QUITS, MOON PUSSY, CHERRY SPIT: 'ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES'

  QUITS, MOON PUSSY, CHERRY SPIT: 'ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES'

 

'Above all else they appeared wholly at venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order…’

--Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

 

***

'A swarming, a wolfing...'

--Deleuze/Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

 

And, yes, that's how these bands come at you out of the speakers and amps: a swarming, a wolfing, one or several.

 

Considered reductively by genre, say, Noise Rock, these three bands, Quits, Moon Pussy and Cherry Spit, have a fair amount in common. They're loud (Very!). Their songs stop, stutter, start again, stop again. Though occasionally modulated, the vocals are most often hoarse, raw, clamorous. Even when only one individual is singing it still sounds like the three heads of Cerberus: Howling.

 

Quits and Cherry Spit employ a pair of guitars each. Moon Pussy has one guitar. All of them keep busy setting your hair on fire.

 

The rhythm sections are basic, even skeletal: Bass. Drum. Clatter.

 

And though the bands might share similar strategies, their tactics are their own.

 

In Quits, Luke and Doug pit guitars and vocals against each other and against themselves. Luke in particular has honed his voice to a singular pitch, anguished and angry -- the sound of another door being torn off a Boeing jet -- only this time, you're strapped to it.

 

How Moon Pussy's Ethan gets all that noise out of one guitar is astonishing. That he can be heard over Cristina's singing, even more so. Though all three of these bands mix up their rhythms and textures, Moon Pussy are the masters of constructing dense, intricate mazes of noise and melody -- songs of the Trickster slyly stealing your food, your tv, your beer -- your girl, your boy. Nothing left but a smile and a wink.

 

Cherry Spit are the newest of these bands but individually they've all been around for awhile. What's most immediately impressive with Cherry Spit is the absolute whirlwind of sound generated by the guitar work of Ricardo and Jackson. Now one, now the other rises out of the maelstrom with a riff, a lead, a set of chords that can't be topped until the other abruptly breaks through the din and grabs you by the neck and shakes you like you're trying to ride out an Oklahoma tornado in a cardboard box. Cyrena's vocals are a taunt, bloodied, unbowed, unforgiving. No quarter asked. None given.

 

***

All three of these bands are, right now, based in Denver. They play a lot and occasionaly share the same stages. Keep an eye on their Instagram feeds and you'll know what they're up to. You've been warned.

 

Quits:

Bandcamp:

https://quits.bandcamp.com/music

https://sleepinggiantglossolalia.bandcamp.com/

Insta: @quitsband

Moon Pussy:

https://moonpussy.band/

Bandcamp:

https://moonpussy.bandcamp.com/music

Insta: @m00npuss

Cherry Spit:

Bandcamp:

https://cherryspit.bandcamp.com/album/demo

Insta: @_cherryspit

:::SIGNAL:::NOISE:::SIGNAL:::NOISE:::

SPEED DEMONS: MINUTEMEN AT BLUE NOTE, BOULDER 7/9/1984

SPEED DEMONS

Minutemen

Blue Note, Boulder

July 9, 1984

 ***

Westword, July 25, 1984

***

When California’s Minutemen played Boulder’s Blue Note recently, the mixed Denver/Boulder audience provided the real entertainment.

When the tofu-and-earth-shoe crowd met the grittier urban Denver stock, an ‘80s identity crisis of epic proportions resulted. At first, the New Age punks couldn’t seem to face slamming; they finally settled on a style mid-way between aerobics and suicide. The dance-floor melee hovered between a sweaty, orgiastic love-in tangle and kinetic skank explosions: transcendental anarchy rules!

Like the minutemen of history, this hardcore band came not to stay, but to warn.

Minutemen songs are brief (mostly less than a minute long), cryptic signals that encode the dislocations of comfort and disaster common to our experience. Boiling down elements drawn from hardcore, rock, jazz, even country swing, the band has developed a set of shorthand notes to the Terror: a gaunt, haywire hieroglyphics of noise and speed.

Starting with The Punchline in 1981, the Minutemen have released four lp’s and a clutch of singles. Although produced by only a three-piece band, the music is astonishingly dense and tangled. The hallmarks are D.Boon’s lean, knotted guitar lines and singing, Mike Watt’s cut-up bass and George Hurley’s sharp, brittle drumming.

Long associated with the California hardcore scene, the band has adopted more of the attitude than the sound of that movement: The common denominator is speed.

