Water Rib to Cry Cloud
Baby Venom’s first track includes the hook of one yet to be written. A sad-eyed seed, destined for the dim-light Blancmange found while at the bottom of a new-wave weapon well. The sorry sound of a radio cassette player with dying batteries, cut – dead electric – cutting, at least; it’s last transmission, lost in part, static to static, boom to bust box.
MP3: Baby Venom - Moms and Dads
MP3: Blancmange - Holiday Camp
Flamingo Dancer
Th£ Samps are hard to pin. First, there’s the name - Th£ Samps? The Samps? Th Samps? Yeah, three whole choices. It’s certainly a quandary. Whatever - the similarly equivocal ‘TrainCUMMINGS a Litl More’, flown suburban birds, glides in a kind of taxed mundane, a dance pushed the way of small-town, big-bar cohesion by the bump ‘n grind intimacy of others but dosed with enough madden to set it flailing exempt, a wastrel booty bumping the drinks of statue bores, catching far riddim.
MP3: Th£ Samps - TrainCUMMINGS a Litl More
Saturdig
Or how dirt-nailed, vaccuum-pocket crate diggings disaffected to dredging Saturdays for bore cure. So for penury, A/V cider: ‘Teenage Genocide’, Urinals, ‘Silent Night, Deadly Night’, Harmonia, Bradford, Let’s Wrestle, ‘Love Caboose’, Messrs Randall and Spunt.
Jerk-Off Love Song
Dispensing with vagaries, London’s American Spirit know what they want and they’re gonna get the dry hump they’re after, rubbing blue-balled up through worn denim against some nubile ass. Less a booty call, more a mundane fuck bulletin, Karen coos through ‘The Honeymooners’ as Bundy is found dry-tongued and determined, a narky jerk you can respect a million times more than the similarly sex-wrecked, supine wetlads to be found in shit dude bands like, I dunno, Blink 182 or The Teenagers.
MP3: American Spirit - The Honeymooners
Nite Glide
Original photo: Travis Peterson
In search of totems and musical Troma, Nite Jewel glides sublime, for now at least, on b-movie synths and bass creeps, cruising city unerred and damp with the falling. Serene and rudderless: Ramona, friend of Ariel’s, conscript for Simonetti, blending with the hoods and their prowl glower, the gutter-strewn and the giddynaughts, ‘Chimera’s a liquefied monument, cherubs and gargoyles pimples fleeing the same marble skin.
MP3: Nite Jewel - Chimera
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
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.
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