Flaming Pablum

Step Into The Light: Pressing Play on the Debut EP by Light of Eternity

PREAMBLE:
It’s practically impossible to avoid prefacing a review of the debut EP from Light of Eternity without first addressing the tragic and untimely death of Killing Joke guitarist Geordie Walker, who passed away unexpectedly last November. The loss of the inimitable guitarist pulled the plug on an iconic band that was still enjoying a remarkable third (or was it fourth?) act and some strenuously well-earned acclaim after decades of iron-willed perseverance and resistance to compromise. Killing Joke unwittingly played their final show just a few months earlier on the exalted stage of London’s Royal Albert Hall, and a new chapter seemed poised to begin. Sadly, it was not to be.

Much as he did with his first two excellent solo forays, erstwhile Killing Joke drummer/founder Big Paul Ferguson had begun working on the project that would become L.O.E., prior to Geordie’s sudden demise, simply as a comparatively relaxed, extracurricular outlet beyond Killing Joke’s notoriously tempestuous working parameters. A guitarist named Paul Williams (not to be confused with the soft-rock singer/songwriter and ASCAP chairman of the same name) from a Durham, England band called Chaos 8, had approached Big Paul about possibly playing on some material he’d started writing. In short order, a creative collaboration flourished and gained momentum, with Big Paul recruiting vocalist/bassist Fred Schreck into the burgeoning fold. Big Paul and Schreck had previously played together in a band called Crush back in the early `90s, but Schreck had originally served in the ranks of a revered New York City band, The Ancients. Things were starting to gel.

In the immediate wake of the stymied plans and deep emotional upheaval of losing his longtime friend and bandmate, Big Paul immersed himself into this project with Williams and Schreck as less of a dalliance and more as a veritable lifeline, devoting himself to the galvanizing music of this new band – now named Light of Eternity – as a means of healing and recalibrating as he mourned Geordie’s sudden absence.

Armed with all that foreshadowing, this reviewer continues to find it difficult to listen to L.O.E.’s first recordings without reading deeply into them.

REVIEW:
I cannot honestly say what I was expecting after being sent L.O.E.’s debut EP, given the particulars. The last music I’d heard by Schreck was his work with Satellite Paradiso, an impressive musical collective helmed by former Psychedelic Furs guitarist John Aston that specialized in a sort of lushly modern psychedelia. Conversely, guitarist Paul Williams’ past music with Chaos 8 offered more of the bottom-heavy crunch of punky, industrial rock with an endearing abundance of snarl and sneer. Taking into account Big Paul’s versatility as a musician and the many stylistic turns he’s taken with various bands over the years, not least with Killing Joke, I was quite curious as to how L.O.E’s music would hit me.

But hit me it did…

Pressing play on the EP’s first track, “Edge of Fate,” as I was lazily meandering to the office, one sleepy morning earlier this week, I certainly wasn’t prepared. A single, monolithic note from a dreadnought-sized synthesizer confirmed that it was entirely too late to dodge the scud missile about to hit my ear pods. Williams’ corrosive guitar and Big Paul’s drums simultaneously drop into the mix for a concussive half-minute that establishes the full, widescreen presence of the band before BOOM, we’re off on a chugging gallop when Schreck assumes the mic as the pavement starts cracking all around me.

As a brief aside, some full disclosure: When I first listened to this EP, I immediately assumed that the vocal duties were being divided between bassist Fred Schreck — whose primary role in previous bands was as vocalist — and guitarist Paul Williams, leaving Big Paul free to bash the bejeezus out of his drums. I jumped to this conclusion given the pronounced dichotomy between verses delivered in a fiery, higher register cackle and a lower, magisterial baritone. I have since been informed, however, that all vocal detail on the record was handled by Fred Schreck, a revelation that is frankly astonishing, and a striking testimony to the breadth of his abilities.

