The Horrors, Skying (Release date Aug. 9)
The Horrors apparently feel that they have to carry the banner for every British band of the ‘80s or ’90s that was ever any good. I’m hearing bits of Blur, Pop, Human League, Cure and even U2 here. Luckily The Horrors have a shtick of their own to add—that dark bass-bumped swirl of imminent menace which sets its own leisurely lion-in-waiting pace.

So instead of aping all those other bands, it sounds instead like they’re being slowly swallowed into a gaping maw of malevolent modern pop music. Even the higher-pitched, jumpier stuff like “Wild Eyed” is tense and forboding.

I got a jar of Smucker’s Apricot Preserves at Stop & Shop yesterday for $1.67 because, according to a little sign near the jar, “this product is being discontinued.”
Discontinuing APRICOTS? Smucker’s can no longer convince people to like APRICOTS?

Guess the jig is up.

The scene reels still from last week’s revelation that Art & Architecture are breaking up (shoddy architecture!) just as their debut album is set to be released on a major label. A&A is one of the few area bands to score such a career-making deal in years, and the only one of those to emerge from our own beloved Bullfinch/Hamilton’s subscene. (Other noted signees were bands which erupted from well-appointed suburban studio basements without ever playing live, or otherwise existing outside our scrappy clicque.)
We could digest the Art & Arch newsflash more readily if we could fathom the reasoning behind it. All four bands members have told us there’s no rancor, no “creative differences.” They can’t all be lying, because at least two of them were drunk enough to be exceedingly truthful when they told us.
The official, and so uncontested, explanation is that songwriter Pierce Lab has been accepted to grad school. Understandable—this is a college band, after all, and it’s as hard to get academia out of your system as it is music. But what Pierce pursued as an undergrad was Electrical Engineering. What he will be studying now, in Massachusetts, is… Music.
Do you really need a master’s when you have a signed band? Isn’t having a signed band the same as a diploma?
Know who’s hopping mad about this? Oh, of course you know. Ick, long-in-the-tooth frontman for The Deadaloos. Ick’s been this close to getting signed so many times that it’s all he thinks about, the only reason he says he’s still in the rock racket at all. The proud townie rails against ivory tower bands who think the real world spins around them. “They just don’t get it,” he sniffs. “They just don’t get it.” Not that he liked the band. But according to Ick, even the undeserving should be more grateful.
An Art & Architecture album, remastered from singles and demos the band made at Homer Studios, whose engineer Eddie Berens amy be the only one who can turn this situation into a resume-builder. Always looks good when your clients get signed off of work you did. But odds are that the album won’t go anywhere. It’s got a release date, but no major press (and, obviously, no tour) are being scheduled. It’ll just get burned off with a stack of other bands who got signed by mistake or misfortune. Albums like that clog our mailbox every spring, and we always wonder what the backstory of the burn-off was. This is the first one we’ve witnessed personally.

Chaste Adventures of Joseph and Piece of Foolishness, ideally matched wordy songwriters, at the Bullfinch… A Tragic Fantasy (aka Long Time Ago) and Poor Harold at Hamilton’s… Rim of the World, the unfortunately named European folk act, at D’ollaires with Angel Intrudes…

Up all night figuring whether I’m owed any money by the government.

Las Kellies, Kellies. Argentinian female trio doing that leisurely sparse Delta 5/Yello/Trio/Slits thing, but with a bit of rockabilly suspense added. I get quickly sick of the intentionally underproduced, but this stuff seems to understand its limitations and actually sounds fuller with all the bursts of silence and clean drumbeats. Lots of repetition, thumps and stray notes, really builds an atmosphere. The lyrics lend mystery to the exercise: the main line in “Keep the Horse” goes “To whom it may concern, to whom it may concern, to whom it may concern, to whom it may concern.” The bit “You may keep the horse” comes out as a quizzical afterthought. Color me enthralled by Kellies.

We remain obsessed with the elegantly rhyming (or alliterative) titles of joke pages in Archie comic books.
From Archie Annual Digest Magazine #57 (1990):
Jest Request
Volley Folly
Cross Toss
Help Help!
Gag Bag
Pie Guy
Stunt Stint
Scheme Supreme
Grouch Vouch
Gals Galore
The Flip-Floppers Fly Again

This issue is also notable for the curse grandly uttered by Samantha’ s Samson at the outset of the “Wanted man” episode of That Wilkin Boy:
“OH, DAD BLAST THE DAD-BLASTED DADBLAST!”

