Chuck Eddy dusts off his old vinyl and scratches his head. We all win.

Greetings, BLURT readers. This column's theme is fairly simple: Basically, I sort alphabetically through my shelves for dusty old 7-inch vinyl indie singles from acts that aren't household names, and try to figure out why I wound up keeping them in the first place. This is the 12^th installment (first two appeared at Idolator.)

***

THE MT. ST. HELENS "North By Northwest"/"Unlucky"/"Dialtone" (MOC, 1998)

Midwestern foursome repeats surfish riff, um, repeatedly; hoarse singer gets excited; rhythms turn staccato. Lots of stops and starts, twists and turns. Structure feels precise but ultimately cold - Fugazi probably deserves some blame for inspiring such stuff, but it's also very Chicago (where the band's from), which is to say it keeps its top button buttoned like such ‘80s bands as the Effigies and Naked Raygun used to, though less efficiently. Somewhere, there's a line about "the western surburbs."  Sleeve has pictures of a city and a mountain (why not a volcano?) that look as blurry as the music sounds. (http://www.myspace.com/mtsthelens)

THE MUSIC TAPES "Why Is The President Crying?"/ DAD "Untitled" (Cosmic Debris Ltd., 2000.)

Split single, apparently released with an issue of Stop Smiling magazine, whatever that was. Hand-numbered release from the Cosmic Singles Club, which I never joined, yet I somehow got # 980 out of 1000 anyway.  Picture disc - bottom half of a simple robot made out of wood on one side, black and white photo of a bespectacled man and unbespectacled boy on the other. Song titles nowhere to be found, but at least the A-side's is discoverable on line; B-side goes nameless even there. Guy from Music Tapes (New Yorkers with some sort of Elephant Six connection) sings in a little-boy voice, precious to the point of extreme annoyance, kinda like that man-boy Stuart on Mad TV. Sound ridiculously piddly and twee: Maybe the president is crying because somebody forced him to sit through this awful crap, who knows. I know nothing about Dad; if you google "myspace Dad," the great Copenhagen hair-metal band D-A-D wind up in the top spot, and this is definitely not them. Music is some sort of generic guitar instrumental, flamenco or Segovia or whatever. Hard to imagine 1000 people would want this thing. (http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=69564406)

NECROPOLIS "Stalking Mark E. Smith Around NYC"/"I Love Cinnamon" (Columbia Discount, 2005) 

You read its title and want the A-side to sound like a northern Ohio version of the Fall, and actually, the hard clattering jangle of a groove underneath almost pulls it off; marching-band drums at the start don't hurt, either. But the singing is a cutesy little-girl voice, with occasional "hey! woo!" interjections from a dude; and yeah, sadly, these are probably the kind of kids who would stalk Mark E. Smith, when you think about it. B-side crosses the cutesy line - she likes cinnamon on her head, see -- and so do the little puppies and kitties and dollies strung up on the clothes line on the sleeve, and so definitely does the computer robot-reading voice ending each song. But the B-side's rhythm clatters below too, and Mark E. and cinnamon are two of my favorite things, and this song introduced some sort of aesthetic that fellow Columbus kids Times New Viking would take the bank (or at least take to Pitchfork) a few years later. So I'll cut it slack. (http://www.myspace.com/necropolisrocks)

THE NECROS "Tangled Up"/"The Nile Song" (Gasatanka, 1986)

Northern Ohio (Maumee to be exact) version of early ("Free For All"-era) Ted Nugent, and one of the best (and most rock) indie rock singles of the past quarter century. (Maybe the best.)  Definitely the only time (tempo-wise, rhythm-wise, riff-wise, song-wise, singing-wise, catchiness-wise) that an indie band has ever pulled off the Nuge thing - Even the very good Necros themselves never again came anywhere near this close, and I should know if anybody should seeing as how I was at least a passing acquaintance with dammit-doll-like frontguy Barry Hennsler at the time (even saw a couple shows with him - White Zombie and Guns N Roses before they achieved stardom for instance, if I remember right. Letting his red hair grow ‘70s long, he'd shout "get a Mohawk!" out the window at Ann Arbor punk rockers back in those days -- unless I just dreamed that up in my head since, but pretty sure I didn't. Later, he wound up on Sub Pop, in the band Big Chief.) Anyhow, absolutely world-class song: "There's a noose around my life that strangles every day/Tangled up in a web of lies, mistakes I never made." One of the best hard rock/punk/metal singles of the ‘80s, on any label level. B-side's a quality cover of a 1969 Pink Floyd song also covered seven years later by the great Quebec cyber-thrash band Voivod. Record label Gasatanka is a parody of Casablanca, maybe because Redd Kross had covered Kiss's "Deuce" on Teen Babes From Monsanto two years before. After this music, punks could never again honestly pretend ‘70s rock wasn't cooler than they were. Which means it was partly responsible for grunge. But some sins are worth forgiving. (http://www.necroscentral.com/)

THE NEIN "Auto-Destructive Dance Routine"/CANTWELL GOMEZ & JORDAN "To Love The Unlovely" (Sit-N-Spin, 2005)

Another split single. The Nein from North Carolina put extravagant whining (about "Palestine" at one point I think) over post-punk-revival stiffened funk beats and alleged (I read on the web somewhere) "found sounds"; toward the finish line, the guitars thicken and vocals overlap and whips and spanks substitute for basslines. Somehow, especially given the icky era that this was released in, it all basically adds up to "electroclash" -- which might be justified if the Nein sounded as German as their name, but they don't. The also-North Carolinian Cantwell and Co. do more hands-in-pockets pogo-funk, fronted by a gal yelping like she wishes she was old enough to have been in the Delta 5 or Essential Logic. But she wasn't, which makes this a lot less interesting than if she was. She turns dirgey toward the end, and I still slightly prefer her to the Nein guy, I guess. Both sides of the pic sleeve present quaint and kitschy depictions of a man and a woman - dancing and necking with heads and limbs falling off and teeth falling out, framed by footprints on the dancing side and lipstick smears on the necking side. If that's somehow supposed to be amusing or transgressive, I don't get it. (http://www.myspace.com/thenein; http://www.myspace.com/cantwellgomezandjordan)

Chuck Eddy is the former music editor of the Village Voice and the author of several books, including the greatest book on heavy metal ever written, Stairway To Hell. He won't admit it, but he knows more about rock ‘n' roll than the entire accumulated BLURT brain trust.

Chuck Eddy dusts off his old vinyl and scratches his head. We all win.

Greetings, BLURT readers. This column's theme is fairly simple: Basically, I sort alphabetically through my shelves for dusty old 7-inch vinyl indie singles from acts that aren't household names, and try to figure out why I wound up keeping them in the first place. This is the 11^th installment (first two appeared at Idolator.)

***

MELTED MEN - Smoke Alarm Limbo (Pink Sock, 2004)

The front of the EP sleeve - revolving around a hideously deformed blue-skinned mermaid princess seated on her throne deep in the coral reef -- looks more or less like some half-awake stoner knocked over a few candles worth of hot wax all over it. And when you get down to it, so does the music, and surprisingly, this is not a completely horrible thing. Back cover also offers a conceptual clue: A middle-aged black couple, possibly with car broken down, occupying the stoop of an apparent gas station in the middle of nowhere, though clearly along Highway 321. Insert shows six subsequent shots of a highway patrolman in short pants detaining a tinfoil-masked transvestite in a hula skirt, not to mention a necklace comprising several primitive woodwinds. Actual vinyl is translucent, a sort of sea-green color. Band is a "collective" (what else?) from Athens, Georgia, and they include the Sun City Girls and To Live And Shave In L.A. among their closest MySpace friends. Songs include "Thumbs Like A Human" (a rapper spits about escargot while splitting the difference between the Residents and Red Hot Chili Peppers over electronic blippery almost managing to sound funky); "After All The Smoke Clears" (sproinging Jew's harp underlies helpful good ol' boy running down the sandwich menu over the phone - hot wings, chicken fingers, deli meat); "Pain Gel" (more blippy electro-funk, this time with twang attached, plus self-consciously annoying babble about being "sick and tired of being sick and tired");  "Sticky Frog" (missing amphibian link betwixt Clarence "Frog Man" Henry and Crazy Frog wherein some backwoods codger growls like Dr. John and/or Captain Beefheart -- but also occasionally Adam Sandler -- about a frog in a hollow log, and the art-funk hops around in an appropriately rubbery and squishy manner);  "Block Of Ice" (beat suggesting soldiers marching in cadence serves as foundation for yet another stoned rebel drawler, this one repeatedly expectorating a borderline quasi-racist "boogie boogie boogie boo/that's what I'm tellin' you" rhyme). During "Pain Gel," I accidentally knocked my phone out of the cradle, and I erroneously assumed that the busy signal - which fit right in - was part of the song.  Neat!

