War is Hell

Combat Shock (1986)

War is a sanitized concept in today's world.  You can pick up a controller and teleport directly into World War II through any numbers of titles.  Commercials show square-jawed Supermen climbing mountains to slay the dragon; or, even more terrifying, men silently hunch over a computer screen playing the new high-tech video game -- piloting an unmanned drone.  Our movies even connect to our subconscious with shallow visuals of things going boom while faceless models bravely throw themselves into the fire, consequences be damned.

It's rare we're ever greeted with those consequences.  You rarely hear about the men when they try to re-assimilate into society and fail; you rarely hear about when they become the victims; rarest still, is when those men are consumed by their own demons.  The stories we hear are those of triumph and bravery, not fear and cowardice.

Combat Shock is a movie that deals only in fear and cowardice.

Frankie Dunlan is a pathetic man.  He's not pathetic in the same way Robert DeNiro's Travis Bickle is pathetic, a wayward loser with redeemable qualities.  He's pathetic in the way most normal people are pathetic, incapable of coping with the intense monotony of a "normal" life yet slowly stumbling through it one mistake at a time.

Frankie lives in poverty with his over-bearing wife and special needs child, a creature almost directly transported from David Lynch's Eraserhead.   He can't find work.  He's haunted by the images of what he did in service of his country.  His own father thinks he died in Saigon.  This is his life.  He's never presented with the possibility of something better coming along.  Even when he finally decides to do something, in this case commit a crime to finally get his hands on some money, the consequences are terrible.

To say the movie is nihilistic would be a severe understatement.  It's climax suggests the only logical conclusion for Frankie is a murder-suicide.  But that isn't an attack on the film.  In its nihilism there is a dark, unrelenting honesty that rarely goes addressed in civilized society.  We simply can't understand how men, especially our veterans, can go crazy one day and snap, and often it's not something we even want to understand.  This movie is trying to find a place where an answer to that question might reside.  Combat Shock isn't arguing that the men who fight war are free of the consequences; to the contrary, it's arguing that the men responsible for war are free of those consequences while the men who fight it are the ones forced to continually bear the crushing weight of that burden.

Time Warp Tuesday: Synthpunk

Punk rock is simple music.  It's the essence of rock 'n roll, its rebel spirit stripped down to only its bare essentials; a guitar and some anger.  You don't even have to know how to play the guitar.  You just need a drive to create.  Some of punk rock's first icons weren't terribly skilled musicians, just men who wanted to rawk.

This simplicity, unfortunately, is also one of punk's biggest limitations.  Punk bands that eventually seek to expand beyond the guitar, drums, bass, vocals format tend to get labeled pretentious. God forbid you ever consider experimenting with a synthesizer!  So by the time most punk bands realize there's more to music then simply a loud roar of the guitar it's already too late.  Such was the case for a number of adventurous freaks in the late '70s and early '80s.

Although, there is no established "birth" or "father" for the sound that would later come to be defined as synthpunk, the two artists generally seen as being at the beginning are New York's Suicide and Los Angeles' The Screamers.  Both bands created sounds reliant on electronics over traditional guitars, positioning them on the fringe of what was already a fringe scene in punk rock.  Despite this, they were able to utilize their synthesizers and drum machines to create music as abrasive as any short blast of punk.

Suicide "Frankie Teardrop"

Few if any of the artists associated with the short synthpunk movement ever went on to find the universal acclaim of their guitar-shredding peers.  Most eventually sunk into production roles for those better known bands, such as with California weirdo GEZA X who was responsible for producing the Dead Kennedy's classic "Holiday in Cambodia", or simply disappeared into the ether from which they came.  It is only within the last ten or so years that most of these bands have been rediscovered as the world of independent music turned back to once again cannibalize its past in the form of electroclash and the post-punk revival.  These new bands took bits and pieces from the era, attempting to imitate its naive swagger, but few truly committed the overall aesthetic of the sound.  Those that did, such as Los Angeles' Bubonic Plague and Brooklyn's Blank Dogs, have created interesting pieces that feel almost like time capsules that could rest comfortably next to those earlier bands without clinging to the detached nonchalance their contemporaries strive for.