A funny thing’s happened to Dead Lewis. When we first started singing his praises (without ever quite praising his singing, if you know what we mean), it was because he’d found the perfect rock blend of irony and entertainment. When he took saucy old British Music Hall tunes and disguised them as classic punk tunes, we were enthralled. When he did a quasi-classical/jazz jam on old metal riffs for a lonely Christmas Eve gig, we were admiring. Then, when he took his exotic take on squeaky white ‘70s funk (Teaspoon of Zest) to a club (Hamilton’s) that couldn’t be expected to get the joke, we quibbled.

Now his career (and you can actually call it that) has really taken off, and color us not green but worried. Half a dozen ever-more-popular Hamilton’s gigs later, Lewis took his show on the road, a regional touring circuit of sports bars and college hang-outs which have honed his shtick into a battering ram. When he returns to the area tonight, it’s at the biggest party-nite haven in town, D’ollaire’s, on a bring-in-the-bucks-or-else Saturday.
A few sex-joke songs in the set became frenzied sing-alongs, so that the lewd tunes now reportedly overwhelm the interpretive funk and pop upon which Teaspoon of Zest was founded.
Which—sigh—explains the name change(s). Ladies and gentlemen, will you put your hands together (or over your ears) for “Screw” Lewis and T.O.Z!!!!

Pernix & Milner of the Sarnafils, acoustic at the Bullfinch… Sunbird Transport
and Manac at Hamilton’s, doing virtually the same set since they’re both “tributes” of the same unprolific band… Gus Sigrid & Bess is a duo—there’s no comma—which means they’re particularly overpriced at D’ollaires…

Is there some national tax break that everybody gets that I’ve never heard about?

Jon Pousette-Dart, Anti Gravity
We all know what punk was rebelling against in the 1970s. In the Boston area, the syrupy soft-rock menace which punk proposed to wipe from the face of the earth was personified by the Pousette-Dart Band

I’m older now, and more forgiving, so when I learned that a Hartford-based musician I greatly respect, Jim Chapdelaine, was involved with the latest Pousette-Dart solo CD, I wondered if I could stomach the old guitar-noodling nemesis now, after a gap of some 30 years.

I somehow made it through the first song, the title song, but had to hurriedly push “stop” after just a few lanquid notes of “Me and the Rain.” I flipped ahead to “Who I Am,” since Chapdelaine was credited with playing bazouki and toy piano on it. It’s just as slow and quease-inducing as that “Rain” song, plus it’s a duet with a female vocalist who coos as self-consciously as Pousette-Dart does. For a record called “Anti Gravity,” it certainly does have a high opinion of itself, thinking we’d fall for these old pop ballady tropes.

Some will applaud the return of California-induced East Coast soft-rock. I feel it differently. Check with me in another 30 years.

From the apparently endless stack of Christopher Arnott’s 45s. We’ll be doing this for months to come.

Loudon Wainwright II, Jesse Don’t Like It/T.S.D.H.A.V. I understand he’s an elder folk statesman and sired the esteemed Wainwright pop progeny Rufus and, um, his sister. But for years I only appreciated Loudon Wainwright III as a novelty act. A smart one, assuredly. “Dead Skunk” hit when I was 11 years old, and this slice of political satire followed 18 years later, when I was a rabid anti-censorship activist in college. (The A-side here is a reaction to Sen. Jesse Helm’s crusade against government-subsidized controversial artworks. The initials on the flip side stand for “This Song Don’t Have a Video.” This single was cutting-edge for about 20 minutes.) Another 20 years, and Wainwrights was on the Judd Apatow TV sitcom. Look, I know I’m some important stuff here, but I just find the guy funny.

The Rake’s Progress, Salvation/It Never Dies. Wonderful band name—classical yet saucy. Plus this is a limited edition (mine’s #290 of 1000) on clear vinyl. Unfortunately, none of those things make it memorable. Straightahead rock riffing and yowling.

The Trip, Help Me/Captain Poland’s Bolero. The band name is way too obvious and simplistic, the punk-tinged neo-psychedelic music much less so. Actually suits the 45 format, which is more than you can say for a lot of sprawling neo-psych experimentatlists.

The Swingin’ Neckbreakers, Workin’ & Jerkin’/Good Good Lovin’. The violent, up-close face-squeezing cover photo that looks like a cross between the work of WeeGee and Stan Brakhage, neatly suits the explosive post-punk rockabilly vulgarity of this band, which visited New Haven clubs regularly in the ‘90s thanks to Paul Mayer of the similarly old-school Gone Native.

Stigmata a Go Go, Satan Comes to Dinner/Mote. There was a time in the ‘90s when the word “Stigmata” was as common in band names as, well, Jesus. At least this one puts religious iconography in its song titles as well. Fascinating thumpy instrumental workouts which deliberately don’t stray far from their repetitive riffs. More soundtracky than in your face (or spurting out of your hands).