Straining at the inherent tension that essentially comprises the trio, Shreck basically … shrecks the Hell out of thing song, buffered by Williams’ strafing guitars and the signature thwomping wallop of Big Paul behind the kit. The fury of the man pounding the crap out of these intricate rhythems is palpable, but, at the same time, this explosive sound never boils over into simply bombast for bombast’s sake. The song is taut and burly, but controlled, muscular but melodic. While Williams seems hellbent on pushing proceedings into the red, Schreck wrestles control of the track’ s middle-eight with a sonorous refrain before we’re again racing at a breakneck pace towards a detonative climax.

Crawling breathlessly out of the smoking crater left by that first track, I brace myself for another bowel-worrying barrage, practically hugging a lamp post on lower Lafayette Street for stability. Instead, I am met with the stately opening notes of an elegiac hymn called “Lament,” which, while rendered similarly sinewy by Williams’s hefty guitars and Big Paul’s emphatic drumming, is a far more nuanced affair than its pugnacious predecessor. Schreck’s resonant croon rises above the brewing storm to not-so-obliquely recount what can only be Big Paul’s innermost sentiments regarding Geordie Walker’s passing, the end results being as poignant as they are powerful.

From there, it’s back to the carpet-bombing with, suitably, “Explode,” finding Schreck reverting to his hellion wail for a shouty barnburner with yet another stomping riff.

The final cut of the EP is “Tipping Point,” a lyrically scathing, gaping-jawed takedown of a flaccidly weak-willed target (a single entity or society as a whole?) vainly preoccupied with consumption and self-gratification. This doomy disavowal is fulsomely fleshed out by fat, chunky chugging underpinned by Big Paul’s gigantic beats and a wash of minor-key synths.

And suddenly, it’s all over. While the word “Light” may indeed be in their appellation, rest assured that Light of Eternity’s music is about as bright and sunny as a forbidding cumulonimbus ready to soak you senseless and flatten your home. But as dark and dense as it can be, it’s also the sound of pure, propulsive catharsis and a bracing first shot across the bow.

I, for one, cannot wait for more. This first EP is unleashed on June 1st. Go get it. 

Find them on Bandcamp and Facebook. 

 

Exhuming The Moondance

I was beginning to slowly piece together an entry about some comparatively ancient doings along the stately byway of Grand Street (which may still see the light of day) but got sidetracked by another item about a former location near the westerly end of that street, namely the Moondance Diner.

Read any write-up of the Moondance Diner on the web, and you’re likely to see many of the same invocations about how the iconic eatery was featured in episodes of “Sex & the City,” “Miami Vice” and “Friends” and in movies like “Spider-Man” and “After Hours.” I can’t speak for those other dumb-ass titles with any authority, but I’d really like to (again) clear up the misconception that the Moondance Diner ever appeared in “After Hours,” a film which is something of a preoccupation of mine

While, yes, the Moondance Diner was very definitively in SoHo -– the geographical heart of “After Hours” -- not that far from various other neighborhood-specific locations in that film, Scorsese actually filmed the diner scenes (both the interior and the exterior shots) at a diner in Hell’s Kitchen called the River Diner on West 36th Street on 11th Avenue (where John Lennon was once photographed). It certainly would have made more sense to film them at the Moondance, but for whatever reason – he didn’t. So, when you read that bullshit on WikiPedia and/or in any other articles on the subject -- don’t believe the hype!

Now, of course, I already addressed this inanely trivial bullshit in this post from back in 2010, wherein I lamented the absence of the Moondance Diner with juxtaposing photos of the deeply shitty hotel that was erected on its former site. One would think that was the end of the story, right?

One would be wrong.

The way it shook out, the Moondance Diner was allegedly forced to close its doors circa 2007, when they could no longer realistically meet the demands of lower Manhattan’s spiraling rent. The physical diner itself – complete with ornate, rotating-moon signage – was sold and shipped to the wide-open spaces of a town called La Barge in Wyoming, of all places.

That should have been it, but, tragically, the winter climate of Wyoming (where, one assumes, they get a significantly greater amount of snowfall than Sixth Avenue & Grand Street ever does) spelled a comparatively quick demise for the Moondance diner, which closed again in 2012.