The Screamers - "Eva Braun"
GEZA X - "Rio Grande Hotel"
Blank Dogs - "Leaving the Light On"
Bubonic Plague - "Gray Wave City"

Dream Affair

With a sound that's heavily influenced by both French cold wave and the '80s EBM of artists like Front 242 and Nitzer Ebb, Dream Affair assaults the senses with their icy guitar lines and the insistent pounding of industrial noise.  It's the sound of serene sleep slowly being ripped apart by monsters invading from a dark place just beyond your dreams.

Case Studies - The Eagle, or the Serpent

DIY folk act Case Studies has a pedigree most probably aren't aware of.  Started by former Duke & the Duchess singer Jesse Lortz after the dissolution of that band, Case Studies hovers in similar sonic territory as the Duke & Duchess.  But where the Duke & Duchess occasionally found their silver lining, Case Studies is about as bleak as any goth act or campy death metal band.  Murder, betrayal, and death permeate almost every song.  Ghosts are invoked in more than one song title, past relationships frequently haunt the narrator, and the characters wandering through these songs are never really offered any chance at redemption.  Bon Iver, this is not.

Case Studies - The Eagle, or the Serpent by sacredbones

John Maus

Right now, John Maus is one of the only individuals out there making important music.  Many people are making good music, some are making intelligent music, but few are making anything truly important.  Maus is one of the exceptions.

Despite this, many critics have taken to using comparisons to other singers or sounds when describing Maus' work.  You'll probably see Ian Curtis' ghost invoked in comparison to Maus' deep bellow.  You'll also see the 1980s consistently referenced when describing his preference for electronics over rawk.  While these references aren't entirely untrue, they're far too reductive to describe what Maus is doing.

It would be hard not to notice the similarities between Maus' music and '80s synthpop forebearers, but where those acts were making simple dance-pop, Maus intentionally loses the plot and gives in to his irrational, and sometimes conflicting, emotions.  He uses his simple dance-pop as a framework for subversive, confrontational statements.  Sometimes these statements are framed as darkly humorous jokes, such as in the case of "Rights for Gays", off Maus' second album, Love is Real.

Offering no compelling argument for his statement, Maus simply intones "rights for gays, oh yeah!" repeatedly.  The song's treatment of gay rights as a joke could be controversial if not for the fact that it feels like Maus is saying, "It's ridiculous we even have to fight for this.  The scenario is itself the joke."  So, in that sense, the song functions in similar fashion to a Kafka story, highlighting the darkly humorous but ultimately maddening absurdities of human existence.

This places Maus more in line with another staple of the 1980s: hardcore punk.  While post-punk of the era had its share of radicals, the intensity with which he presents himself and his penchant for dark humor seems more akin to a band like the Dead Kennedys.  Never is this more apparent than in Maus' re-working of 1990s Ice-T vehicle Body Count's "Cop Killer".

This mixing of ideas from various genres of pop music takes Maus' music from simple dance-pop into a more complex realm where pop stars and pundits can comfortably engage each other beyond the need of co-opting the other's image to maintain relevancy.

John Maus - "Quantum Leap"
John Maus - "Tenebrae"

Weird Era - Side B

Falling somewhere in the middle of an increasingly crowded field of lo-fi psych shoegaze, British group Weird Era calls to mind the works of familiar artists. You can hear traces of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, Jesus & Mary Chain, and the Warlocks.

But where those bands constructed albums that contained distinct and different pieces, Weird Era seems to be arguing for a uniformity.  Everything seems to melt together. There are distinct parts contributing to a complete piece, you can almost separate the guitars and the vocals in your mind, but they're just far enough out of reach that it's almost impossible to distinguish the music as anything other then one complete "sound." Even the tracks slowly drift into one another as if they're intended to be heard as one continuous piece.

All of Weird Era's work is offered for download on the band's site.

Pure Garbage

Hobo With a Shotgun (2011)

A lot of attention has been devoted to what should be a minor footnote in the history of exploitation cinema.  Hobo With a Shotgun isn't the first movie of its kind; it's not even the first movie in recent history to ape its multiple influences.  What distinguishes Hobo With a Shotgun from genuine faux-exploitation misfires like Machete is the sense of awareness that is present in the film and the sincerity that follows from it.  Many modern retro-leaning films that raid the sleaze bin of exploitation cinema do so in an almost condescending manner, taking what is "cool" from it, the gratuitous nudity and violence, and cast aside the charm and goofiness that make those movies "uncool."

