- Xray Eyeballs: Not Nothing (Kanine - 2011)
- K-Holes: K-Holes (Hozac - 2011)
Great is the power of steady inclination. Only 18 years passed between Larry & the Blues Notes’ “Night of the Phantom” and its resurrection on the first issue of the first volume of Back from the Grave – 1983 mind you. The Blue Notes and Alarm Clocks and Henchmen and One Way Streets, et al had a colossal impact on me from that moment in 1985 when I snapped up their comped teen angst from Main Street Records in Northampton, took the bus back to Amherst (with a nonbeliever – what a bummer) and dropped the needle after soaking in Warren’s supercilious liner verbiage: KAPOW! The Elite's “My Confusion”! Satisfaction, sweet spot tapped. Looks like I wasn't the only one.
Fast forward 24 years later to September 2009 at Mercury Lounge for a first encounter with Golden Triangle. They're opening for Ty Segal, whose set was lousy, although I’ve seen him since and he’s doing just fine. Anyway, they looked like refugees from those Back From the Grave covers – tattered goth zombie ghouls in leather jackets, higher heels, vampy puss faces and bad girl posturing. But when their grimy garage zoink launches it really shuts me up. I am all in. Haters may abound, but there's no denying the rat like edge of their pilfered boogie. Isn't this the expected upshot of those Crypt seeds? Far better it be Golden Triangle than the gunk punk metaled minions who flexed their interscopes across the 90’s and beyond (although I lost the thread in ’92). I saw GT three or four more times prior to their late 2010 suspension and each episode was a real cool time, positioning themselves as BK conduits to the horizontal action in-love-with-these-times neo garage faux degeneration. Go.
(Then again, sometimes I feel like a chump throwing in with these ersatz heathens, especially when standing next to Doug Mosurock or John Allen, whose esteem for the form is far less forgiving. Perhaps I’m still scarred from John’s first visit to my apartment 20+ years ago when he mocked my Fuzztones albums. Yea, I know the qualitative difference between the Fuzztones and the Cheater Slicks, thank you very much and I am also awares, I think, that those early Crypt salvos’ve spawned more contemporary variants than should be counted. If there’s a form in which the distance between phoning it in and peanut butter love is a trifle, this is it, and some folks just don’t have the love. Who can blame them? Who really misses Sympathy’s impenetrable lack of quality control?)
Excuse the seesawing self-doubt, it's in my nature; back to the rat pedal combustion. Whatever confusion there is about these times, all senses tell me that the GT subdivisions conjured two distinctively peanut butter worthy records in 2011. O.J. San Felipe - this guy appears to be everywhere, doing everything. I leave my exclusively secluded neighborhood to socialize maybe what - twice every month? - and this guy is always around. I’m at the Duane Reade picking up my Hair Club for Men products, he’s there. Dropping the kids at school, he’s there. At the DMV, he's there. Yet, he's got the songs. They churn like weird spiders glitzed with spankled twang, a constant buzz and that Sponge Bob voice. Can’t believe he pulls it off, but he writes distinguished AM radio hits – in a universe where zombie ghouls eat Duran Duran records in an inverted simulacrum of 1965.
Who’s been playing K-Holes the first two Bloodloss records? No, not the one with Mark Arm, those real early ones – Human Skin Suit (1987) and The Truth Is Marching In (1990). That’s some ugly greasy pop right there. What makes K-Holes so convincing is yea, that swamp sax (finally someone gets it right!), but also the freak art vibe leaching from every note. There’s a sense of purpose with this group that eludes many other practitioners of ugly music, the homoerotic enthrall just one facet of how they can effectively hustle the evil hoodoo. It may all be a put on, but when the garage is this outré it warps lover’s wands all the way back to Esquerita. Xray Eyeballs and K-Holes make like it ain't the summer of love all over again (let's hope Tim Warren can still make the rounds). There's no question then that they've earned their place in 2011 as the 21st seating of a wicked company.
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