(http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewProfile&friendID=74171248)

MONDO TOPLESS - "Amazon Queen"/"Leave Me Alone"/"Just What I Need" (G.I. Productions, 1997)

More white boys playing fast and loose with dangerous and thankfully long-discarded stereotypes; the drummer even gets credited with "jungle wooops" in the A-side, which wooops sound a lot like the "monkey see, monkey do" chants in "African Man" off Iggy Pop's undervalued 1979 New Values LP. Numerous other racially insensitive rock'n'roll precedents - Warren Smith's "Ubangi Stomp," the Lime Spiders' "Slave Girl," like that - come to mind as well. Though it should be noted that the actual (and pleasantly buxom, though tragically not topless) grass-skirted cartoon Amazon queen on the 45 sleeve is unmistakably Caucasian, not to mention not particularly tall. And speaking of buxom, the band - a couple members of which I should confess here that I partied with on occasion in mid ‘90s Philadelphia, where they're from - took their name from an old Russ Meyer movie, just like Faster Pussycat and Mudhoney and Vixen before them. As umpteenth-generation Nuggets revivalists go, their live sets could be fun to frug to, too, I recall; the bar scene depicted on the rear side of the single sleeve even makes me a wee bit nostalgic. And "Amazon Queen" itself starts off pretty well, with a hardy riff and rolling Tarzan tom-toms and those aforementioned war wooops. But the vocal feels fairly weak and unassertive beyond the chorus, and the "yeah yeah yeah"s sound too rushed to hang loose, and the trash organ more suggests some shag-haired TV approximation of ‘60s garage-punk than the real thing. (Not that ‘60s garage-punk particularly cared about being "real," I don't think, but you get the idea, right?) The guitar leading "Leave Me Alone" has some life to it, too (momentarily reminds me of Mellencamp's "R.O.C.K. In The U.S.A."), and you can feel the band shooting for Seeds/Music Machine/Shadows Of Knight sleaze from some dank back alley. But they seem scared to rock too hard, so it's impossible to shake the feeling that they're just more follow-the-rulebook post-Fleshtones camp followers instead. "Just What I Need" is faster, with a bit of bop to it, but ultimately even more sub-generic. Word is the foursome's still around, though with a couple different guys now.

(http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=4406834)

THE MOONEY SUZUKI - "Oh Sweet Susanna"/"Say Man, What Time Is It?" (Gammon, 2002)

New York, five years later, with garage revival stuff in the form of the Hives and Strokes and White Stripes starting to reap profits that Mondo Topless certainly never imagined, and I WAS THERE, too - never partied per sé with the black-clad sunglasses-at-night schticksters in the Mooney Suzuki, but I did witness them on stage a bunch. They recorded these songs in Detroit, and put a black chick whose Afro harks back to the heyday of Angela Davis and Cleopatra Jones on the hard cardboard cover - so yeah, yet more radical chic and mau-mauing the flak-catchers. But I'm pretty sure "Oh Sweet Susanna" was the Mooney Suzuki's best song regardless, not so much for its bittersweet reminiscence of last summer's crush (which was fine, don't get me wrong) as for its guitar riff, which for all the world sounds stolen outright from Eddie Money's not exactly garage-purist "Two Tickets To Paradise." Boogie-woogie piano at the start resembles "Long Tall Glasses (I Can Dance)" by Leo Sayer to boot, and I have no complaints about the toasty and casually manly vocalization, which pulls off its ‘70s commercial meatball rock in much the way, say, Urge Overkill's "Sister Havana" had a few years earlier. The B-side's MC5 attempt is more along the lines of this band's usual doings, and also isn't really much of a song - just a couple of dorks shouting back and forth: "Say man, what time is it?" "I tell you, it's showtime!" Nothing but a vamp, trying to come off funky, as ineptly at it as anybody from the Spin Doctors to Jon Spencer Blues Explosion (both of whom it brings to mind) might have at the time. As a tossed-off B-side though, taken out of the context of its era and its habitat and it's makers' delusions of souldom, it almost passes muster. When last heard from two years ago, the Suzukis were succumbing to coming hard times in the biz, watching their V2 label fold just in time to keep the world from hearing an album that sounded like they'd experienced a Deadhead conversion.

(http://www.myspace.com/themooneysuzuki)

Chuck Eddy is the former music editor of the Village Voice and the author of several books, including the greatest book on heavy metal ever written, Stairway To Hell. He won't admit it, but he knows more about rock ‘n' roll than the entire accumulated BLURT brain trust.

Chuck Eddy dusts off his old vinyl and scratches his head. We all win.

Greetings, BLURT readers. This column's theme is fairly simple: Basically, I sort alphabetic ally through my shelves for dusty old 7-inch vinyl indie singles from acts that aren't household names, and try to figure out why I wound up keeping them in the first place. This is the 10^th installment (first two appeared at Idolator.)

***

THE LIDS - "No Fool For You"/"Too Late"/"Nothing To Do" (Die Slaughterhaus, 2003)

Garage-punk brats from...somewhere (there's basically no information about them in the Internets), seemingly singing into a toy microphone and hoping to be picked up by the hand-held tape recorder down the hall. Fast, primal slop for hip young caveboys and cavegirls. One chord and one sentence per song, if that. Guy tells us he's no fool for us; girl chimes in randomly in the background, seemingly responding boy's monosyllabic ramblings but lagging behind the beat. "Too late too late too late." "Oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah." Oddly, or maybe not (how easy or difficult would this be?), all three songs are hooky anyway. "All I want is something to do," he sings bored through the blur; then...a time change, which sends the music careening toward some semblance of climax. Which makes "Nothing To Do" the Lids' epic, almost.

(www.grunnenrocks.nl/bands/l/lidsthe.htm)

LOVE AS LAUGHTER -"Hall and Oates Have Disappeared"/ "Looks Like This City's Broken" (SubPop, 2000)

The Stones to Pavement's Beatles? Whatever that means. Anyway, they're from Brooklyn, and "Hall and Oates Have Disappeared" - which, as far as I can tell, has absolutely nothing to do with the Philly blue-eyed-soul duo in question - does have a certain lower-minor-league Exile On Main Street muffle to its shuffle. Doesn't really rock; not much drummer push, but it's got a little roll to it - and in 2000, and maybe even still now, a little roll was at least a step in the right direction for notoriously scared-to-dance indie rock. High-registered stuff about finding a parking spot in the parking lot, then the music switches into a sort of vamp, even almost a hint of disco throb at one point (did they think that was the Hall and Oates part?), with whimsical noises gurgling out of it. Just sort of meanders on and on, but it does quote "Space Oddity" by Bowie at one point. "Looks Like This City's Broken" has more of an apparent low-grade attempt at a boogie riff. Given the city's busted state, the singer suggests, we should just turn around and go back. But to where? (www.myspace.com/loveaslaughter)

MATMOS - "On And On"/DIE MONITR BATSS - "Black Out Cross" (Ache, 2004)

Baltimore-via Frisco duo Matmos work plinks and urps into some robotic semblance of extended funk-like repetition; drum-like objects of some sort double the rhythm, and then a bassline enters -- almost phat, in its own geeky way, though presumably unrecognizable to Curtis Mayfield or Gladys Knight fans who know the original song supposedly being covered. Thing is, when the melody picks up, you can actually hear remnants of a mournful "Freddie's Dead"-style soul melody for a couple minutes; the emotion really accumulates. And then it's back to space-age robot wars. Die Monitr Batss, meanwhile, manage a distant memory of boogie chug in their own post-punk way, with Contortions-or-Lora-Logic-style free-jazz sax splat fleshing out the field. "You can't see me/I can't see you" (or "can," maybe - hard to tell.) "I'm not gonna watch you do it" - so they're not voyeurs. They have more instrumental than vocal energy, though - Die Monotone Batss, they should be called. "Ho Wave," the Portlanders (somehow tangentially related to theoretically dancefloor-unscared indie band the Gossip) call themselves on their Myspace page; har har. Climaxes in yer usual Wagenerian post-Sonic Youth drone-clank. But first, extroverted instrumental parts lead to a nervous breakdown, suggesting an old woman falling out of a wheelchair during a magic show.