On a personal level, the Moondance Diner was a longtime favorite of mine from both when I was a single, beery rock pig on the hunt for greasy food after an evening of ill-advised high decibels and from when I became a doting dad to two little, tiny people. Not only was it an iconic spot on the map, but the food was spot-on. Since its departure, I always envisioned some grand road trip I’d take upon retiring, wherein I’d drive around the continent, visiting bits and pieces of downtown Manhattan’s past like the Moondance Diner, and the bar from the Cedar Tavern (now in a bar in Austin, TX) and the giant lizard from the top of the Lone Star Café (now also located in Texas). That expedition probably won’t be happening.

As of this time last year, as reported in this story in the Cowboy State Daily, the dormant diner was being eyed for re-opening by various parties, but I don’t know if any of that has come to pass since the publishing of this article.

Once again, click on that link for the full story of the fate of the Moondance, … along with dispiriting pictures like the one below.

Lastly, here's my little daughter in front of same circa 2007...

Word on the Street

Big Black at CBGB, 1986

I realize I technically already logged my eulogy to Steve Albini, but when has that ever stopped me?

I’ve mentioned him a few times, here (notably here, here, here and again here), but my friend Greg Fasolino was a near “Zelig”-like figure in terms of attending (and, even better, recording) certain gigs back in the day, and he and I share an almost perfectly aligned taste. A great example of this is the clip below.

The summer Greg recorded this video – capturing vintage Big Black at CBGB in the July of 1986 – I would have been sequestered out in a group house on Long Island, washing dishes at Ina Garten’s Westhampton Beach iteration of The Barefoot Contessa. That honestly doesn’t matter, as I wouldn’t go on to first hear Big Black until the fall of 1987, when a friend of mine walked into my shift as a disc jockey at my college radio station and demanded I play the 45 he was shoving in my face (the “He’s a Whore”/”The Model” 7”). I dropped the needle on the Cheap Trick cover and was a convert for life.

Being quicker to the table than myself, Greg not only went to this gig, but he captured it on video -- which was still no small feat, in 1986, if you consider how unwieldy and bulky video equipment was, at the time.

The resultant footage is a revelation. Here’s Steve Albini, looking sorely undernourished, unleashing a ferocious onslaught of visceral noise and invective, interspersed with bone-dry quips of the blackest pitch. It’s also a telling example of what shows in the intimate confines of that fabled room were actually like. Peter Prescott of Mission of Burma/Volcano Suns joins them for later numbers.

I was going to say, “not for the faint of heart,” but given the tragic circumstances of Albini’s death, that seems a bit tasteless … which he’d have probably endorsed.

Rest in peace.

Goodbye, Steve Albini

For two LPs and a handful of singles, The Wedding Present had cultivated a tidy body of work that was marked by Dave Gedge’s lyrical preoccupations with the vexing intricacies of intimacy, as buoyed by a maniacally jangley electric guitar.

Cut to 1990, wherein Gedge incongruously recruits Steve Albini, fresh off of working with considerably noisier bands like Boss Hog, The Jesus Lizard and Pigface, to helm an EP, swapping the Wedding Present’s previous palette of bright primary colors with inky dark smudges that didn't stay inside the lines. Then came the full album.

Providing a forceful, sonic heft to the band’s overall aesthetic, Albini’s fabled warts’n’all recording style swiftly jettisoned the cute, indie tweeness of The Wedding Present’s previous work with a thick, bulbous sound that was roughly hewn and endearingly unwieldy. From the pit-like dance floor of New York City’s own CBGB, my friend Rob Bala and I heard Dave Gedge step up to the mic to explain the title of the new record and the songs thereupon. “It’s called Seamonsters,” deadpanned Gedge. “because they’re big and scary!”

True enough. The indie jangles had been replaced by driving, uncooperative guitars, pugnacious basslines, migraine-friendly drums and eardrum-ravaging lashings of flat-out noise terror that transformed Gedge’s songs from aw-shucks ditties about star-crossed crushes into howling exhortations of unreciprocated adoration and bitter betrayal.