The last great disruption of form in popular music was the late ‘60s expansion of the song structure: the decompression of the three-minute radio hit. Improvisation and ‘expanding’ consciousness egged each other on until drugs and ego bloated what was initially an exciting and innovative mutation into the fat, shapeless grotesqueries best exemplified by the Grateful Dead at their longest – and worst.

When punk came along in the late ‘70s, it immediately began to hack away at this carcass, tearing away at the immense façade of false sensitivity to reveal the rickety, attenuated skeleton hiding beneath. In their rush to judgment, though, punks sacrificed a great deal of complexity in order to render sound and lyric down into their own statement. What remained was a freeze-dried nihilism: concentrated, certainly nourishing, but nonetheless a stew in which all elements began to taste the same.

If punk tried to defoliate the over-grown jungle of pop and disco in the late ‘70s, leaving a naked landscape of scorched and narrow forms, the Minutemen are gardeners of a different sort, compressing the music into brief bonsai songs packed with complex sound and lyrics. Any given Minutemen song is bursting at the seams with riffs and words all arranged in tight, precise patterns. There is a rigid, implosive order, as though the Minutemen are trying to develop a microchip music in which each song is freighted with more and more information in an ever diminishing space.

Live, the sense of urgency that radiates (at times oppressively so) from the recordings is mitigated by the band’s seemingly effortless control of the material. D.Boon should be declared a national monument; he’s certainly big enough. With his shaved head, bull-neck and 250-pound bulk, Boon looms over the stage like a mobile Mt.St.Helens. And amazingly, the Minutemen never miss a beat as they flawlessly piece together the intricate Chinese-puzzle of parts that make up their songs.

For the Minutemen, ‘speed’ becomes a testing ground for control and independence, a miniature model for life lived at the edge of a social speed of light. Their most recent lp was not called The Politics of Time for nothing. Marshall McLuhan stated that the ever-increasing speed of communication had turned our world into a global village; Paul Virilo in his book on pure war writes that ‘the field of freedom shrinks with speed.’ The Minutemen race against themselves and a world always a step away from destruction here along the furthest borders of such ideas.

Boulder’s own Kaustic Kids opened for the Minutemen and acquitted themselves reasonably well during a brief set covering punk and neo-punk standards. While they have enthusiasm in abundance, their execution of the material was thin and distant, pleasant but inconsequential: Adam Ant at the Soda Straw.

Westword

July 25, 1984

 

RSD: ‘Come On By. We’ll Make A Day Of It’

 RSD: ‘Come On By. We’ll Make A Day Of It’

‘Music has become comic in the present phase primarily because something so completely useless is carried on with all the visible signs of the strain of serious work.'
T.Adorno, 'On The Fetish Character In Music And The Regression Of Listening'

*****

I'm not a fan of Record Store Day.

That may sound odd or even churlish coming from someone who has been in the record store business since 1978, 45 years of buying and selling pre-recorded music in a variety of formats. Why wouldn't I want a day dedicated to the exact thing I've been doing  every day of the year (excluding Thanksgiving and Christmas, the only days we don't unlock our doors and welcome in all and sundry) for four and a half decades of, more or less, commercial bliss?

…

The first RSD was in 2008. I'm not sure which one of the Dave's we had working for us at the time (there must have been five or six of them, including, of course, my partner, Dave Stidman) but it was one of the Dave's who was a buyer at the time, so most likely Dave Wilkins or Dave Kerr. Anyway, one or maybe both of the Dave's came to me and said there's this new thing going to happen and it's called Record Store Day and it's going to be a special day to sell vinyl records.

At which, feeling churlish, I pointed to the unlocked front door and the handful of customers picking through our racks of music and said, 'Every day we're open is (lower case) record store day. We've got records to sell. People come in and buy those records. That's a record store day.'

Came the reply, 'But... but... Record Store Day is going to have all these special releases that are only available on Record Store Day!'

Which brought out even more churl: 'Ah, so Record Store Day is going to clog us up with a bunch of tin-plated, cheapjack, phony 'collector's records'. Are we going to have a Kenny Rogers "The Gambler" on gambler's visor green vinyl?'

'But... but...'

But me no buts. That first year we had no Record Store Day. We did have, lower case, a record store day. We were open. We sold some records. It was, as usual, a (lower case) record store day.

****

Lost in the fog of time, I don't remember if I continued to carry on in this, admittedly, high-handed, arrogant and churlish manner, or if I relented the next year or held out a bit longer - but relent I did and we were soon in the thick of it, celebrating in a single, concentrated, consecrated day, Record Store Day.