Hobo With a Shotgun wastes little time on irony or posturing, instead opting to embrace every last cliche the exploitation and low-budget action genres can offer.  There's the stoic hero, the irredeemably evil villains, the hooker with a heart of gold, and the gallons (and gallons) of blood.

None of this is wasted.  Instead of using these cliches to make a movie mimicking sleaze cinema from 42nd Street theaters, this movies looks like it could have played on a double bill with Death Wish 3 or The Exterminator 2 or, blog favorite, Street Trash at those same theaters.  Characters respond irrationally, the villains have a cartoonishly insane disregard for the concept of proportionality, and the violence goes so far into the realm of bad taste that it's almost impossible to take the overall film seriously.

What brings things back down to earth, and holds the film together, is the package the film is wrapped in.  Crafted with a garish sense for the macabre, Hobo looks like the most beautiful yet insanely terrifying acid trip you've ever stumbled into.  Blood can alternately look like candy-colored syrup or mind-bending molasses; a yellow cloud of sleaze looms over many scenes creating a stifling sense of claustrophobic panic; and, every character has been designed to look like they've stepped right out of a back alley abortion, ripped from the womb of Charlie Bronson and Alejandro Jodorowsky's deranged love child.

This isn't a movie that simply asks you to remember what sleazy B-movies used to be like.  This is a movie that wants you to experience the gloriously depraved mania of villains who use manhole covers in place of guillotines.  While Hobo With a Shotgun will never be seen as a "conventionally good" film, it contains a reckless spirit and frightening creativity that most "good" movies will never approach.  In short, it's the best piece of trash ever made.

Time Warp Tuesday: MDC

It's rare that you can tell what kind of music a band plays based solely on their name.  U2?  Interpol?  The Dave Matthews Band?  Such is not the case with hardcore punk.  Often bands that play within this subset of music make it very clear what they want you to think.  The Dead Kennedys?  Black Flag?  The Circle Jerks?  Probably moreso than any of those bands, the one hardcore punk act that truly offered up a very clear statement of rebellion was a relatively obscure group of Austin-ites known as Millions of Dead Cops.

MDC "My Family is a Little Weird"

Devoid of anything even remotely resembling subtlety or irony, the band immediately positioned itself as a very stark contrast to the more elusive, and often intentionally difficult, bands in the rival post-punk scene of the era.  MDC wasn't going to bury their messages in difficult prose, they were going to bludgeon you to death with their slogans.  If Ronald McDonald wasn't pushing corporate deathburgers then lead singer Dave Dictor was throwing his own homosexuality back in the face of a freedom-loving-until-someone-uses-that-freedom country by asking, "What makes America so straight and me so bent?"  This often led to the band having to confront harsh truths even within the the supposedly open-minded confines of its own hardcore scene, such as when the band, and friend Randy Turner of the Big Boys, ran afoul of Rastafarian punks Bad Brains over Turner's homosexuality.  Never a group to shy away from controversy, MDC responded into the only way they knew how: direct confrontation.

MDC "Pay to Come Along"

In what is probably befitting a band that cared so little about mainstream recognition, MDC is probably one of the few bands of the hardcore era that hasn't gotten the critical reassessment it deserves.  Where a band like Black Flag has had its various eras reevaluated in a far kinder critical light then once offered (My War), and The Circle Jerks are seeing a resurgence in popularity due to lead singer Keith Morris' new work in OFF!, MDC is one of the few bands from the early hardcore era that seems oddly left out.  In a musical climate that today offers non-ironic, nigh-humorless firebrands like M.I.A. and Xiu Xiu, it would seem like MDC's brand of hammer-you-over-the-head sloganeering would be ready for rediscovering.

