks as well. Demonstration is eight frantic yet controlled routines executed to perfection. I don’t know how long we can put off mopping, but maybe just a little longer. When I look to the future, I sweep.
STRAFE F.R. - Octagon Sphere
Over the last few years, Strafe Für Rebellion has become a real favorite. The music they made in the 1980s is heavy and mysterious in both sound source and artistic intention, often seeking to throw you off balance and always succeeding in pulling you into its gaping maw. It’s a little scary, but it’s worth it. There are a select group of seekers that trawl the same deep, dark waters—Coil, H.N.A.S., Zoviet France, NWW etc. The Strafe FR catalog (they shortened the name at some point in the ‘90s) is vast and upper echelon. On the recent, essential Klar!80 compilation, you can find evidence of their earliest work from the dawn of the ‘80s. After breaking up in the ‘90s, the core duo of Bernd Kastner and Siegfried M. Snyiuga reunited in the mid-2010s and have put out a string of great albums. Octagon Sphere came out almost a year to the day from my current vantage point, and—surprise surprise—it’s an excellent piece of work. These guys are seasoned pros and masters of the art of sound design. They have such skill with juxtaposition, slotting incongruous elements beside each other and making them live in uneasy harmony. The title track opens the album with a disturbing blend of ominous singing, mysterious clangs, menacing synths, chaotic water movement; there is a humidity to this introduction, preparing you for what’s to come. “Tank 20” brings the beats along with a slice and dice atmosphere worthy of Coil at their techno peak. It’s kind of a throwback jam, in the best possible sense. Most Dais artists would sell their soul for a banger of this caliber. “Elephant Hunting” comes busting in on a lopsided groove and places ethereal vocals over a constantly mutating soundscape, one that grows more erratic and threatening by the minute. This is Strafe F.R. 101 and I am here for it. Have these guys ever been on the cover of The Wire? Would they even want to be? Whatever, let’s leave them alone to construct their little worlds for us to get lost in. Seeya around the next corner, lads.
TARKAMT - Pure Fucking Magic
Egyptian musician Cherif El-Masri has serious cred: this guy plays guitar in the Invisible Hands with Alan Fucking Bishop. So why the fuck is he out in the desert making gnarly gnoise for a tape label from Seattle? Because the dude likes noise and because noise is awesome, that’s why (call it an informed guess). This is old-fashioned audio splatter, utilizing radio transmissions and distortion pedals like the Good Lord intended. What sets Pure Fucking Magic apart is El-Masri’s ability to wring drama out of a minimal set-up by establishing dynamics in a notoriously dynamics-averse field. I like when noise has texture and shape and you can almost see it hovering in the air, deciding which way to go. My favorite cut is “Falcon Gliding On Radio Waves,” but the buzzing insects gradually succumbing to frenzy during “Basilisk Molt” is brutally effective as well. A note on the packaging—it’s over-the-top awesome, with a risograph-printed envelope made from a certain Company’s design, a dossier of declassified UAP photos, a feather and a stainless steel ball bearing. Tarkamt: where the brutal and the beautiful hold equal weight.
VOLK SOUP - Incompetent Hits: The Singles Vol. 1
I’m not even sure how I stumbled upon this Leeds group, but I think that I put off listening to them for a minute because I thought it was gonna be like the Viagra Boys or Fat White Family or some embarrassing shit like that. Volk Soup is closer to the smart-ass facepunch thwack of bands like Thank and USA Nails, but they’re not as “noise rock” as those bands, who still tend to deal in the cards that AmRep et al laid out way back when. Incompetent Hits is really the first Volk Soup album, as it collects a series of digital singles from the last few years. I do appreciate how they put out the singles as virtual 45s, two songs at a time, but it flows together as an album well enough. “Wiping Arse Blues” and “Billionaire” pound out seasick grooves that manage to sound like something Ron Johnson would have put out circa 1987, which is high praise in my book. “I Shot Him and I Ran” weds McClusky snark to a KBD-esque sense of camp. Parts of “Virile Young Man” sound like early Adam and the Ants and “I Don’t Wanna Share My Face” is an anti-social media taunt that’s like a PiL song squeezed into actual pill form. Keep an eye on ‘em.
WATT - Recorded in Miami 1989-1991
Watt—Bill Orcutt’s pre-Harry Pussy duo with drummer Tim Koffley—are like a lost SST band equally indebted to D. Boon and Samuel Beckett. You’re right there in the room as these two duck and weave while keeping mum on the mic. Unlike Vladimir and Estragon, this pair seems to be having a great goddamn time throughout the album’s duration. Five years later, Mao Tse Helen, a shotgun wedding of Minutemen swing with Beefheartian vocals, would tread similar ground in Richmond, but that’s a story for another time. As per usual, Orcutt was clearing his own path. Not even Joey Ramone could predict what lay in the future, for the endgame remains unknowable and unnamable.
ZERO BARS - Demo 2023
I don’t know anything about this band except they’re from Toronto and this shit rules. What else do you fuckin want, you greedy pig?? On the Bandcamp page, Brian Flynn sez: “Fucking brilliant. Nothing more profound to say.” Turn it up and get bent.
RANDOM RADIO RECCO
SAB #___?
I Wouldn’t Want To Forget Me
4/9/2019
https://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/85201
I have been DJing on WFMU for 8 years now. That’s 375 shows, most of which are three hours long. That’s a lot of music. I think I’ll try to pick a random show to highlight every week or so. For now, check this one out (literally scrolling down the page and stopping at a random show). If you don’t have WFMU’s free app, I highly recommend downloading it. It’s extremely reliable and works quite well.
This episode starts out with Magical Power Mako but by the end of the first set, we’re already rocking out to Nomeansno. For some reason, a two song only set follows, but it’s Venom P. Stinger and Tar, so that doesn’t suck. A whole bunch of punk and art rock follows (Guinea Worms-Railroad Jerk-The Mae Shi) until we find ourselves in the final set with Odwalla88, Plus Instruments and a couple of ringers named John Cage and Sun Ra. Ain’t life grand?