****

And the Dave's were right. Record Store Day has been a blast and I'll even admit that occasionally, not often but once in awhile, the powers-that-be with RSD will manage to put out something that almost qualifies as a genuine 'collectible'.

But what I've learned over the years is that regardless of what I think of the quality of the collectibles on hand for RSD, it is the joy and excitement of the people rushing through our doors that is genuine.

It's like a special Christmas just for my people: the nerds and goofs, the obsessives who have to have that Beatles single reissue with the extra three seconds where you can hear Paul pass gas as John falls over into the drum kit laughing.

Yeah, I'd buy that.

****

There is something spooky about RSD though -- we've had the damnedest luck, especially with the weather. It's been raining or, worse, snowing, on several of the days, occasioning discomfort and inconvenience for the hardy souls who show up early to get in the door first. We usually have a line-up of bands to play on the sidewalk and we've had to call that off more than once - in fact, just last year we had a fine slate of local psych bands scheduled but Mother Nature had other ideas - though we did get the bands on the sidewalk the next Saturday.

The craziest thing we had happen on RSD was a few years ago, pre-covid times, when our neighbor, Xcel, the electric company, decided that a Saturday in April, the exact RSD, was when they would do some major upgrades to their sub-station across the street from Wax Trax. This led Xcel to shut down 13th from Clarkson to Pearl while hauling in on several flat-bed trucks these enormous electric transformers that were as big as a house and looked like they had their own gravitational field. The noise from the trucks, the cranes, the machinery was deafening. Parking, already at a premium in our area, was insane.

And still, it was a great day! Probably our best -- until the next year when we had another RSD.

****

Well, that brings us almost to the end of this little piece. So let's talk about the year we didn't have a Record Store Day. No, not the one I wouldn't let the Dave's have. I mean the one we fucked up.

Here's how Denver's Westword reported it back in 2015:

'Wax Trax, an iconic record store here in Denver, will have more vinyl than you can browse through this Saturday, but nothing in stock will be an exclusive Record Store Day release. Because the store sold an exclusive release online for Black Friday, it was contacted by the head of Record Store Day, Michael Kurtz, informing them that they wouldn't be allowed to participate in this spring's April 18 event, as online sales are strictly against the rules.

"There was a mishap," says Wax Trax employee Sherry Gray. "We did something that we weren't supposed to do. He just wrote us an e-mail saying we can't participate this year, but we can reapply for next year."

"We made a mistake," says owner Duane Davis. "We thought it was a piggy-back Record Store Day release, but it was an actual exclusive."

Davis reached out to the Record Store Day organizers to try to sort out the mishap, but they never responded.'

So that was not good and we got spanked.

We made our amends, reapplied and were back on the next year. But... rain, snow, Xcel... and then 2020, the Covid Lockdown. No Record Store Day. No (lower case) record store day at all.

Dave and I have prided ourselves on being open 363 days every year, year in, year out: we're open. Rain or shine. Blizzard or tornado. Hungover and staggering. Cars running into the store. Fucking Xcel. Whatever, we’re open.

***

So I hope to see you Saturday, April 20, 2024. God willing and the creeks don't rise. It will be both Record Store Day and (lower case) record store day. Our doors will be open. We'll have some records to sell.

Come on by. We'll make a day of it.

Duane

Black Flag, Rainbow Music Hall 1984

 

When Black Flag was scheduled to play Denver's Rainbow Music Hall in April, 1984, your humble scribe here, in addition to working at Wax Trax, was also writing occasionally for Westword. The music editor at the time was Gil Asakawa and Westword was at the peak of its most Village-Voice-like glory. Patti Calhoun, Editor In Chief, Publisher and (I think) Owner, was tough, fair, committed, fearless.

Gil was a good guy and let me get away, not with everything, but a lot. A helluva lot! In true Wax Traxian spirit I was not just opinionated but absolutely reveled in the sort of stylistic excesses I had been infected with by deep immersion in the UK music press of the early 1980s -- especially the New Musical Express, Sounds and Melody Maker.

NME's Paul Morley was my model: erudite, fiercely polemical, brazenly intellectual, outrageously provocative -- I paddled my tiny canoe piled high with pages from Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, Lacan, Adorno and Benjamin in the wake of Paul Morley's mighty dreadnought of severe and demanding prose.

How short I came of the mark you will observe below...