(www.myspace.com/matmos1)

MEANEST MAN CONTEST - "Contaminated Dance Step"/ "Feelin' Pretty Psyched (About Love)" (Weapon-Shaped, 2002)

Another San Fran duo; this one via L.A., and rapping. Or at least talking, or reciting poetry, or whatever you call it, with a matter-of-fact diction, about logos and crescendos and managerial positions, words coming at you way too fast for note-taking unless you remember way more shorthand than I do. Not much attempt to use the voice as rhythm or maintain a groove - and the background music sounds more like a movie soundtrack than dance steps, contaminated or otherwise -- but they sure pack in a lot of syllables. Eventually the A-side song turns into some subliminally familiar spiel about how "hyphenated Americans mean divided Americans." An opinion that goes back at least to Teddy Roosevelt, and which may well make Meanest Man Contest unreliable narrators. Then there's another spoken word sample: an intro to Louis Armstrong playing trumpet. Then on the flipside, another long collage suite, returning to what I assume to be the Mean Men's own voices, talking about a male professor who "wasn't fired, he was let go." More changes of direction, more monotonous verbosity, different voices out of each speaker: "It was hidden in the cardboard and the cobwebs, it is not dead." "The stories suffer from deadline pressure." One guy starts almost actually rapping, sounding legitimately underground (rather than under-underground), rhyming about rising like a phoenix something material venereal MCs get murdered in cereal. Pretty sure he's joking. "Aren't we bitter little people, we ought to be unable to say anything except sardonically." Or something like that. He may not be joking there, but then I may not be following him.

(www.myspace.com/meanestmancontest)

DAN MELCHIOR - "Instant Love"/"That's No Way To Get Along" (Smartguy, 2000)

Fuzzed-up megaphone grumbling over blues chords; arty by virtue of production (or lack thereof) not structure. At times he just beats his guitar, the only instrument here I think. One of those eternal eccentrics, hunting for something to kill the pain. From London; now apparently in North Carolina. Yet despite its surface weirdness, "Instant Love" sounds too average. Needs more of a hook, or something, to justify its normality. "That's No Way To Get Along" opens with Delta picking, and is marginally more interesting by virtue of sounding more antiquated. "I'm goin' home/Don't tell my mom." Why not? Would she move before you show up? An old song, I assume. Those lowdown women treat a person wrong, and there's no way to get along. Keeps returning to the same place -- circular like a roundelay, or round like a circle.

(www.myspace.com/dasmenace)

Chuck Eddy is the former music editor of the Village Voice and the author of several books, including the greatest book on heavy metal ever written, Stairway To Hell. He won't admit it, but he knows more about rock ‘n' roll than the entire accumulated BLURT brain trust.

Chuck Eddy dusts off his old vinyl and scratches his head. We all win.

Greetings, BLURT readers. This column's theme is fairly simple: Basically, I sort alphabetic ally through my shelves for dusty old 7-inch vinyl indie singles from acts that aren't household names, and try to figure out why I wound up keeping them in the first place. This is the 9^th installment (first two appeared at Idolator.)

***

JEFFREY LEWIS "The Chelsea Hotel Oral Sex Song" (Rough Trade, 2001)

Basically, a Craig's List Missed Connection ad as a shaggy dog story: Slacker nebbish with ponytail and backpack (you can tell from the comic strip tucked inside the record sleeve), born of the same East Village "anti-folk" scene that coughed up Kimya Dawson, walks along Manhattan's West 23^rd Street towards the Chelsea Hotel, "where Nancy and Sid and my friend Dave once dwelled." He overhears a cute tattooed girl with glasses behind him walking with a couple gay male friends and remembering some song where somebody got a blowjob there. He gets "uncharacteristically courageous," and turns around and tells her "Leonard Cohen." They wind up having a five-minute conversation in which she confesses that Leonard's song inspires naughty thoughts, but timid little twerp that he is (a fact he's going to passive-aggressively pound into our heads with every last little self-aggrandizing bone in his undernourished body if it's the last thing he does), he never gets her phone number. "I'm a schmuck, don't you doubt it/All I did was write this stupid song about it," when they could have been giving each other head in the bed that Leonard Cohen once used. "You may think it's sad, you may think it's pathetic/that I'll sing this song and she'll never hear it." He's telling us all this, of course, in the most monotonous sing-song diction, accompanied by only an acoustic guitar which he barely strums, and his voice cracks like zits popping all the way through. The girl probably thought it was adorable; we're sure supposed to. Personally, it makes me want to wring his pencil neck. Have to admit, though, I kind of like the song anyway. The actual physical object - music on only one side of the single, "33rpm" and song info rubber-stamped on its plain white label - is almost as unadorned. And the enclosed miniature graphic-novel is about how Rough Trade heard the song, which becomes "the top-selling single in the entire world," and 50 years later poor Jeffrey plays it on stage and the girl is in the audience, and they live happily ever after, except she tosses out all his music and comic books. For now, though, he's apparently half-moved to Portland, in order to badly cover Crass songs. (www.myspace.com/jefflewisband)

THE LIVE ONES "Dirtweed"/"Don't Look Down" (Slow Gold Zebra, 2008)

Muffled hard rock from a totally anachronistic - heck, already totally anachronistic if this was ten or even 20 years ago - NYC sleaze-punk trio, led by two scraggly Connecticut-born Czekaj brothers. Yeah, dirtweeds for sure. They're trying to sound like Detroit in the late ‘60s, or maybe Seattle in the late ‘80s, and they know how to look the part. Singer-who-drums Mike Czekaj slimes high and threatening through his bloody adenoids about how you're gonna get beat when you walk down the street. The beat, naturally, sounds like walking down the street. Toward the end, he starts "woooo!"-ing and "waaagh!"-ing. In "Don't Look Down" the band slows down, shooting for a black hole of Funhouse emotion, and Mike's voice gets deeper and more self-destructive: "Please take me home/I can't stay here feeling this way." He starts howling more, quoting BÖC's "This Ain't The Summer of Love," and the sound builds to a decently noisy spurt of a drone, and there's an actual guitar solo. Almost four decades after the first Stooges album, this particular brand of rock yields constantly diminishing returns. But there's something still left in it. (www.myspace.com/theliveones)

LOOKER "After My Divorce"/"Master's Gone Away" (Serious Business, 2007)

Yet another young urban bohemian snapshot that already seems somewhat dated, given the bedbug plague and all: Newly unmarried woman moves to the Big Apple from Paris (or Venice, or Pittsburgh - depends which verse you're hearing, kind of like "Gone Country" by Alan Jackson backwards), digs a chair and table out of the trash and sweater out of the hallway to make it through the autumn. Well okay, that plot conflates both songs, but they do seem related. Looker are three pretty gals and a guy drummer, and in mid-decade they put a small, steady pile of good EPs, CD-Rs, and one album along with this 7-inch, and were one of my favorite local live bands in New York. "Master's Gone Away" has a rhythm that flirts with ska, and lyrics that quote the old blackface minstrel tune "Jimmy Crack Corn," which is also where the title (and the song's last line) comes from. "After My Divorce," post-Byrds Anglophile jangle with sweet triple-girl harmonies and a taut beat turning martial, references Morrissey and Poe in consecutive lines; this charming man reads the divorcée's tell-tale heart. Toward the end, the Lookers repeat "Shangri-La, Shangri-La, Shangri-La" - the Shangri-Las being one influence they list on MySpace, along with the Clash, Adverts, Talking Heads, Shirelles, Blondie, Pretenders, and Kinks. Though not the Primitives or Waitresses or Jam, all of whom probably belong there too. (www.myspace.com/looker)

