In a world of numb, every feeling is strange, every emotion a compelling mystery.
But out in the car on the road of the night, there’s answers and more. There’s headlights and roadkill and a disregard of the encroaching dawn. Climb inside, feel hands on your thighs and the stars in your eyes.
Dead To Me, the debut album from Belfast’s Girls Names is released this week. In promotion of the album’s release, the band are touring from the end of April through the start of May. All dates below.
Thanks to everyone who has helped up to this point. Big love to all.
25th April – The Menagerie, Belfast Dead To Me Release Party w/Third Man Theme + Charles Hurts
28th April – CQAF Marquee, Custom House Sq, Belfast w/Gang of Four
29th April – Auntie Annie’s Belfast, DJ Set w/Seapinks
30th April – Hello Operator, Dublin w/Cap Pas Cap + Magic Pockets
1st May – SFTOC Festival, King’s Arms, Salford, Manchester
2nd May – Cargo, London w/ O’Death
3rd May – Spanky Van Dykes, Nottingham
4th May – Buffalo Bar, Cardiff
5th May – The Lexington, London w/ PS I Love You
6th May – Dead To Me London LP release party @ Shackwell Arms, London
21st May – The Menagerie, Belfast w/Chain and the Gang
“When Brecht, on the way from his home to the theatre in July 1953, passed the column of Soviet tanks rolling towards the Stallinaee to crush the worker’s rebellion, he waved to them and wrote in his diary later that day that, at that moment, he (never a party member) was tempted for the first time in his life to join the Communist Party. It was not that Brecht tolerated the cruelty of the struggle in the hope that it would bring a prosperous future; the harshness of the violence as such was perceived and endorsed as a sign of authenticity.” – Zizek, 2001.
You can’t make excuses for him. GG Allin was not a likable human being. And on the surface, it appeared that neither did he want to be. In fact, it was precisely his commitment to misanthropy that constituted his appeal for knuckleheads gawping in on his theatre of cruelty. And yet, for all his apparent lack of regard for others, this was a man who sought attention, who courted and reveled and rolled in it with every heinous act of self-immolation.
While GG Allin hated the human race, he also seemingly demanded its love; a love for his hate, perhaps to validate it, turn it transcendental. Or just to satisfy a crippling ego that tore at the edges of respectability and common-sense and human decency. From the offset, GG was pure in his intentions. With debut single “Bored To Death” he was from the start at the apex of his ever present paradox, where his hatred of humanity is borne of frustration at its rejection of him. This, afterall, was a man named after the son of God, as his father believed him to be the reincarnation of Jesus. With expectations that high, failure on those terms was guaranteed. Life for GG would not be normal from the start.
Difficult it may be to make a permissible argument in favour of GG’s behaviour, one thing hard to contest was his commitment to persona. And perhaps persona is the wrong word, because GG Allin never felt like an act. It may be mental illness or it could be the logical, ultimate embodiment of the rock and roll myth: to rebel to death. And that he did, in a pathetic Weekend At Bernie‘s style demise, fans posing with his blued corpse thinking he’d simply passed out from another exercise in over-indulgence. A fittingly depressing end.
Whether idiot savant or sheer brutalist, “Bored To Death” still stands as the awful authentic act, crushing the worker’s rebellion with its vile rejection of humanity. Belief need not always be rendered positive to convince.
Watch the new video for CYMBALS’ “Totally Over”, directed by Dan Brereton.
“Totally Over” is taken from the band’s debut album, Unlearn, released on May 9th. Advance copies are available from the Tough Love shop now (only 40 remaining).
How many summer’s of love have there been? How many are we allowed to have? Are we permitted one more, fleeting and blissful, just before the world slides off into the oblivion of apocalypse?
Alongside not paying, another thing that Crime didn’t do is tolerate hippies. 70′s San Francisco had been 8 miles in the sky for so long it couldn’t remember why it got high in the first place. Whilst New York’s Bowery was buzzing once again, crusty San Fran had chilled so hard it was frozen. Someone had to defrost that pooch and what better way to do it then shower it in warm piss?
Over on the Eastside, Richard Hell was fantasizing, “Hey man lets dress up like cops, just think of what we could do?”, but Crime were one step ahead of Television’s daydreaming, having already taken to wearing police uniforms on stage. It was a decision that seemed indebted to their life in SF. The city had long been the perennial home of the 1970′s car chase, and stood in the shadow of Alcatraz and a flagrantly lawless counter-culture the band despised. To mark themselves out as something different to the alternative, they went straight for the jugular and dressed as the enemy. Somewhat contrarily, at the same time this would also irritate the establishment. Crime were outlaws to all.