Music Editor Gil knew, of course, that I was the one to write a piece announcing the Black Flag show -- it was not that I was the only one who even knew who the band was but I was probably the only one that liked them.

And so I got the nod: 1,000 words on this strange, sweaty, disturbingly sincere but frighteningly violent band from LA that seemed to attract more cops than fans at their shows.

Local Anesthetic (Wax Trax Fanzine-July 1982)

Also, I had already seen Black Flag, a couple of years before in 1982 at the Mercury Cafe when it was around the corner from Wax Trax on 13th & Pearl.

That show had been a stunner! Two shows, actually: an afternoon show for all-ages and an evening show for the alcoholics... But those shows are another story.

This Westword piece hit the street the day before the show so I had no idea that the performance would go down in Denver Rock 'n' Roll History as the night Classic Rock Impresario Barry Fey would call in an airstrike on his own position! Yes, this was the night Nig Heist, opening for Black Flag came out on stage in their all-together and proved that nudism not only does not improve Rock 'n' Roll but isn't even remotely sexy.

Well, okay, here it is: Black Flag and Denver...

**************

Westword 4/24/1984

Flag Wavers
by Duane Davis

Listening to Black Flag is the moral equivalent of a dunking in an acid bath, where all the dross is eaten away, where the excesses of the soft, satisfied life are boiled off in a savage, single-minded reductionism that collapses experience to a single cry, a single rage, a single pain.

In other words, this is more than just another flashthrash hardcore punk band from LA.

The music's mind-boggling simplicity refuses all answers, denies all solutions, accepts no excuses. It demands that we turn and face ourselves, that we recognize that if we allow even one to suffer, then we all must suffer. The band offers no veils, no mediation between music and life, as it posits a vocabulary stripped to its barest terms, its simplest metaphors.

Within these astonishingly narrow confines, Black Flag inscribes a primer of raw, direct and immediately accessible emotion. It's a first-grade reader in which Dick and Jane and Spot are brought to bay in Hell; a propaedeutic in which love is revealed as sadism, concern as smothering rage, success as the exercise of arbitrary power, happiness as the refusal of responsibility.

Formed by guitarist Greg Ginn in 1977, Black Flag embodied the American reading of British punk. The band had a gloss that shifted the pace into hyperdrive with the music accelerating like a rhino on amphetamines -- an all-out, all-risk assault that burned its bridges through the sheer heat of movement. Three chords were a luxury, tuning a matter for dilettantes and hooks a sure sign of wimps.Enormous quantities of noise were jammed into one- and two-minute songs that had more to do with detonation than duration.

On the dancefloor, pogoing to Black Flag mutated from a solitary jumping up and down in your own private space to a volatile MX cross-hatching of bodies launched in pre-emptive strikes against all borders near and far. The stage no longer elevated a 'performer' who stood aloof and separate, but marked a target for destruction. In its simplest terms, the music offered 'adolescent adjustment crises' in the guise of holocaust, an escalation of growing pains into apocalyptic convulsion.

The Punks did not, of course, invent all this. They had grown up in a society bannered with terrorism, with hourly reports from the war zone that extended to every living room. They were simply raising the language of 'SWAT' and 'Starsky and Hutch' to the pitch of pain they felt mushrooming inside. If the world itself seem at the flash-point of self-immolation, what handier, more ready metaphor for personal pain than what you see on TV or read in the headlines?

But if hardcore was telling us nothing new when it said growing up is a tough proposition, its form for expressing such age-old homilies speaks volumes (pun intended). Its refusal of the rhetoric of awareness and understanding is a rough attempt at forcing the recognition of the impenetrable experience of each individual: if I tell you I am aware of how you feel, then I have defined what you are allowed to feel -- particularly if I'm in a position of power as parent or teacher.

Song after song offers a desperately naked and vulnerable narrative: 'Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie/ I need some more/ Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie/ Don't ask what for' and 'Don't you try pretending/ Everything's alright/ I just might start destroying/ Everything that's in my sight.' Clumsy, awkward, gauche, contradictory -- it's a fusion of words and music that contradicts the last musical decade exemplified by singer/songwriters such as Jackson Browne, James Taylor and Joni Mitchell.

The intent is not simply anti-social, it's virulently anti-psychological in its insistence that the '70s version of mental health was a fraud: group therapy, transactional analysis, strokes, gestalt, touchy/feely, getting it together, getting in touch with yourself and looking out for number one.

