Revolutions!

MD Listening Club #3.

Slade: I saw these guys last week and it was the most fun I’ve had at a show in ages.

krogerfoot: DNOTHD is one of my favorite albums I’ve never actually owned. I had an unmarked cassette forever and ever and played the shit out of it. I need to buckle down and buy it. I’m glad it’s as great as I remember it.

1981. For the first 4 minutes, pretty standard (if excellently-played) US punk/hardcore. Then it gets…interesting. Like SY before SY, with that pentatonic theme repeating intermittently, a feedback symphony, a demented nightmare train of a drumbeat, Jim Morrison stream of consciousness vocals, tape effects. Then “Youth!” morphs into “You!”, a call to arms. Greg Sage is one of the great unknown guitarists.

Slade: This group is the source of my LoOG handle.
They’ve been around for 30 years with one survivor from the original lineup, Justin Sullivan. When you look up English teeth in the dictionary there’s a picture of him.

krogerfoot: Got two possibilities: Captain Beefheart, or something weird. (ed: “Something weird” won). I picture a DJ going to a lot of record shops in China and Vietnam and putting this together. It’s beautiful in places.

Glyph: Awright, I know what’s next. Something brief. Something rocking. And something with a terrible bandname. When I first listened to AoL, I thought they couldn’t play. It took a couple listens to realize they really, really can. AoL just have a different idea of what constitutes a “hook” (a clang, a scrape); but they aren’t wrong, as they’ve burrowed deep into my brain. Plus vocalist Eric Bachmann had a highly-distinctive rhythmic sensibility in his delivery – very “punchy”, in some ways almost more reminiscent of rapping rather than singing.