Search Results for "Art Black"

The connecting factor here is Tex Perkins, but really we’re talking about a hefty chunk of Australia’s ugliest, least velvet underground. On Axeman’s Jazz, the Beasts of Bourbon — Tex (vocals), Spencer Jones (guitar) and three past or present Scientists — play lazy, garagey nihilistic C&W with moderately straight faces. Highly Crampsian in feel, the…

Anyone unfamiliar with this Lower East Side (Manhattan, NYC) mob of miscreants might well ascertain all they need to know by taking a look (and a sniff) at the cover of an early single that came spattered in (very real) pig’s blood. All of those left in the room after first exposure will no doubt…

Noted painter/woodcut artist Bill Hamper considers music a sideline, a hobby. But don’t tell that to record producer Rollin Slim, or music historian/art director William Loveday (or his colleague, Chatham Jack), Jack Ketch or…Billy Childish. Idiosyncratic dyslexic poet of discontent and disgruntlement, Hamper organized a mutually hateful bunch into the Medway (named for a British…

New York’s garage-rocking Fuzztones — Rudi Protrudi, Deb O’Nair and three lesser-named cohorts — do their wild Crampabilly thing on Leave Your Mind at Home, seven numbers recorded live. The sound approaches bootleg quality, but that hardly matters — the shrieks and demented guitar solos here don’t exactly call out for laser-level fidelity. Raveup enthusiasm…

Universally ignored and/or abhorred during their existence, Steel Tips were one of the few punk bands in the late ’70s to wallow in and lionize actual street-level violence, as opposed to costumes and makeup. At a time when sado shock was an easily marketable commodity, this New York group trafficked in genuine physical assault, attacking…

Originally known as the Milkboilers, Sarah, Hilary and Louise first clustered around a microphone to sing girl- group backup on records by the Milkshakes, for whom they doubled as groupies and squeezes. After taking lead chores on “Boys,” they cut their own two-volume set of four-song 7-inches “with musical accompaniment by Thee Milkshakes” for Big…

Much of the Dicks’ early output can most flatteringly be described as forgettable political punk, yet Gary Floyd’s mongrel Texas blues howl and some genuinely hooky snippets certainly snag attention (see Live at Raul‘s’ “Hate Police,” also recorded as the Dicks’ first single and later covered by Mudhoney). These People, recorded following a lineup shift…

The Bats’ taut jangle has become nearly synonymous with both New Zealand’s pop underground and Flying Nun’s rich roster. The quartet of singer/guitarists Robert Scott and Kaye Woodward, bassist Paul Kean and drummer Malcolm Grant has been writing and recording delicious pop gems since 1983, but didn’t get around to recording a proper full-length album…

When organist Hans Ingemansson relinquished songwriting and lead vocals to guitarist Robert Jelinek in the mid-’80s, picking up a new rhythm section in the bargain, Sweden’s premier modern beat-psych combo offhandedly changed names from the Backdoor Men to the Creeps and made a big splash in the small pond of garage punk devotees with the…

Elevated (strung up?) as the newest breed of rock’n’roll hero — martyred chronicler — Lester Bangs was a timely victim for the perennial personality cult, which seized upon his accidental death in April 1982 to resurrect his seminal rock writing for a new fanzine audience. By turns introspective and scathing, his dissection of music was…

This aggressively melodic Southern California punk-pop trio got a reputation for its juvenile porn-movie fetishism (the first two albums feature skinflick stars as cover models). But the simple, uptempo music is smarter and catchier than the band’s imagery would suggest, even if the lyrics are stupid as often as they’re clever. Energetic and insistent yet…

Although barely considered worth a footnote today (cross-reference under “singleminded” and “energy OD”), the Hypstrz were nevertheless radical in their own special time and place, blasting through ’60s garagemania in late-’70s Minneapolis, purposefully stamping their frantic rifferama into countless pubescent brains, personalizing punk in a subversively idiosyncratic (and decidedly song-oriented) manner, thereby paving the way…

1979: The Pop Rivets, a Canterbury group of devoted acolytes to punk’s gritty DIY ethos, release Greatest Hits, home-recorded and enclosed in handmade sleeves (later repressed in printed covers; later still retitled for its Hangman reissue). A more mod-oriented and less reserved TV Personalities or Desperate Bicycles, the Rivets (aka Rivits) retrospectively fit neatly in…

Initially another bunch of misfit goodfernaughts in thrall of shock, volume and outrage, Austin, Texas’ Big Boys were well matched with cross-dressing nascent blues revisionists the Dicks on the LP they shared, recorded loud and dirty at their hometown’s premier end-of-the-’70s punk showplace. The self-released Where’s My Towel better indicates the band’s ultimate strengths: Randy…

Lesser-known purveyors of the “Medway Delta” sound, Graham Day’s Prisoners/Prime Movers, alongside Billy Childish’s myriad combos, butted their way into prominence through sheer persistence in the ’80s Chatham (the city between London and Canterbury where the Medway River meets the North Sea) chapter of the Great Garage R&R Manifesto. Less spontaneous than Mr. C and…

Noble philosopher and drooling idiot, transcendent shaman and earthbound sucker, Iggy Pop is in many ways the ultimate embodiment of rock’n’roll. While a similar claim can be made for artists from the Stones to the Clash to the Ramones to Half Japanese, the beast born James Newell Osterberg is a walking, talking one-man melodrama, reflecting…

Prominent among US-worshipping foreigners, London’s Birdhouse managed to amass a sizable following for their slavishly imitative Motor City drone with a 1986 single, “My Birdman.” Burnin’ Up was released as a six-song EP in the UK and a ten-song album in America; except for Vic Maile’s crunching production and an obnoxious slap at metal/rap, the…

Blindly idolizing the Sex Pistols et al., Santa Barbara’s Rotters knowingly baited the censors in 1978 with their first 45, “Sit on My Face Stevie Nix” b/w “Amputee,” which garnered considerable press when it was instantly banned from LA record stores and radio. One of the most slavishly imitative tributes to pure ’77 UK punk…

If Henry Rollins incarnates all the smoldering hatred and intensity of familyman Charlie Manson, then Sky Saxon — the legendary leader of LA’s protopunk Seeds — is a self-made construct of all the qualities Rollins discarded: drug-addled, hippie mystical, stuck in the ’60s, inconsistent and unfocused. The above discography is a necessarily abbreviated listing of…