LOS ABANDONED "Office Xmas Party"/"Electric Dad" (Vapor, 2006) More friendly female vocals, this time from the opposite coast - Van Nuys, L.A., Cali.  In the seasonal though not especially seasonal-sounding A-side, a working woman (like the one in, say, Martha and the Muffins' "Echo Beach" maybe) ill-advisedly hooks up with a co-worker at the annual holiday bash, beneath decorations while other attendees fall face-first into the spiked fruit punch, and as you'd expect things get awkward when the pair confront each other again in the coffee room Monday morning. The beat is skiffly with a slight lilt, though probably not quite enough of one to justify the middle part of Los Abandoned's "new wave/Latin/indie" designation on MySpace. Eventually, horns take over. "Electric Dad" does in fact seem to be recited in Spanish, but its music is just an emaciated indie-pop approximation of synth-pop: which is to say, the synth seems lazily stuck on just one setting, too unambitious and not half funky enough to have passed for synth-pop on ‘80s MTV.  Though the band does appear to dress colorfully enough to pass for new wave. (www.myspace.com/losabandoned)

Chuck Eddy is the former music editor of the Village Voice and the author of several books, including the greatest book on heavy metal ever written, Stairway To Hell. He won't admit it, but he knows more about rock ‘n' roll than the entire accumulated BLURT brain trust.

Chuck Eddy dusts off his old vinyl and scratches his head. We all win.

Greetings, BLURT readers. This column's theme is fairly simple: Basically, I sort alphabetic ally through my shelves for dusty old 7-inch vinyl indie singles from acts that aren't household names, and try to figure out why I wound up keeping them in the first place. This is the 8^th installment (first two appeared at Idolator.)

***

INDIAN JEWELRY "In Love With Loving"/"Lost My Sight" (On/On Switch, 2005)

The modestly plain-brown-paper-colored cardboard picture sleeve depicts two apparent humans with ichthyosaurus skulls where their heads should be, but joined Siamese-twin-like at the heart. Notes typed on a 6 1/2" x 5 1/2" piece of paper inside follow screwed-up 16^th Century French theories about conjoined twins ("too tight a womb, tight clothes, and the manner in which a woman sat while pregnant") with by more up-to-date screwed-up Italian theories about demonic possession. There are Latin words as well. The music, from three mysterious Houston, Texans also known to call themselves NTX + Electric and Swarm of Angels among other weird names, has vocals coiling through what sounds like a long vacuum-cleaner hose filled with psychedelic guitar noise wobbling as if from Mesopotamia (the A-side) and a barely audible woman's voice approximating Grace Slick/Kim Gordon/Exene mode way-in-hell-back behind a repetitive guitar figure given a disconcertingly nervousness (the B-side). Dub blackouts figure heavily, if not necessarily intentionally, in both songs, and the band knows how to get beauty out of an ill-defined blur as it gets louder and louder. Think Chrome, or maybe the Butthole Surfers of the mid ‘80s. "These songs," the liner note insert warns, "were recorded as quickly as possible."

(www.myspace.com/indianjewelry)

I-SOUND "Sweating In The Ages"/"Dog Years" (Broklyn Beats, 2002)

In "Sweating In The Ages," a broken computer keyboard dances a skittery soft shoe, turns into a cash register spewing pennies all over the room, which turns into a Martian typewriter, which gets mellow and forlorn and then turns into a tick-tocking metronome. In "Dog Years," an unhurried, fuzzy clank suffused with crud somehow forms itself into an identifiable albeit highly distorted groove. Nice pockets of space -- albeit conveying less personality, somehow, than Indian Jewelry's. Though based in Brooklyn, I-Sound once split an CD with Berlin's To Rococo Rot, whose name is spelled the same forwards and backwards. (http://broklynbeats.net/artist.html )

ROSS JOHNSON "It Never Happened"/"Nudist Camp"  (Sugar Ditch, 1993)

Shaggy dog stories, almost as hilarious as this Memphis roots-punk utility player clearly thinks they are judging by how he keeps laughing uncontrollably at himself - first, over a beat stolen from Dylan's "Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35", a yarn about naughty stuff Ross did in his youth. One time, for instance, he saw a woman in culottes and a halter top, and ("this is in a non-sexist context," he swears), he "felt funny" (see also: Beavis and Butthead), which is to say "objectifying glare took over." He's having a conversation with himself, reaching for the craziness of Hasil Adkins or Harmonica Frank; he stops to pray, hopes it's all just a bad dream, assures himself it'll all be over soon. Flipside starts with more chuckling, but the music gives deep chugga-chugga horn-funk a Latin bugalu bent then puts Hendrix guitars on top, à la the Jimmy Castor Bunch. Again, Ross is reminiscing. "When I was younger I had ambitions" -- many of which were inspired by looking at "nudie magazines" and involved living at a nudist camp. But one day a kid from down the block tried to pimp his strip-poker-playing twin sisters, bad girl Donna and good girl Dora. Which scheme went badly. There's also a hidden, untitled third track - a rinky-dink instrumental not distantly related to the theme from "The Dating Game." On the Sun Records homage of a record label, both sides are classified as "Delta Music Hot Vocal."  (www.myspace.com/thebaronoflove)

JOHN WILKES BOOZE "Whiskey And Pills"/"Marc Bolan Makes Me Want To Fuck" (Family Vineyard, 2002)

I count about 13 words in the lyrics of the first song; maybe five words in the lyrics of the second (yeah, fewer than in its title). "Whiskey and Pills" is a call-and-response between a preposterous Jon Spencer-style huckster and somebody (or maybe the same guy) with a higher voice - basically, pigfuck punks ineptly pretending to be a ‘60s garage band who were in turn pretending to be the Isley Brothers. Plenty of energy; not enough music. The "Marc Bolan" song, mainly just some geek swishily repeating the line "children, sweet children of the revolution," is slower and has some remnant of Southern-not-glam rock in its opening guitar cascade. Marc Bolan was one of "five pillars of soul" these guys later dedicated CD-R EPs too; the others were Melvin Van Peebles, Patty Hearst, Yoko Ono, and Albert Ayler. Which is to say they defined "soul" their own way. On the single, a sticker stuck to the outside says "debut 45 from Southern Indiana's premier R&B band." Guess they forgot about John Cougar's group. Also says "recorded live to 2" tape" -- but I bet Indian Jewelry still recorded theirs faster. (www.myspace.com/johnwilkesbooze)

KILL ME TOMORROW "I Require Chocolate"/"Rats For Sale" (Gold Standard Laboratories, 2002) 

Like Indian Jewelry, these San Diegans are a co-ed trio who insist on having their rock and dubbing it too - at least during the introduction of "I Require Chocolate," all zooms and zips and secret passageways. When unconventionally tuned guitars enter, it sounds a lot like real early Sonic Youth, back when their drums did a tribal goth rumble under foreboding Wagnerian feedback mini-symphonies. But the nasally voiced sarcasm upfront comes closer to mid ‘80s British indie post-punks like the Membranes or Nightingales. The words aren't remotely comprehensible, but it's clear their consonants and diphthongs don't match the insert card (see also: Indian Jewelry again) that substitutes for a lyric sheet. Turns out, when you read closer, that the words on paper are plot summaries: "A famous but over the hill superhero is found guilty in a case concerning a series of bizarre sex crimes..." And then, for the B-side, "Since the beginning of civilization a strange vendor has walked the Earth selling his variety of plagues to mankind..."  "Rats For Sale" - recited in a flat Thurston Moore deadpan - is both more deliberate and more decipherable, at least to the extent that its untrustworthy narrator hopes to convince you that rodent ownership would be "beautiful." Maybe not as beautiful as the water-blue vinyl the songs are pressed on, though, or the color scheme of the 45 cover they're packaged in - obviously designed (like Kill Me Tomorrow's CDs) by a painter with a fondness for filling in all available space with fluorescent hues. Which is sort of what the music does, too: For indie-rock artfucks, they've got a real full sound.

(www.myspace.com/killmetomorrow)   

Chuck Eddy is the former music editor of the Village Voice and the author of several books, including the greatest book on heavy metal ever written, Stairway To Hell. He won't admit it, but he knows more about rock ‘n' roll than the entire accumulated BLURT brain trust.