Essentially a punk band, Crime embodied the values of that music to such an extent they couldn’t accept the tag ‘punk’, instead priding themselves on being “San Francisco’s first and only rock’n'roll band”. Again, not so much a swipe at the Woodstock generation, as a full on kick in its emasculated balls. The first of the West coast insurrectionists to release a record with the “Hotwire My Heart” 7″ in 1976, they pre-dated the better known Germs, Flipper, and Black Flag. Yet unlike their peers, Crime never got round to releasing an official album. What did emerge in 2004 was a compilation, San Francisco’s Still Doomed, that collected the songs recorded in their practice space, leaving only the embers of their fuzzed-out rockabilly punk rock.
“Piss On Your Dog” stands as a precursor to all subsequent loud-mouthed, sludged-up grotesque punk. It’ s an obese, knuckle-dragging ogre, ripping up trees to use as a tooth pick and spitting a tropical storm worth of mucus all over the loved out sunshine streets of Haight and Ashbury. No more than a maximum volume repetition of a 3 chord riff, it constantly revolves back into itself over a pounding incessant beat with call and response vocals echoing the classic detective partnerships. Although a massively loud distorted proto-punk rock song isn’t perhaps the most unique thing you’ll ever hear (even at the time The Stooges had all ready blown a thousand eardrums), the allure of “Piss On Your Dog” lies in how ugly it is – ugly, but smart and efficient.
This ugliness can still be witnessed in what stands as one of the most absurd and surreal performances ever – Crime playing in San Quentin, the infamous holiday home for murderers and rapists, whilst dressed as the same guards that walked the corridors.
CYMBALS will release a select run of their debut album, Unlearn, on 12″ vinyl for Record Store Day 2011 this Saturday 16th April, and play a free show at The Victory in Dalston, London in the evening to celebrate. The record comes in an individually hand screen-printed sleeve by artist Sinead Evans, limited to a pressing of just 300 hand-numbered copies.
The album will be released fully on May 9th alongside it’s digital release.
Hear more from CYMBALS on their SoundCloud and download ‘Single Printed Name’ for free, or check out their Ollie Evans (TEETH, Klaxons, Gossip) directed video for ‘Summer Escaping‘
Copies of Unlearn can be ordered directly from the Tough Love shop here. Quantities are extremely limited.
Look out of your window. Does it feel like the world is ending? Look inside. Does it feel the same? It’s a certain kind of narcissism that allows us to believe that we are the first to have these particular feelings of loneliness, isolation, alienation and apocalypse. Yet these are the prevailing themes of humanity; alienation and hopelessness remain a timeless commonality. Does it make you feel better to know internal desperation is an eternal, everlasting struggle for all?
And yet it remains difficult to shake that feeling of impending doom. Perhaps it’s our vain belief that our moment in history is the only moment in history, because we are in it? That the value of experience is always shaped by one’s own subjectivity? “The Threat” seems to be concerned with this very dilemma.
Led by the brother of the more widely known Ted Leo, Chris Leo’s The Lapse existed for a brief period of two albums in the late nineties, before shaping into some other bands also unfairly destined for obscurity (Enon being particularly notable). The reference to the more famous (all things being relative) sibling is not simply a way of ascribing some form of familiarity to The Lapse: there’s the same themes of political discomfort that concern Chris as with Ted, even if the form chosen to communicate them is slightly different.
Whereas Ted’s Pharmacists lean on first wave punk and hardcore for inspiration, The Lapse were slightly more in tune with the NYC underground. Very much of their time, they took cues from the artful noise of Sonic Youth and Blonde Redhead, but were melodically guided by Leo’s stream of conscious diatribes that seemed to run an A-Z through contemporary political philosophy. Obviously left leaning, Leo was nonetheless never overtly stating allegiance with one side or another, simply pointing to the hypocrisy and vanity that drives power in whatever form. On “The Threat”, those concerns seemed to coalesce into a kind of historical subjectivity, whereby Leo’s own malaise was positioned in the context of the general desperation of humanity – “be it 17 more years or 700, who cares?”. As he sees it, this particular Threat has always been with us, now there are just new ways of talking about it and communicating it on a mass scale to the world. As such, our desperation just grows louder and more widely diffused.
Lots of people talk about the end of the world, but nobody talks about The Lapse. Since they dissolved, the blogosphere has emerged as a space in which obsolescence isn’t so much planned, as it is a necessity. And yet “The Threat” is about an enduring problem: the good times, like the bad, are constantly slipping away. The fear, though, is always with us. As the sinewy energy of “The Threat” suggests, it doesn’t paralyse us. On the contrary, we wouldn’t do – or be – anything without it.
