No Pain In Pop

More Tight, Punk Jams

Fridays in thrall to the weekend: winter, to warm: us, to more, tight punk jams. The allure of either still ceaseless, songs played fast on guitars and drums exist to bring us closer to the climax of weeks, The Widow Babies, Vivian Grls and PENS all adept at making mischief hours seem less than three minutes away.

MP3: Widow Babies - Mike Watt Created the Universe with a Bass Solo

MP3: Vivian Girls - Damaged

Rattling south on a drum-roll with California plates come The Widow Babies, four who rest up in Pasadena and hang on Long Beach, sniffing the ocean air and shooting amorous glances the way of a thousand older men who just might be Mike Watt, you never know, toiling as they do across the harbor in San Pedro.

“We’ve always kind of viewed Mike Watt as a mythic hero, so we wrote the first song (”Mike Watt Created the Universe with a Bass Solo”) long before the rest of the album,” throater Elise McCutchen says of the The Mike Watt EP (wannit?).

“Vampire Lincoln came about around Halloween of last year. We realized at the last minute that we were expected to dress up for the shows we were being asked to play, and all Danny, our guitarist, had available to him was an Abraham Lincoln mask and a Dracula cape. So the album’s story evolved over time from there.”

The story makes sense.

“The narrative basically goes: Abraham Lincoln comes back from the dead as a vampire, and he’s pretty pissed off after being assassinated and everything, so he decides he wants to take over the world.

“His hands are a little too frail for completing this task, though, so he hatches a plan to steal the hands of the most powerful man in the world and the creator of the universe: Mike Watt.

“Vampire Lincoln sneaks up on Watt one day while he is kayaking, and he severs his hands, causing blood to stream into the river.

“While he is gloating over his seeming victory, though, Watt rises up from the water and plays, without hands, a bass solo so brilliant that Vampire Lincoln merges with the river, never to be seen again.”

A close escape. Musically, these fatherless babes take plenty of guidance from The Urinals’ staccato yelpings, a snark recovered from teacher’s desk decades after Milo left it there and the growling bass tumble of their hero.

Recluses no more

The Vivian Girls are of an obvious Brooklyn lineage, but what they do is so neck-bitingly superior to others of their ilk that they are not to be ignored, UK, when they bring their Velvets-stroked, sequoia-fumed dust-hustle to this isle when the summer’s gone. Their take on autumn’s archived above, dates in December, an out-of-print vinyl issued through Mauled By Tigers will be available on some of the ever-great In The Red’s scarlet plastic “in the fall” (the fine folk at Transparent have more).

Scribbling

To conclude this gigantor bulletin, we want to throw words the way of PENS, who, tiring of heckling us ‘Arse Roads’ as LOOK LOOK (dancing boys), arrive with a new member and dilapidated plimsols to pick their way through London pavements littered with blood and glass.

No Pain In Pop went out last night to see three girls bang drums, fuck around with guitars and holler down through struggling microphones, but were waylaid by a 20-minute-wait for a homeless man’s ambulance. He was asking for money next to the cashpoint when he suddenly sprung a leak somewhere between his hip and his dick (for any that passed, it was blood not piss). IVDU? Used to be, apparently, currently and always a slave of DVT. By the time the spurting had been plugged, we were upstairs in time to see PENS finish with ‘Networking’. Suck.

Anyway, you can hear ‘Networking’ at PENS’ MySpace. We can’t work out if it’s ‘rad’ or ‘awesome’, but for our money ‘FReddie’ does both, unquestionably.

Tags: pens, vivian girls, widow babies

R.I.P. Family Wagon

Photos: Rachael Davis

What once seemed relentless and forever has passed and gone the way of all things, teary congregates, for Gentle Friendly’s family wagon haf died. Quiver for broke cam belts, fried engines, lost pistons.

MP3: Gentle Friendly - Five Girl Night

Want to help Gentle Friendly tour always? Chuck $$$$$ for a new ride:

We are gathered here today, loose and mysterious rabble, to pay respects to a vessel valiant and accommodating, a motor, surrounded by metal and high tenacity polyester, that – even when bullied into situations beyond the remit of its nuclear moniker – sought never to rush the important things in life, allowing us instead to the savour the pleasure of From Here We Go Sublime on a storm-beaten, four-hour drive home from Liverpool in six.

Though I feel I never truly got to know Family Wagon while still the odour of oil lingered on its breath, it was a pleasure to observe its own odd mannerisms and idiosyncratic tics – the inexplicable terror that would grip Family Wagon whenever in close proximity to the 65 mile per hour mark and the way it would transmit that fear to us through windows that rattled and wheels that moaned and ached and threatened to drag us off onto some verge somewhere at the eternal periphery of the Midlands.

By all accounts its final voyage, a mid-morning trolley from a former cotton-spinning mill turned site of communal rhythm rite, was a fitting send off for a timid beast that espoused a “Soon come” mindset, an outlook which, while perhaps not entirely fitting for a vehicle built for prompt deliverance, was valuable to even the most learned among us. May some other deliverance, divine or otherwise, drive you now to tarmac warm and sticky and fleet underfoot, Family Wagon, forever relentless in our hearts.

Tags: family wagon, gentle friendly, memorial fund