Chuck Eddy dusts off his old vinyl and scratches his head. We all win.

Greetings, BLURT readers. This column's theme is fairly simple: Basically, I sort alphabetic ally through my shelves for dusty old 7-inch vinyl indie singles from acts that aren't household names, and try to figure out why I wound up keeping them in the first place. This is the 7^th installment (first two appeared at Idolator.)

***

GOOPS "One Kiss Left"/"Build Me Up Buttercup" (Blackout!, 1994)

The picture sleeve's front cover looks like some kinda Big Daddy Roth Garbage Pail Kid Wacky Pack, with four cartoon band members (three crazy guys, one hot girl) racing along in their flaming monster truck with the license plate "KILL," brandishing baseball bats and barbecue forks, chasing a squirrel so scared its feet have turned into wheels. Back cover has the band all naked (with naughty bits peeking out) on a polka-dot couch, puking and slavering as a gigantic furry rodent splats from the sky and spills its sticky guts all over the room. Six-page black-and-white comic book inside has the Goops "On The Road," driving from party to party and town to town and batting more squirrels around and bathing together and covering obscene Avengers songs on stage while (again) wearing no clothes. Yet even their penises and vaginas manage to seem funny, not gross or prurient. And oh yeah, there's also music! Catchy St. Mark's Place-style middle-class fake-punk garage trash (from back when St. Mark's  Place was still trashy) with gal-singing and guy-guitaring better than passable; in the ‘90s, NYC and L.A. both coughed up a bunch of such bands, while critics ignored them -- maybe because they sang like they wanted a hit, and therefore weren't deemed hip enough. Here, the A-side is a lust song with some semblance of a beat: "C'mon baby, don'cha be that way/I'll do anything you say." But the B-side's the keeper: A kicking cover of the Foundations' 1969 garage-soul classic about being led on by a fickle tease. The Goops build it up, and don't let us down.

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=152991456

CLAY HARPER "Prayin' Hands"/"Church On The Corner" (Casino Royale, 1996)

More excellent cover graphics: The front has a colorfully dressed guy, with five-o'clock shadow and his tiger-striped shirt unbuttoned too low, posing just like Roland Bell on the LP cover of The Harder They Come; there's a city and church behind him, and when you flip the sleeve over, you see said house of worship close up, with hands folding in prayer on each side. It's not the only picture-sleeve 45 I've got on my shelf from Clay Harper -- a guy who used to sing for the Coolies, an Atlanta band whose less than 15 minutes of fame had come from putting out an album full of silly Simon & Garfunkel covers in 1986, the same year Paul Simon put out Graceland. A decade later, in 1996, Harper apparently put out one 45 on Casino Royale every month or close to it; I've got 11 of the things, and they're beautiful - soldiers and strippers and factories and devils and sleazy dames with guns and lurkers in the shadows and Blaxploitation movie posters and Kung Fu movie posters and ominous urchins from the street. Most of them credit Art Direction to one Kosmo Vinyl and Art Production to guys named Kerry Hadaway and Brian Joyner. I haven't played them in years, but as I recall, they mostly sound good, too. But I'm singling out the single that came out in June of that year, for the way its two titles are conceptually linked, and because its cover is my favorite. "Prayin' Hands" has The Harder They Come in its sound, too: The rhythm is ‘70s soul-reggae, with a horn break seemingly referencing "007 (Shanty Town)" by Desmond Dekker. Harper has a gruff Dixie white-soul voice - more "pub-rock" than "roots-rock" or "Southern rock," I'd say, by which I mean amiable and energetic but not particularly stodgy or redneck-macho. He sings about a little girl with a crappy life who prays the world her soul to keep and winds up in a better place, which I suppose mean she dies; details beyond that are hard to make out. "Church on the Corner" brackets itself with church organ (credited to "Reverend Oliver Wells"), but Clay confesses that he never liked churches, that he just passes them by without entering, and he's not sure where his antipathy comes from. But a wedding, or maybe that same little girl, wind up changing his mind. A gospel backup singer helps.

http://www.casinomusic.com/vinyl/index.html

HELLA "Stephen Hawking Has A Posse"/FOURTET "Both When I Am Alone And We Both Are" (Ache, 2003)

Hella are a noisy Cali duo whose 2002 debut album likeably reminded me of the very early (hardcore-era) Meat Puppets, but I lost the plot soon after; their track here has a gradual keyboardish opening (played on guitar maybe) giving way to blurry belches of distortion and apocalyptic clangs like tin cans repeatedly toppling off a high shelf. The title suggests theoretical physics might be an inspiration as well. Fourtet is London "post-rock" electronic guy Kieran Hebden, and his cut has more space - e.g., little brush strokes. What they have in common: clattery beat, fuzzy effects, vagueness. And the scratched-up collage on the 45 sleeve is just as blurry, blotchy, and amorphous.

http://www.myspace.com/hellaband

http://www.myspace.com/fourtetkieranhebden

THE HOT ROLLERS Uncornucopia (Flotation, 2007)

A three-song seven-inch EP on nail-polish-white vinyl from three badass ladies, dressed like they're ready to join the Shangri-Las' gang. So: Ratted-hair rock, maybe Seattle's answer to (Detroit's) Gore Gore Girls. "You Don't Satisfy" rides the slime oozing out from beneath the garage door of some service station on a dead-end street; opens with a riff from the Monkees' "Steppin' Stone," drummer Starr Harris screams like the Sonics' Gerry Rosalie, and Lori Campion lets loose black clouds of guitar smoke as her vengeful vemom shoplifts a lyric or two from "Steppin' Stone" itself, then turns into talking as she chides some bad-in-bed clutz that he can't do the deed like some other fella. "Heard About Him" rocks up a ‘65 B-side by British bird Sandie Shaw, ending on a high note out of "Wimoweh"/"The Lion Sleeps Tonight." And raunchy fuzztones blanket everything, including three-part harmonies and (I think) a cowbell, in the raunchier, dirtier, heavier "Outta Control" - about a mean chick from a northern galaxy who has cherry-red lips and bloodshot eyes. She's running wild tonight, she's gonna fuss and fight, and I'm pretty sure Girlschool would be impressed.

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=2663461

Chuck Eddy is the former music editor of the Village Voice and the author of several books, including the greatest book on heavy metal ever written, Stairway To Hell. He won't admit it, but he knows more about rock ‘n' roll than the entire accumulated BLURT brain trust.

Chuck Eddy dusts off his old vinyl and scratches his head. We all win.

Greetings, BLURT readers. This column's theme is fairly simple: Basically, I sort alphabetic ally through my shelves for dusty old 7-inch vinyl indie singles from acts that aren't household names, and try to figure out why I wound up keeping them in the first place. This is the 6^th installment (first two appeared at Idolator.)

***

ENON "Marbles Explode"/"Raisin Heart" (Friction, 2001)

Indie geeks from Philly fuzz up a shrill robot-clank rhythm distantly related to "Let's Go All the Way" by Sly Fox, maybe working in a few turntable scratches. The vocals stay flat and inaudible, barely even sung. When the rhythm switches up, the singing turns even more lackadaisical - at one point the guy says something about a boy in a small steeltown on a mission to find employment (like, um, "Maniac" by Michael Sembello?), then he loses me. Though maybe those words alone justify the mechanical beats. At the end, he picks up a smidgen more energy, fumbling through a momentary mojo-mofo rap with no funk to speak of. B-side is mellower and sleepier, seemingly female-sung: Easier to take, but if less irritating than the A-side, also even less compelling. Vinyl is blue;   sleeve gatefold features what appears to be a textbook entry about Indian burial mounds that, as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with either song, though the word "Enon" is at least used once. This band had a decent indie-scene rep at one point, right? I wonder why. (www.myspace.com/enonmusic)

FEDERATION X "Nude Disintegrating Parachutist Woman" (Wantage USA, 2003)

