Plankton

I seriously cracked up for a good 5 minutes. Your sense of humor is outstanding.

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See location...

Urban Hat€monger ?

You did no wave and didn't do The Ascension by Glenn Branca?

Maybe we should start calling you The Big Pussylord

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Engine

The funniest/strangest thing is that we're supposed to take an interest in what somebody who flaunts his worship of Manowar and irrational fear of spiders has to say about Lydia Lunch and Sonic Youth. I find it difficult to say the least.

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Like an arrow,
I was only passing through.

The Batlord

I actually have a small bit of a revue of his Lesson No 1 for Electric Guitar, but I need to give it another listen to be able to even attempt to finish it. I'll get back to it at some point, but I have the attention span of a gnat so I tend to flit around from this band or this genre at the drop of a hat.

Manowar rules and spiders are the avatar of Satan on Earth.

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The Batlord

CLEVELAND ROCKS!!!: Proto-Punk and Art Rock In the Land of Drew Carey - Part II

Rocket from the Tombs: The Day the Earth Met the Rocket from the Tombs

Alright, so this isn't really an album, and it wasn't released until decades after the band went kaput, but they never actually released anything and it would be impossible to do this without looking at Rocket from the Tombs. Half the band went on to form Pere Ubu for god's sake. As far as I can tell it's just a collection of random demos and live recordings, so it'd be impossible to review it as an album, so I guess I'll just have to treat it as a collection of songs.




Sounds like good-but-not-great proto-punk. Like The Stooges' little brothers. It's not something that I've never heard before, but it is gloriously raw. It's also kinda fun to hear David Thomas singing in a much more raw style than he would in Pere Ubu. I could certainly see how this band would have been influential in Cleveland. Of course, used toilet paper could probably be influential in Cleveland. Fuck Ohio.

There's not a whole lot to say about this. I mean it's pretty cool Stooges worship, but it's not a revelation, and it's not much more than raw proto-punk so it's not like I have to explain it to you. If you're an Ubu fan then I'd recommend this just for the history lesson, but for anyone else it's not mandatory, although "Sonic Reducer" is just the bee knees.




Oh, and is it just me, or does this sound like The Damned's "New Rose"? I'm pretty sure this was made before the Damned even existed, but I have no idea how The Damned would have even heard this. Is there another earlier song that both those bands copied or something?

Edit: Never mind. I just looked and apparently it's a Velvet Underground cover. So I guess The Damned "borrowed" it.

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The Batlord

CLEVELAND ROCKS!!!: Proto-Punk and Art Rock In the Land of Drew Carey - Part III

Devo: Be Stiff EP

Alright, so Devo are from Akron and not Cleveland, but it'd seem wrong to not include them. I actually remember being disappointed the first time I ever listened to them. I'd heard some story that at Devo's first performance it was just one dude in a gorilla mask who played a repetitive riff on a piano over and over again just to see how long 'til everyone got annoyed and left. So, I was hoping for something truly bizarre. Instead I got "Jocko Homo". Which is weird, but you know, not gorilla mask weird. I've never really listened to them since. So, here I go...




Alright, Tin Huey's attempt at being self consciously silly sounding on their debut EP blew, but these guys are both fun as hell and catchy. So take that Tin Huey. I've already listened to the whole EP, and am trying to get through the rest of it, but I'm stuck on the cover of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction". It's fucking awesome that they've used a dance beat to give that song as much energy as the original. I'm gonna have to listen to the Stones version some time, cause the Devo version might just be better.

"Jocko Homo" and "Mongoloid" sound like the sort of new wavey pop that I sort of associate with Devo through their reputation: quirky pop, with simple-as-Pauly-Shore rhythms. Weird as hell sounding, but fun. The rest of the album is pretty much power pop/punk of amazing to pretty damn good quality. "Be Stiff" might just be one of the best power pop songs I've ever heard and has enough power to run Jenna Jameson's vibrators for the better part of a year. I've already played this album at least five times and will definitely be checking out their debut LP for a review soon.

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The Batlord

CLEVELAND ROCKS!!!: Proto-Punk and Art Rock In the Land of Drew Carey - Part IV

Pere Ubu: 30 Seconds Over Tokyo/Heart of Darkness and Final Solution/Cloud 149 singles

These aren't albums, but there's no way in fucking hell I'm skipping over Pere Ubu's early singles. Get ready for me to gush like a sad fanboy. Time to kick my ass again...