The music uncovers a vast, pervasive hoax masking the ongoing use of adolescence as a political and coercive label and the channeling of personal growth into roles acceptable to a producer/consumer society.

There's no doubt that the music's extremism leaves it open to all sorts of 'reasonable' questions. Why be ugly? Isn't there more to life than pain? Why no uplift? What about beauty and love and joy? Is this art?

But DAMAGED, Black Flag's 1982 debut lp, established a framework for grounding all these questions: when you ask such things, you can do so only because you think you already have an answer. The album is a landmark, a classic of dark, repressive rage that inhabits a narrow geography between nihilism and fascism; it offers an identity and role wholly Other than what conventional society instruct. The music -- its ideas, emotions and language -- structures a particular ontology, a specific way of being someone. For those, often young and without power, who desperately search for somewhere to belong, the fascination exercised by this music is great. It coalesces all their vague yearnings for freedom and purpose into a pure surface of action and image. What it wants is to be more than just right: it wants, simply, irrevocably, to BE.

The newest lp, MY WAR, (on the SST label), comes after a year-and-a-half of intense legal wrangling with Black Flag's former label, Unicorn, over the rights to release material. Two members of the band were sent to jail after authorizing the release of a double-album compilation of old songs called EVERYTHING WENT BLACK on SST. In addition, Dez Cadena and Chuck Dukowski left the band, leaving singer Henry Rollins and founder/guitarist Gregg Ginn to carry on.

The new material shows no sign of letting up, though. Every song is a provocation to reckless endangerment, a dense knotting of hardcore and heavy metal that weaves a tangled skein of isolation and paranoia, death fears and death wishes. As always with Black Flag, there's a breakdown between psychosis and catharsis, between the disease and its expulsion. This is the aporia of condition and metaphor, the exemplar of the undecidable, unresolvable (con)fusion of life and expressing.

And it's great rock and roll.

Black Flag w/ Meat Puppets & Nig Heist, April 25, 7:30pm, Rainbow Music Hall, Select-A-Seat, 778-0700, $6.

 

PS. yes, that Rainbow marquee is for a different Black Flag show at the Rainbow. 

***

Westword 4/24/1984 01

Westword 4/24/1984 02

Westword 4/24/1984 03

 

Nig Heist 4/25/1984

Nig Heist 4/25/1984

Nig Heist 4/25/1984

Nig Heist 4/25/1984

Cherry Spit: Demo Review

SIGNAL:::NOISE:::SIGNAL:::NOISE

 

Cherry Spit: Demo (5 Track EP on Bandcamp & Spotify)

The songs here don't hide anything from you, nothing's concealed or held back -- it's just that nothing is revealed. Everything that's gone into the making of these tracks has dropped below the event horizon and what we hear is the static from an energy being torn apart on its way into the heart of a black hole.

This is, of course, physically impossible - everything is at once empty but every sound, every moment, every move, has a specific gravity -- like walking in the eye of the Red Storm on Jupiter.

The sound is thick, dense, grinding - oppressive in a way that makes you start to struggle for a breath. An unknowable, unreachable turmoil of guitars, drums and bass with sharp streaks of synth like lightning flickering closer and closer.

The voice is far down in the mix, almost a shadow of a voice, a buried signal arriving with an uncertain message hinting at loss, threat, sorrow and defiance.

The sound hasn't been pulled out of the atmosphere without precedent: echoes and shadows of Lydia Lunch, Sonic Youth, Ut, Kim Gordon's Body/Head, Mars and DNA are fitful, unstable elements decomposing erratically throughout.

***

***
 

 

Cherry Spit is:
cyrena - vocals/bass
ricardo - guitar
jackson - guitar
wayde - drums

Cherry Spit Bandcamp
 

Cherry Spit Spotify

 ***

 

***

jOoHSUhP - Two Reviews

 jOoHSUhP - Two Reviews

****

 jOoHS UhP: 'Big' (jOoHSUhp Bandcamp)

So imagine this happened: Wayne's World has been mysteriously moved to below decks on the USCSS Starfreighter, Nostromo, where Brett and Parker hang out with Wayne and Garth, exchanging fart jokes, secret hand shakes and Grand Theft Auto hacks. It's a party where, when the Alien shows up, he brings along Face Huggers modified into Multi Chambered Hydraulic Turbo-Fusion CyberChill Dab-Ponics Bongs. Ripley, wearing a black tube top, camo pants, a pair of sick Nike’s, and a baseball hat with ‘BROOKLYN’ in big block letters across the front, arrives with a bag of pizza rolls, chili cheese fries, twinkies and Jonsey, her cat, who, unaccountably, is sporting a mohawk.