Inside an orange picture sleeve depicting parakeet warriors, a power trio from Oregon and/or "New Yorkingham" interprets a 1971 song by prehistoric U.K. sludge cult gods and major Metallica inspirations Budgie; get it? Polly want a firecracker. Starts gradual, almost pretty, and producer Steve Albini typically hides the vocals while emphasizing the huge swinging riffs or commendable approximations thereof. Good for the guitars, but I wish he'd given the singing more prominence - sounds like a horny young white dude getting boogiefied, in that random zitfaced working-class New Wave of British Heavy Metal sort of way; nothing wrong with that. Poverty-level production provides character regardless. B-side starts where the A-side left off: "Albini used a razor blade to split it in half (ala James Brown singles)," a press release still stuck inside the sleeve explains. The song is sculpted into a concrete structure - indie of the Enon stripe, say, seems entirely unformed in comparison. And as it builds to the urgent "oww oww owwwwwwww" part, Albini mixes the howling higher, maybe because no words are left to get in the way. (www.myspace.com/federationx)

FIELDS OF GAFFNEY "Cold Weather"/"Twilight" (Sub Pop, 1999)

More blue vinyl! In a prettier shade than Enon's, no less. Propulsive strumming somehow descended from the Velvet Underground - sounds like it could come from New Zealand, even Cleveland. But again, just like with Enon, it's frustrating that the vocals don't come with any with personality attached; why bother exerting the energy it'd take to decode them? Par for the course, though; Eric Gaffney was part of Sebadoh. He looks prissy and twerpy on the sleeve, though the rest of the packaging (a colorful montage of drum-kit cutouts, guitar-playing potatoes, rabbits celebrating all four seasons, line drawings of unidentifiable quadrupeds, and a scrap of sheet music affixed with the mission statement "stately but not too slow") is fun to look at. The music murks up more as it progresses, which at least gives it someplace to go; Eric's strums take the scenic route. And on the more shapeless B-side, his guitar picks up steam even after everything else dies down. Vocals are still lifeless and off-key, though. I suspect the titles are meant to help evoke moods--and yeah, I suppose I can hear cold weather and twilight in there somewhere.

(www.myspace.com/ericgaffneysebadoh)

FM KNIVES "Estrogen"/"Can't Afford You Now"/"Just Like William Tell"/"Cassavettes Vs. The Moneygoround" (SmartGuy, 2002)

This is more like it. Sacramento kids pop-rocking immediate-impact melodies at overdrive tempo, with a high nasal singer up front radiating innocent energy--like the Buzzcocks, or Only Ones, or 999. Why did this kind of voice ever leave punk rock? (Wild guess: hardcore killed it.) Even the sleeve artwork - precise minimalist lines and shapes - suggests skinny-tie 1979. The lyrics still don't literally click, especially on the two B-side cuts, but then I'm no Cassavettes buff: Something about 20 dollars shattering nerves, leaving you choking on the just desserts? "Estrogen" has thicker guitar, and might have something to do with the singer's car, or perhaps his pajamas. "Can't Afford You Now," slower and clearer, is also the best song, and most coherent: The singer runs out of sedatives and loses his medical, and you love him ‘cause he's heretical. Well, not that coherent, maybe. But catchy as heck, and gratifyingly lightfooted, despite lack of studio budget. "I can't afford you now/So I hide out in the crowd."  Okay, that makes sense.

(www.myspace.com/fmknives)

GLASS CANDY AND THE SHATTERED THEATRE "Metal Gods"/"Hurt" (no label, 1999)

Some websites claim this 45 came out on K Records, but despite being mixed by Calvin Johnson, the twee-mind behind both that label and Beat Happening, my copy mentions K nowhere. Anyway: Young denizens of Portland (the Northwest not Northeast one, natch) imagining they're from the Weimar Republic; Nina Hagen cabaret schlock shtick over a clattering synth-drum thump and noisy guitar that enters uninvited. On the sleeve, the trio goes for your usual self-consciously decadent androgynous albino cokehead salamander look. The beat keeps things passingly edgy, and Ida No (ha ha) gasps and pants a little toward the end. "Hurt," originally done by late ‘70s Los Angeles keyboard punks the Screamers, is more horrific, with screams shooting for Alan Vega or Lydia Lunch and guitar lying low, reverberating just below the surface. Builds a road from no wave and electroclash, but who ever asked for such an avenue? Later, the band would shorten its name to just Glass Candy, and apparently make a notable impression in certain hipster dance clubs. If you read the credits insert, appropriately, you might be confused into believing the song titles are "Makeup" (by Jefferey Kyle) and "Photos" (by Valentine.)

(www.myspace.com/glasscandy)

Chuck Eddy is the former music editor of the Village Voice and the author of several books, including the greatest book on heavy metal ever written, Stairway To Hell. He won't admit it, but he knows more about rock ‘n' roll than the entire accumulated BLURT brain trust.

Chuck Eddy dusts off his old vinyl and scratches his head. We all win.

Greetings, BLURT readers. This column’s theme is fairly simple: Basically, I sort alphabetic ally through my shelves for dusty old 7-inch vinyl indie singles from acts that aren’t household names, and try to figure out why I wound up keeping them in the first place. This is the 5^th installment (first two appeared at Idolator.)

***

DESTROY ALL MONSTERS “Typical Girl”/”Attack Of The Chiggers” (no label flexi-disc, 1997): Slow slimy sludge-shtup shtick shtuck to the bottom of some sadistic prison guard’s big boot, from Ann Arbor post-Stooge proto-punk avant-garage performance-art legends, allegedly recording live in ’75; the flexi apparently came inside a zine the band put out several eras later. “Typical Girl” addresses its nastiness, in ways sickos may have found erotic, to an unnamed “little girl”: “I know you so good like the back of my hand.” “You look like everyone else! You’ve got no self respect!”  “You’re so typical like all the rest/ That’s why I like my baby the best.” At least he can’t be accused of high standards. A woman gets pulled onto the stage, sounds like, and starts squealing, “Don’t touch me! Get him out of here!,” then gasping amidst rubbing noises from a sax, or saw, or strings, or something. Maybe it’s staged, maybe it isn’t, but either way you get the idea you’re hearing something you shouldn’t. Second song is even slower, with a more distanced vocal; guy yells out “attack of the chiggers!” as guitar makes itchy chigger-attack sounds. On purpose or not, the “ch” word might easily be confused for an “n” word. (www.myspace.com/destroyallmonstersdetroit)

DJ BLAQSTARR “Feel It In The Air”/ BUSY P “Pedrophilia” (Fader, 2007): “I can feel it in the air/I can feel it in the street/I can feel it in my balls/I can feel it in my feet” – or words to that effect. DJ Blaqstarr plays a variation of so-called “Baltimore club music” (sort of a Tourette’s-inflicted distant relative of early Chicago house, Miami bass, and/or Detroit ghetto-tech), with skippity beats under a sample that goes “caw! caw! caw!”; eventually the silly lyrics fall out, so the caws and skippities are all you’ve got left. Busy P, from Paris, makes an even more shapeless brand of hipster-sanctioned dance music – namely, the squelchy, mildly rock-infused techno identified with French label Ed Banger Records, from which Justice also emerged last year. Two electronic themes criss-cross; one fades out while a voice squeaks “Busy P!” Eventually, it slims down to a few isolated bloops. No idea how one would dance to it -- seems kinda slow. But I like the Southern Comfort joint venture slogan on the label: “Start and end things right. Drink responsibly.” (www.myspace.com/blaqstarrmusic; www.myspace.com/busyp)

DOILY “2000 Dumb”/”Welcome Home” (Broklyn Beats, 2001): The martial rhythm sounds submerged – on a submarine, maybe. Springs and gadgets and bellows (both kinds) succumb to nautical miles of deep-sea echo. Deadpan spoken phrases, seemingly  from movie dialogue, emerge out of the abyss: “Shot down in cold blood.” Gradually the music turns into a busted pinball-machine on tilt, or better yet a firing range, heard through static over a broken field radio in the back of a Jeep with no doors. That’s the A-side; the B-side has not-quite-tuned-in shortwave transmissions evolving into dub reggae, or some bassline’s recognizable approximation thereof. The transmissions fade in and out, do backflips over Pymgy of the Ituri Forest drums, thicken into quicksand until you start losing your belongings. Word is that some Brooklyn gal pieced it all together. (www.broklynbeats.net)