Basically this sounds like a cleaned up and classed up version of Rocket from the Tombs. And what a difference a year(?) makes. No longer do David Thomas and Peter Laughner sound like charmingly noisy amateurs. Now they sound like masters of making professional sounding garage(ish) rock that sounds like it could bring 60's garage rock into the modern era if it was released today. Some may see these singles as stepping stones to greater things, but I think that's missing the point. These may not be as self consciously experimental and arty as their albums, but they are very much worth your time.

If I had to describe Pere Ubu at this time, I'd have to say that they sorta sound like a proto-punk version of Black Sabbath. They play relatively slow and heavy-as-fuck. The songs are longish and don't necessarily go anywhere too quickly but prefer to build up with ever increasing tension until they explode with unleashed power. Like the music, David Thomas' vocals are more restrained here than they are in RftT or later Pere Ubu, and they fit the music perfectly. Yet even if Pere Ubu isn't exactly a pop band at this time, they certainly know how to pull catchiness from the jaws of intelligent art rock.

All of this shiznit is pretty much essential, but the star of the show is "30 Seconds Over Tokyo". Just a lumbering beast of a song that crushes you with apocalyptic claustrophobia before exploding with the aforementioned unleashed power. I'm not usually a lyrics kinda guy, but I make an exception for this song. They describe the Doolittle Raid, which was the first bombing run on the home islands of Japan during WWII. The lyrics describe a terrifying, tripped out fantasy journey that sounds like the world is about to end. I could listen to this song over and over again, and will probably take up smoking weed again at some point in the future just to listen to this song while baked off my ass.

There is one odd man out though. "Cloud 149" doesn't sound a million miles away from Devo's oddball pop, but it throws a strange riff over it all that somehow reminds me of country. Weird but cool. So, I'm gonna stop now lest my fanboyism becomes truly embarrassing.

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Unknown Soldier

I can't imagine you listening to Devo, but their debut album is a classic of its time. In fact I love the first five albums.

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Metal Wars

Power Metal

Pounding Decibels- A Hard and Heavy History

The Batlord

CLEVELAND ROCKS!!!: Proto-Punk and Art Rock In the Land of Drew Carey - Part V

Electric Eels: Having A Philosophical Investigation With The Electric Eels

I actually had to spend a good amount of time just finding a site that had their discography. I am led to believe that this is a formerly unreleased album by this band. Hopefully this is so...




It's certainly noisy. The vocalist sounds remarkably similar to Johnny Rotten. The lyrics that he seems to be shouting are even similarly anti-everything. But they broke up in 1975 and didn't seem to have released anything in that time, so I sort of doubt that this is anything more than a coincidence. During my searches I kept coming across people who seemed to worship these dudes. I was expecting something mind blowing. All I'm really getting is tuneless noise. The only song that's really sticking in my head for even five seconds is "Agitated" which works for much the same reason that any Sex Pistols song works. Catchy and delightfully abrasive. But even this song sucks monkey balls compared to the Sex Pistols. I'm gonna chalk this one up to a loss. Thanks anyway, dudes.

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The Batlord

CLEVELAND ROCKS!!!: Proto-Punk and Art Rock In the Land of Drew Carey - Part VI

Dead Boys: Young, Loud, and Snotty

Alright, I've done Rocket from the Tombs. I've done Pere Ubu, a band that came from the ashes of RftT. So, I guess I'd better do the other band that formed after RftT imploded...




Yawn. Now listening to Generic Punk Rock Album No. 2746. I dig punk as much as the next angry twenty something, but I do like my punk to actually sound good. The Dead Boys do not. They sound like everything that was boring about Rocket from the Tombs, just with a shittier singer. If they wanted to do what they were doing without the artiness of Thomas and Laughner, then they could have at least upped then ante and not just stuck their thumbs up their asses and whistled a jaunty but boring tune. This album is masterful at taking second rate songs and doing absolutely nothing at all with them. I am almost done with it and not a single song has stuck out to me as worthy of note. Even their version of "Sonic Reducer" can't touch the Tombs version. Good job dropping the Dead (huhuhuh) weight Ubu.

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