Needless to say, that was all Steve Albini.

Yes, yes, yes… he went on to record In Utero by Nirvana, but … that’s almost inconsequential compared to everything he did prior to and beyond that.

He wasn’t always pleasant, much less polite. Hell, he positively *excelled* at being abrasively tasteless. Sharp of wit and even sharper of tongue, Steve Albini said quite a lot of flatly objectionable shit, in his day. A lot of folks overlooked that because of the truly unique and combustible majesty of the sound he created with bands like Big Black, Shellac and some other outfits whose monikers might land one in Facebook jail for posting. But his reputation for brute-force candor that came coated in a veritable fondue of eloquent cruelty preceded him, and usually not in a nice way.

I first heard Big Black in college (my first taste being Albini’s merciless manhandling of Cheap Trick’s “He’s a Whore”), and it immediately left an impression. To my bruised ears, the truly great musicians aren’t necessarily classically trained, conventionally adept or saddled with “chops” so much as they simply have a readily identifiable style. The nanosecond you hear a piece of music Steve Albini was involved in, you know it, and there is no other sound quite like it. Big Black may have looked like a hapless trio of gormlessly bespectacled nerds, but they created a roar more ferocious than any burly metal band you can name. In the recording studio, music overseen by Albini (he rejected the title “producer”) took on a sinewy bluntness that could *only* have come from his helming of the console.

I was going to keep waxing hyperbolic about albums like the heroically indelicate Songs About Fucking or Shellac’s 1000 Hurts, but my friend Anthony Cohan-Miccio beautifully addressed the issues I alluded to in the first graph on Facebook so well that I thought I should share the whole damn thing below.

Rest in peace, Steve Albini

Beyond the shock of his age and productivity - a damn week or so before the first Shellac album in a decade! What in the Roy Orbison shit is that?! - I think the reason Steve Albini dying is hitting me harder than I would have expected is how much I admired the way he engaged with the asinine, needlessly cruel, hateful shit he got up to in his past (you can’t even say “youth” unless you use GW Bush logic). He owned it, and made the effort to explicate it without excusing it. He didn’t just apologize, but acknowledged he’d gotten off easy. As someone whose sense of honesty & humor has collided with ignorance & privilege to a humiliating degree as well, I really appreciated the all too rare example of being MORE committed to honesty, humility & evolution than just ego preservation & income. I’m going to spend today hearing a lot of exquisite room mic work he achieved, and there will be plenty of memorials going into the remarkable bodies of work he created and helped others create. but, as just a rando fan, my deepest grief is knowing a guy who believed in growing, and never wanted to stop sharing what he learned along the way, isn’t going to get to anymore.

Read: Steve Albini details his role in "edgelord" culture. 

I Call Bullshirt!

About 11 years ago, I wrote a little rant here about an online concern called Do You Remember Tees, an outlet that sold t-shirts emblazoned with the names and iconography of many long-vanished nightclubs, from the widely celebrated to the comparatively obscure. I had a bit of an issue with that, as I expressed here:

Personally speaking, I'm not sure how I feel about this venture. I mean, I love the notion of preserving and celebrating these places, but it kind of gets back to the whole notion of whether you should be wearing the t-shirt of a place you never actually went to. I mean, here in 2013, as much as I cherish my own memories of, for example, seeing bands at The Ritz, sporting a crisp, brand-new t-shirt with the Ritz's old logo on it seems a bit disingenuous. Beyond that, I don't think many of the places ever sold t-shirts to begin with, but that's a pedantic quibble at the end of the day.

Suffice to say, I never bought any of their stuff. I doubt my sniffily disparaging post had anything to do with it, but the link to Do You Remember Tees went offline a while back and, as far as I can tell, that business is no more.