DYKEHOUSE “Chain Smoking”/”FYD” (Ghostly International, 2003): The label’s from Michigan and specializes in electro, but the A-side’s music is almost a conventional indie guitar-jangle breakup song – guy makes out with girl in backyard, tries to undo her pants, but now he’s chain smokin’ ‘cause his heart’s broken, so he rhymes “frown” with “upside down” and “loud” with “mushroom cloud.” His voice really does have some of that two-packs-a-day gruffness to it, too, and the melody has some of the pop feel of mid ‘80s Hüsker Dü, but more twee and British. “FYD” starts with a higher voice – probably a guy attempting a Princely falsetto – and has more synthesizers, but depicts a situation no less concrete: “At the club last Friday/You’re all done up in black/I knew I had to have you my way/When I saw you arch your back.” So he buys her a drink, drives her home in his Mercedes, takes her up to “Big Daddy’s room,” where he brings out his “Dutch love broom,” whatever that is. (I chuckled at it, I admit.) Then he switches into minstrel-boast mode, updating a trusty old seduction growl from Isaac Hayes or Barry White amid wah-wah effects: “Who’s the motherfuckin’ pimp? My big dick just won’t go limp.” Not as funny as he hopes. Then simulated sex moans – maybe like fellow Ann Arborites Destroy All Monsters years before. There was a minute or two there in the early ‘00s when work from weirdos named Morel and the Horrorist hinted that techno might turn into a new kind of singer-songwriter music; this’d be another example, I guess, but the idea didn’t seem to stick around for very long. Maybe the problem was that the mundane clubland situations depicted seemed too shallow for listeners to care about them? Just a thought. (www.ghostly.com)

EL CAPTAIN FUNKAHO ”Space Slut”/”Bootay”/“My 2600”/”Evil Goat Interlude” (Stones Throw, 1998): From a reportedly moonlighting San Francisco library clerk, more cartoon pimp shtick, though of the outer-space variety this time. Chipmunk-punked robot aliens seek booh-tay, harking back to Bootsy Collins and Captain Sky and especially Jimmy Castor: El Captian Funkaho requests that you hand over your tutti fruity, and soon it’s time for the post-Hendrix feedback solo. “My 2600” opens with a mega-heavy riff out of Black Sabbath’s “Electric Funeral,” then turns attention to old videogame brands, many of which I’m unfamiliar with: Atari, Asteroids, Bezerk, Combat, Pong, Pac Man, and (in a possibly intentional reference to the great 1984 Rebbie Jackson hit of that name) Centipede. The artist starts rapping like he’s auditioning for Newcleus, and yet more psychedelic freak-funk pours in. “Evil Goat Interlude,” named perhaps for the Satanic inverted ibexes of black metal fame, is just a few seconds of chattering and guitar growl. The 45 sleeve colorfully depicts a mad scientist with star-shaped sunglasses and maroon Bozo the Clown hair, furiously joysticking. There are also goats. What else do you need? (www.stonesthrow.com)

 [Photos, top to bottom: Destroy All Monsters, Dykhouse, Funkaho]

Chuck Eddy dusts off his old vinyl and scratches his head. We all win.

Greetings, BLURT readers. This column’s theme is fairly simple: Basically, I sort alphabetic ally through my shelves for dusty old 7-inch vinyl indie singles from acts that aren’t household names, and try to figure out why I wound up keeping them in the first place. This is the 4^th installment (first two appeared at Idolator.)

CRACK ♥ WE ARE ROCK – “Hooker Leg”/”Animal Trap” (no label listed, 2002): Inside a lovely if claustrophobic 45 sleeve with forest animals paint-by-numbered all over it (the opossum and red fox, oddly, are much bigger than the mountain lion), music from Midwest escapees to San Francisco that somehow serves as a bridge between the fleeting quasi-genres “electroclash” and “digital hardcore” – which is mainly to say distanced voices rapping, sort of, over synthesizer abrasions and insane studio glitches and buzzing sounds. The intended speed is never stated outright, but at 33 RPM, “Hooker Leg,” at least, suggests a noise-rock version of some early ‘80s Rough Trade girl band, like maybe the Au Pairs, with distortion working against the tune at riskier levels than Jesus and Mary Chain ever dared. Cyborg voices eventually discuss the shaking of souls. “Animal Trap” has balloon-rubbing effects out of Pere Ubu’s Dub Housing, and what sounds like an off-key trumpet toward the end, clearing some space and followed by the side’s only comprehensible words – namely, a woman politely telling us “thank you.” Notation on a fawn’s back on that cover picture: “Live In Africa 2002 BC.” Or maybe that’s the label? (no contact info)

CRIMSON SWEET – Robot Bus Driver (Crimson Sweet EP, 2000): Bizarrely, I still have four different 7-inches by this turn-of-the-‘00s NYC trio on my shelf, which puts them in the running with Cobra Verde, Shonen Knife, and, uh, Clay Harper (whoever he is) [Harper, ex-Coolies, operated and recorded for his own Atlanta-based label, Casino Music, in the ‘90s—Discography Editor] for 45-shelf indie-supremacy. Don’t recall ever loving anything by them, but apparently I liked all of it enough to keep. In my mind, at least, I associate their co-ed art-punk garage sensibility with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Glass Candy, who both emerged a bit later but ultimately got way more attention. This particular four-song translucent-vinyl 45 (first Crimson Sweet music I heard) switches off between relaxed Bangles-jangle and more hoarsely snarling screech. “CTR” mentions schoolyards; “Robot Bus Driver” follows Morse-code guitar with death-metal grumbling; “Bad Riddle” is live-wire hardcore; “I Can Touch You Now” an apparently sincere lust song wherein the wonderfully named Rooster Booster (who also plays guitar) eventually takes her drink and leaves. She’s hard to decipher when she gets full-throat emotional, but that doesn’t always work against her. Her bassist, Konsulate, looks like a young Mick Jagger. (www.myspace.com/crimsonsweet)

CRITERION – “Race Traitor”/”Honky Talk Hits” (Broklyn Beats, 2001): Two more aural experiments from a mad-scientist laboratory in Brooklyn, working overtime to resurrect dub without reggae life support: “Honky Talk Hits” lets an inverted piano mess and minstrel-show vocals that go “yeaaaahhh…..” and dig through sand dunes’ worth of dirt; “Race Traitor” is closer to some of Adrian Sherwood’s more outlandish ‘80s productions, or maybe Keith LeBlanc’s 1983 12-inch “No Sell Out,” credited to Malcolm X. A repeated sample of Dick Gregory growls “We don’t dislike you, we hate your stinking white racist insti-tooo-shuns,” which slogan performs the musical duty of keeping the experiment grounded, so centrifugal force doesn’t yank everything apart. (www.broklynbeats.net)

DAPHNE’S OPERATION – “Short Disaster”/”Curds & Whey” (Mudslide/Bottom Feeder, 1995): Like all three singles above whether intentionally or not, chaos intersperses here with white space; like Crimson Sweet, this Murfreesboro, Tennessee quintet (instrument credits: “pickin’, singin’”; “beatin’”; “more pickin’”; “washtub, hogcallin’”) refreshingly seems torn between being a pop band and a noise band. Somehow, the gravity of their guitars makes up for their vocals’ meek, muffled bent. And though the music offers up no tangible beat to speak of, the B-side, at least, manages hints of propulsion, and structure, and possibly even a song, albeit introvertedly expressed: “Growing up is so weird,” a subdued voice concludes, sneaking into the clatter’s cracks. “Call or write us,” the liner notes on an insert request, “for your next wedding, barmitzvah, hot rod/custom car show, barbecue, open house, Tupperware party, slumber party, funeral, shindig, hootnanny, fiesta, thingamajigger or, of course, board meeting.” I hope that won them a few gigs, at least; I still wish they would have clarified once and for all, though, whether “Curds & Whey” just means cottage cheese. Little Miss Muffet was always too cagey on the issue. (www.myspace.com/daphnesoperationrules)   

