Strong Effort
i picked this up in a basement in ottawa a while back and have listened to it a lot more than i thought i would. frustrations were floating through town and one of the local promoters used it as an opportunity to put on a show for one of the many terrible local acts; frustrations opened for the local act, who i didn’t stick around for. i think i had an exam to go study for. i’m not the hipster in this equation, though. the process seriously got inverted, somehow. it’s an ottawa thing….
perhaps part of the reason i’ve been listening to this a lot is that i’m actually not entirely sure how to describe it. some people will no doubt wish to use more recent terms, but i’m going to reject that approach. the demo has a very retro sound that pegs it, roughly, as punk rock c. 1985. however, the way it combines influences makes it difficult to conceive of it actually existing c. 1985, and i’m not aware of anything that exists that sounds quite like it. a basic description would be that it sounds about halfway between the earliest sonic youth and the earliest nirvana; in a very real way, it sounds like the missing link between no wave and grunge. however, you can also hear some influences from early emotive hardcore in the vocals, as well as a touch of husker du in the song structures and quite a bit of joy division in the overall atmospherics.
i’m often not a fan of retro approaches, but if retro is to be done at all then this is the way that i’m going to find it interesting. while it’s not *actually* an underground punk demo from 1985, it really sounds like it could be one, and, if it was one, it would be unique enough that it would carve out a space for itself in the crowded punk spectrum. it could have launched it’s own genre, even.
more importantly, perhaps, is that it’s a whole lot of fun to listen to. what dragged me out to the show was nothing more complicated than the promise of some thick feedback coming at me from close range in a basement. i certainly got that; listening to the demo, the noisy guitar atmospherics absolutely form a very central part of the sound. it is the rhythm section, though, that drives these songs in the different ways that they’re driven. while the vocal melodies are sort of generic (especially within the larger grunge meta-genre), the vocals are definitely melodic and that itself is a driving factor. more to the point, though, is that most of the vocals are very silly and are fun to be silly with. the ones that try to be more than silly fail in the sense of them being bad poetry….which is itself silly, so it remains consistent. in the end, listeners and musicians alike are all laughing with each other.
overall? yeah, this is pretty good. it’s very familiar, but it’s somehow sort of novel. frustrations have put together a fun demo, and are solid and noisy when they play it in front of you. hopefully, some people will get a chance to hear it…..