Cut to 2024 and along comes DEFUNCT, a similarly inclined venture as Do You Remember Tees, hawking t-shirts and coffee mugs with the names and logos of more since-vanished New York City clubs, bars and record stores, and I have many of the same nagging reservations. I mean, in this instance, not only are they offering t-shirts splashed with club names like The Ritz, Danceteria and The Palladium, but also several shops I held quite dear like Rocks in Your Head and Rebel Rebel and some dear-departed bars like Chumley’s and Lucky Strike. While, yes, I was a huge fan and regular patron of all those businesses cited above (devoting a laborious number of posts to each one of those spots here on this stupid blog), the whole thing just feels like a shallow rip-off. I have no recollection of Rocks in Your Head ever selling t-shirts, but I’d sincerely wager that, if they did, they sure didn’t look like the ones on offer here. I can guarantee you that Danceteria never sold friggin’ coffee mugs.

Maybe I’m being the gatekeeping “Name Three Songs” guy that I’m entirely capable of being, and maybe I’m making much ado about absolutely nothing (I mean, at the end of the day, ….t-shirts, coffee mugs …. It’s all just stuff), but the whole thing just reeks of (obvious) inauthenticity.

Wendy on The Deuce

Just a super quick one.

That’s Wendy O. Williams above, standing on top of a car and about to bring a sledgehammer down on an unsuspecting televisions set. This is just a screen-captured from the video embedded on this old post. The band were out front of a Sam Goody’s on East 42nd Street, just steps off Second Avenue around what some now desperately call “Pix Plaza,” doing a promotional stunt for the release of 1980’s New Hope for The Wretched

I stumbled on the photo below, meanwhile, presumably taken circa their follow-up album, 1981’s Beyond the Valley of 1984. I’m making that assumption given Ms. Williams’ tonsorial presentation -- a brunette mohawk in place her former dyed blonde locks. Again, by my estimation, Wendy is pictured back on East 42nd Street, albeit this time waiting at the southeast corner where The Deuce intersects with Madison Avenue. Ironically enough, I first bought Beyond the Valley of 1984 at a long-shuttered record store just a block or so to the north of that very spot, probably oblivious to the fact that Wendy herself was stalking those very same streets. It would have been something to run into her on the sidewalk (although her base of operations, as I documented a little while back, was way downtown). Still, one just didn’t imagine the Plasmatics walking around Manhattan.

Before I could verify the corner in question, I found an older photograph of practically the very same spot, this one taken, presumably, in the late `70s. That same Duane Read sign is visible in the shot of Wendy.

I haven’t made it back up to that neck of the woods recently enough to capture a glimpse of what that corner looks like these days, but here it was as recently as 2022.

The exhaustive clip below, meanwhile, was released last year in observance of the band’s 45th anniversary.

Page Rage

Nothing quite sends me into a frothy-mouthed rage like broken images on this blog. It sincerely burns my fuckin’ toast to see posts I’ve only put up just days earlier blighted with missing visuals. It looks sloppy, it’s really discouraging, and it’s happenign a lot – again – lately. So I reached out to the folks at my service provider, and they said …

There may be a brief increase of issues as our IT and Engineer teams are making changes to the infrastructure to help improve and stabilize the platform. This is the work needed to update existing and provide additional resources to better serve user content.

Once complete, they will be able to turn their attention to using the improved stability to correct and enhance the processes of uploading and storing images.

Yeah, that and $2.90 will get you on the 6 train.

In any case, my apologies if you’re experiencing it, as well.

"Safety in Numbers": Back ... Again ... to the SIN Club

The SIN Club — actually an acronym for “Safety in Numbers,” and not an allusion to transgressions of divine law, although a few of those probably went down there, too — on East 3rd Street between Avenues B and C allegedly only lasted a few months in 1983. I can’t speak with any authority on that, given that, at the time, I was a snot-nosed, 16-year-old high school sophomore from the Upper East Side for whom environs east of Avenue A were forbidding on the best of days. It may be hard to reconcile, here in 2024, when the East Village and what used to be called Alphabet City are now overrun by brunch-obsessed millennial influencers and ambitious finance bros with oversized golf bags, but huge swathes of the Lower East Side used to be a genuinely dangerous, if you weren’t minding your p’s and q’s, so to speak.