THE DEAD C— “Stealth”/”The Factory” (Sub Pop, 2000): Seemingly recorded from deep inside a radiator in Dunedin, New Zealand, “Stealth” recreates Metal Machine Music as part of the Environments series, and its dune-din ebbs and flows with real beauty. Hard to tell if actual instruments are involved; if so, they’re presumably not being used as their builders intended. The music breathes, though. The Dead C are prolific cult heroes in avant-noise circles; Thurston Moore and Byron Coley may well own a zillion releases by the threesome, but for my own purposes, this taste test seems sufficient. “The Factory” feels even more onomatopoeic, way more “industrial” than most music filed under that heading – an assembly line of clanking and revving gears and motors and spindles and power generators, with heat and sparks blasting off of the steel. Or maybe just guitar feedback, who knows. Both sides are instrumental, and as with Crimson Sweet’s disc, the vinyl is a vague sort of grey you can halfway see through. (no contact address; fan page at www.myspace.com/thedeadc)

DEATH OF FASHION – “These Days”/”It’s All Ours” (Canarsie, 2005): I have no memories of these guys at all, though MySpace tells me they come from New York. The A-side is built on a ringing Velvet Underground (via Smiths or somebody, probably) guitar drone – prettiness given forward motion. The singer’s voice is flat and basically devoid of character, typical college rock. But he picks up energy as he goes, stumbling into tunefulness and emotion simply by varying volume and intensity. He sounds cheerful, determined; worries he “might not make it through the day,” but you’re confident he will. On the B-side – shorter but tougher to get through – he just stumbles. Guitar enters out of nowhere at the start, almost like Plastic Bertrand’s “Ca Plane Pour Moi,” but the drummer’s attempt to add more rhythm into the equation comes off clumsy. If you’re gonna kill off fashion, it’s best to replace it with more color than what’s here.

(www.deathoffashion.com)

[Photos, top to bottom: Crimson Sweet, Daphne’s Operation 45 sleeve, Death of Fashion (credit J. Wilson)]

Chuck Eddy dusts off his old vinyl and scratches his head. We all win.

Greetings, BLURT readers. This column’s theme is fairly simple: Basically, I sort alphabetically through my shelves for dusty old 7-inch vinyl indie singles from acts that aren’t household names, and try to figure out why I wound up keeping them in the first place. The first two installments appeared at Idolator.com; this month, I pick up in BLURT where I had left off.

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BROKLYN BEAST “March of The Oil Barons”/”The Vampire Strikes Back” (Broklyn Beats, 2002): Clearly there’s a concept of historical importance here, not to mention a craft project: The label – featuring a photo of George W. Bush with fangs drawn on his face — is not actually on the disc, but rather on a sticker inside the sleeve, ready for the listener to cut out and apply. “Since United Records wouldn’t print our label you get to do it yourself!,” exclaims a Brooklyn-addressed press release, which I also tucked into the sleeve. That same one-sheet explains that the record is “a one-off experimental breaks project with production by label heads doily and Criterion,” and calls the music “hard dub and chug fun for the summertime,” which overstates matters somewhat: I hear skipping vinyl noises, cartoon-like sound effects, distorted scratch sounds, all switching gears and shaped and repeated into a clanging facsimile of a rhythm. Sort of reminds me of the early works of U.K. industrial band Test Dept. The flipside is equally repetitive, but faster, and even more disruptive, with abrasive horn-sample additives. An intriguing curio that tries to answer the question: “How far from what people think of as music as you can go and still maintain a recognizable beat?” Not quite this far, but maybe close. (www.broklynbeats.net )

THE BUNNY BRAINS/DESIGNER American Swiss/Cheese Single (LHG, 1996) I saw clamor-crazed Middle Atlantic combo the Bunny Brains play live a couple times (rabbit outfits were involved once), and I should disclose that one of their principal participants, Dan Seward, is the brother of my very good friend Scott Seward, the funniest metal critic on Martha’s Vineyard. Also, I should note that Scott once helped name one of their songs (on their 1995 Beach Bunny Bingo 10-inch EP) “Bring Me the Head of Trent Reznor (Chuck Eddy Mix),” and in 2000 they put out an anthology entitled Sin Gulls: Goring St. Eddy. Other than that, though, I honestly have no connection with them at all, and I’ve never been able to keep straight their apparent feud with some phony group of alleged Bunny Brains alumni who also claim to be the Bunny Brains. Or used to. Or something. Anyway, they split this four-song 7-inch with a Swiss band, and I only realized just this second that both sides weren’t by the Bunny Brains! The two Designer songs on the “Swiss Cheese” side are “My Favorite Toy” and “Beach Bum”; the former has a silly falsetto vocal lightening the horrendous heaviness of some slowly accelerating Flipper-style guitar sludge, while “Beach Bum” actually brandishes some semblance of surf guitars beneath its strangulated Gibby Hayes (of the Butthole Surfers)-style vocal. The “American” (as in Bunny) side soars 80 miles high in “1000 Years Ago” and digs appropriately into some Amon Düül sci-fi fuzz before getting cut short in “Space Noise Symphony  3 (1^st Movement).” Strangely, the Swiss side does not have more holes in it. (www.myspace.com/thebunnybrains )

CHEETAH CHROME & MIKE HUDSON “Downtown Beirut”/”Nothin’” (Or, 1995) I knew Cheetah Chrome was the Dead Boys (and, before that, Rocket From The Tombs) guy, of course, but I might not have remembered that Mike Hudson was the Pagans guy if I hadn’t received a frequently entertaining 159-page memoir by him called Diary Of A Punk: Life And Death In the Pagans last month. Still, these are clearly Clevelanders aging in New York, and they made a way better single in 1995 – almost two decades past their primes – than most would have predicted. “Downtown Beirut” has the sort of hard and lowdown post-Stooges guitar scritch that I would have called “grunge” before that word got codified into a clearly defined genre, and it seems to be about survival in a war zone – love in the middle of a firefight, Vietnamese babies on their mind, that kind of thing. “Nothin’” chronicles a war zone of its own: “just another junkie out of Avenue C,” watching his back for brothers who’ve been hunting for him. “You used to get what you asked for/But not anymore/And I’m just trying to score,” vamping down to a spoken-word section about quitting, giving up. “Baby, I got nothin’/You got nothin’, too.” In 1995, Avenue C was still a good place for the people in this song. Not anymore, though. (www.cheetahchrome.net )

COCOCOMA “6 ¼ - 125”/Take My Time” (Goner, c. 2006) Recorded December 2005 in their hometown Chicago, so my release-year guess can’t be too far off. Either way, this speedy, muffled nugget is the sort of revisionist garage punk that genre addicts pretend rocks harder than it does simply because it’s so inept and incoherent, and it’s got a Mad-type drawing on its sleeve to match (quaintly old-timey handlebar-mustached soldier handing a bomb to a baby in a stroller). You know the routine: sounds like a first take, and isn’t necessarily better for it. The A-side’s title is pronounced “six and a quarter, one twenty five,” and what saves it are gang-shout harmonies trying to sound inebriated, and the fact that it’s over before you can get too annoyed; some apparent sax blat doesn’t hurt. “Take My Time” is even less of a tune, with audible but incomprehensible vocals. Over a whole album, the shtick would get oppressive (and when I heard this band’s CD, it did just that), but at single’s length the slop makes for a halfway diverting novelty. (www.myspace.com/cococoma)

NIKKI CORVETTE ”Love Me”/”What’s On My Mind” (Rapid Pulse, 2003) In Detroit, Nikki is something of a new wave legend, and these are the same sort of hard-popping, glam-riffing, sugar-sweet bubblepunk crush trifles she’s made on and off since the late ‘70s, when her three-girl Corvettes served as a missing link between the Runaways and Go-Gos. “Bonkers boogie from the new wave Betty Boop,” a Detroit News critic raved in 1979. “If Marie Osmond were a juvenile delinquent.” Bomp reissued 16 early Nikki and the Corvettes toons on CD in 2000, and a nifty comeback disc called Back From Detroit came out on Dollar Record Records in 2006. This single, Detroiters will be ashamed to hear, was recorded in Minneapolis and released in Connecticut. But both songs are still innocent come-ons, equipped with super duper hooks just like always -- Nothing more, nothing less. And judging from the three photos included, Nikki still looks adorable. (www.myspace.com/nikkiandthecorvettes )

Chuck Eddy is the former music editor of the Village Voice and the author of several books, including the greatest book on heavy metal ever written, Stairway To Hell. He won’t admit it, but he knows more about rock ‘n’ roll than the entire accumulated BLURT brain trust.

[Pictured: Bunnybrains, Nikki Corvette]