A Few of My Favorite Things
Four Great Party-Wreckin’, Lease-Breakin’, Cat-Scarin’ Records
by Nik Rainey
It’s tough to ferret out proper platters of blare nowadays. Abrasion is salable now – how else do you explain the Boredoms being on a major label? One era’s poison squeal is another’s mainstream meat – what drove people from the room just a few years past hardly makes the cognoscienti blink anymore. Metal Machine Music? Easy listening, bub. Sonic Death? Been there, deconstructed that. Early Swans? “L.A. Blues?” No New York? Yawn, yawn, yawn. But fear not, exterminators! The following four recs are guaranteed to clear the room of your choice. And you’ll never have to vacuum again.
Missing Foundation 1933/Your House is Mine (Purge/Sound League, 1988) – Every dime store punk combo splashed the talisman of “anarchy” around like a spastic garden hose, but few practiced what they preached like NYC’s Missing Foundation. No songs (just a couple of grating demi-riffs splayed around and played into the ground), utterly unintelligible vocals and sheer ear-shredding amusical krunk. Fun, fun, fun! I think this is a concept album. I don’t wanna know what the concept is.
Suicide “Frankie Teardrop” (Suicide, Red Star, 1977) – Think you’ve heard the Ultimate Rock Scream? Not ’til you’ve recoiled from this claustrophobic psycho-synth epic. As Martin Rev wrings a numbing drone from his broken-down keyboard for ten minutes, a heavily-reverbed Alan Vega recites, no, inhabits, the tale of a working-class smudge driven to killing his wife and child and then himself. Vega’s hot breath chokes the air from your ear canal as he whimpers, twitches, then – AAAAAAAGGGGGGGGHHHHHH!! As bleak as a Hubert Selby novel and kilos more visceral, this nerve-knotting meisterwerk remains one of the scariest songs of all time. Play it for a jaded death-metalhead some time and you’ll see what I mean.
Diamanda Galas “Wild Women With Steak-Knives (The Homicidal Love Song for Solo Scream)” (The Litanies of Satan, Y, 1982) – For one side of her debut album, Big Mama D. adapted a Baudelaire poem and laid it on a bed of ominous, layered electronics. For this, the other side, a bronchitic and speed-tweaked Galas walked into a studio at 3 AM, shrieked non-stop for twenty minutes, and walked out. Yeah! And you should hear the dance mix!
Journey Escape (Columbia, 1982) – This record isn’t particularly abrasive or discordant. It just really sucks.