As such, dubbing this pop-up live-music venue “Safety in Numbers” was no accident. While it was a place for the like-minded to congregate and enjoy this particular variant of left-of-center expression (bands like the earlier iterations of SWANS, Sonic Youth, False Prophets, etc. not exactly being to conventional taste, at the time), being that it was tucked way to the east in what was largely considered something of a lawless badlands, it was in everyone’s best interest to travel to and from the club in a pack. Wander the darkened streets of Avenues B and C in the early-to-mid-`80s alone, and you were more than likely to fall prey (literally) to some of the neighborhood’s less convivial elements.

I’ve written fleetingly about the SIN Club a couple of times here (notably here and here), prompted by rare photographs that documented its brief tenure but, again, I never went to the place, much less did I hear about it until way after the fact. Sure, I was fortunate enough to attend since-vanished ventures like CBGB, the Ritz, Danceteria, The Cat Club, The Pyramid, King Tut’s Wah-Wah Hut, Brownie’s, Sin-E, The Bank, Downtown Beirut, the Luna Lounge, Coney Island High, The World, The Spiral and even the Lismar Lounge (not what anyone would call “a nice place”) and a few others I’m forgetting, but — by most accounts — the SIN Club made those establishments feel as legitimately underground as The Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel.

Legend frequently looms larger than actual fact, but the SIN Club seemed to really be that rarefied entity … the kind whose every existence defied all semblance of likelihood and logic. When I heard of the list of bands that played that space and the ensuing scene (a refreshingly open-minded mix of hardcore punk, experimental noise rock, burgeoning hip-hop, electronic dance music, etc.), it seemed too cool to be true, especially given its geographical placement in the unwelcoming heart of Alphabet City.

Recently, a gent named Steven Wishnia, who formerly played bass for the aforementioned False Prophets, put together a great oral history of the SIN Club for an outlet called Hell Gate. Check it out here.

As I understand, when the SIN Club was finally shut down, the space became occupied by an interest called The Living Theatre, where my on CREEM Magazine colleague Charles' band Fractured Cylinder played.

But that's probably a post for another day...

"The Marble Thingy"

I honestly don’t remember for how long it was installed at the Forbes Gallery on lower Fifth Avenue, but it was at least several years. I almost want to say I remember first seeing it when my father still worked at the magazine back in `80s, but I may be projecting. In any case, after my children arrived on the scene by the mid-2000’s, when they became more ambulatory, I used to periodically take them to check it out. 

By “it,” I’m referring to what my littlest used to call “The Marble Thingy,” which was an art installation that hung on the north wall of the Forbes Gallery’s vestibule. We could just duck in and spend time watching it do its thing. By “its thing,” I mean an inventively complicated obstacle course for a series of metal ball bearings, finding them running down ramps, bumping off bells, whirling through shoots and triggering other mechanisms in the manner of something between a gravity-controlled pinball machine and a Rube Goldberg contraption. My kids absolutely loved it, and we could literally spend upwards of an hour in that little room.

My son Oliver was especially enamored of “The Marble Thingy,” and we were rarely able to walk down that stretch of Fifth Avenue, specifically between 12th and 13th streets, without popping in to check in on it. He’d have happily spent all day just watching it.

Unfortunately, like so many other elements of New York City, the Forbes Gallery closed abruptly in November of 2014. The building that had once housed the magazine’s editorial offices and Malcolm Forbes’ stately gallery of artifacts closed up shop for good. The magazine ended up moving to Jersey City (where I’d later fleeting interview for a position as a science & technology editor I had zero aptitude for) and its old headquarters on Fifth Avenue became yet another NYU facility (as is so often the case).

Sadly, “The Marble Thingy” vanished along with the rest of the Forbes Gallery. I would later learn that the piece in question was titled, fittingly, Wallpiece IV by a sculptor named George Rhoads, and it later sold at auction for a figure between five and seven thousand dollars. Regardless, it was priceless to my little boy, and we both still invoke it when we walk down that street.

This isn’t the exact piece in question, but it’s a good example of what it was like.