Oh, it's a party!

And if I were asked to sountrack this get down? I think I could do worse than suggest jOoHS UhP: 'Big'. (jOoHSUhP on Bandcamp).

jOoHS UhP is a tangle of 4 or 5 kids (actually, it's just two - but who knew!?!), who, I would guess, get together in someone’s basement, drink beer, compare skateboard scrapes and bruises, shit talk for an hour or so, and, then, inspired by one of them leaping up and yelling, 'My dick's so hot my pee feels cold', rummage around under the couch for a beat-up Roland or MicroKORG, plug in, hit record, and begin to assault their neighbor's ear drums and a variety of sine waves.

And it's a wild ride: here, it sounds like a Kraken caught in a closet with Raymond Scott and a rabid coyote; there, it blasts out amphetamine collages of noise with bursts of grunts, growls, frog croaks and bowel thumps.
There's a track, 'I'm Sorry,' that's a minute and a half of what sounds like an AI floor polisher going slowly mad in a dark hallway of the Overlook Hotel. Or ‘Black Cherry’ with a slow romilar roll, twangy, dragged out percussive thumps and a fuzzy, catatonic vocal layered over a sinewy trap beat and anchored by deep synth moans that burble up like something from a sea-sick whale. ‘Pretzels’ whangs against your head with a clatter of triphammer beats, industrial strength blarts and slow, queasy keyboard rumbles – while the singer sneers in a thick, greasy voice something about having pretzels in his eyes and having enough salt… oh, and garden gnomes!

Elsewhere, say on ‘Bitchin' In This Bitch’, they begin with some Depeche Mode perkiness laced with a high, clear, ringing icicle drip of tones that quickly morphs into a breathless race to jam in words and beats.

My favorite, though, might be ‘No We Don't Wanna Make Good Music. We Tried And It's Boring’ where the boys throw in everything they got: slow-mo sexy vibe, a shit-ton of blips, bleeps, staggers and skitters, and, wouldn’t you know it, a drunk cowboy ramble that shades into a ferocious Capt Beefheart shouter.

What can I say?!?

‘Party on’!

*A quick note on production: I don’t know what these guys used to create and record the material here, but the sound is very good: clean (where it’s supposed to be); fuzzed out and dirty (where they want it); packed tight as the wire in a hand grenade with every bit of noise fit in like a puzzle and no pieces left over or jammed into the wrong spot. This release is clearly meant to be fast, fun and chaotic – which it is! Nevertheless, the whole package is put together with a fair amount of inventiveness and attention to detail and it’s interesting to take note of the casual professionalism that undergirds the silliness and makes it work. You know… Beavis and Butthead with mad skills.

I like the way they describe their sound themselves: ‘Beats so distorted you can't tell what the fuck is happening accompanied by over-compressed nonsense lyrics and other poorly mixed garbage. We got some good tracks too.’ ( https://joohsuhp.bandcamp.com/album/best-ovv-joohs-uhppppppp )

Yeah, they do!

@glasssrecords @joohsuhp

 

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jOoHS UhP: 'Juice. Feet. Milk.'
15 track album released 9-27-2022 on jOoHSUhp Bandcamp
***

Dollar Store surrealists of sound, jOoHS UhP make a helluva clatter, mostly in a unique Anarcho-HipHop DNA strain all their own, ranging from something like Man Ray and Raymond Scott collaborating on the soundtrack for a Tex Avery animation of Duchamp's Cubist masterpiece, 'Nude Descending A Staircase (No. 2)' to that time a National Guard ammo dump caught fire on Uranus.

Sort of. But not quite. It is its own critter.

Blasting out piano plinks and brown notes with equal abandon, 'Juice. Feet. Milk.' is wildly inventive and extravagently entertaining, bursting at the seams with beats, blarts and bloopers. To my ear, there's a very welcome pitch of the kind of sonic overload and nosebleed, sledgehammer satire indulged in by Uncle Al back in the RevCo days of 'Beers, Steers and Queers'.

So, if you are intrigued by the notion of Bevis and Butthead helping the Beastie Boys pound out a cover of Throbbing Gristle's 'Hamburger Lady', then this buds for you.

Don't wait to hear it on the hydrogen jukebox in Mos Eisley's cantina -- snag it now:

jOoHSUhP on Bandcamp