MDC - "John Wayne Was a Nazi"

MDC - "Corporate Deathburger"

In the Music of Madness

In their own words, Demdike Stare, "...tracks the sonic leylines of cult soundtracks, Arabesque dubs and psychotomimetic ephemera with a proper Lancastrian twist."  What this really means is two music-obsessives have tripped a wormhole into the outer reaches of a mindfuck few can accurately describe.  There's elements of giallo soundtracks, European occult films, new age music, and a host of other influences that, when combined, will leave you with fever dreams of a frightening intensity.  It's almost like being dropped into the ending of a Lovecraft story.

Demdike Stare "Forest of Evil (Dawn)"

Your Weekend Jam

Psychic Ills "Mind Daze" (2011)

 Last week's jam was a slightly danceable freakout featuring vocal contortionists and pliable synths. This week is the comedown. Sounding like they've stepped right out of a late '60s death cult commune, Psychic Ills offer up a narcotic-like haze with their track "Mind Daze," which is off their upcoming album Hazed Dream. Hazed Dream is out October 18th on Sacred Bones.

Psychic Ills - Mind Daze by sacredbones

No Joy - He Cried

Neo-shoegaze group No Joy adds a creeping dread to what was already a fairly menacing song in their cover of the Shangri-Las original.

Salem - King Night

Duel meets David Lynch in Salem's new video for "King Night" below:
SALEM - KING NIGHT from Theo Wenner on Vimeo.

The Most Offensive Film Ever?

Street Trash (1987)

Some movies are made for the sake of art; some movies are made for the sake of money; and, then there's Street Trash.  It seems the only reason Street Trash was made was to offend.  What group, you ask?  Everyone.  Every single person alive.

The movie tosses off jokes mired in multiple -isms (racism, sexism, classism, etc.), scatological humor, rape, necrophilia, and generally every taboo subject you can think of, plus a few you probably didn't know existed.  This intention to offend is nothing new, even within the decade it was created given that the 1980s was the decade that gave us Troma Films, but what sets Street Trash apart from its many low-brow peers and imitators is the sense of craft with which the offensiveness is set upon us.

Make no mistake; this is no literary achievement.  There's no subtext to the plot exploring the plight of New York's downtrodden homeless population.  This is the purest form of exploitation in that it seeks to garner entertainment from the sad, pathetic lives these characters lead.  No character here is ever presented with the opportunity to lead a better life, and even when they harbor such illusions, their dreams are still caught trapped by the muck and filth that surrounds them.

BUT, and this is a very large but, the exploitation here is tossed at us to such an absurd degree it eventually lapses into the realm of parody.  And a deceptively clever parody, at that.  Where Troma would simply be content to mess around with bodily fluids, Street Trash launches them at us in full force -- homeless men are introduced to a rare alcohol that causes bodies to melt, explode, and disfigure into incomprehensible shapes and colors.  It's almost as if Andy Warhol decided to rip control of his '70s exploitation films from the hands of Paul Morrissey and try to one-up George Romero in the gross-out category.  The death set pieces fuse pop art camp with horror movie gross, creating a surreal vision that no filmmaker has been able to match since.

This cleverness also extends to the characterizations, which, while no great achievement, play with what had by then become genre conventions.  The main villain of the film, Bronson, is a deranged Vietnam vet who can't let go of the violence he perpetrated while in 'Nam.  This type of character was an extremely tired stock character used not only in the exploitation genre (Rolling Thunder, The Farmer, etc.) but also in mainstream cinema of the era (Platoon, Casualties of War, etc.).

Here, Bronson is a far stranger creature.  While outwardly visions of war fuel his racist paranoia, he finds himself attracted to a female character of unspecified Asian heritage.  In his dementia, she becomes intertwined with the Vietnamese he killed during the war, adding an oddly sympathetic aspect of self-loathing to what should be a one-note villain.  While you never end up feeling sorry for Bronson as a character, there are moments when he passes from stock villain to a damaged, ragged reality.

And in what is probably the cleverest aspect of the film, Street Trash subverts traditional depictions of New York as a cultural and intellectual epicenter by throwing its low brow pedigree in your face.  For the entire duration of the movie we follow homeless men drinking themselves into literal messy, splatter-filled graves.  Nary an intellectual comes within vomiting distance of the screen, although, the movie displays a disgusting wit about itself.  So in that sense, Street Trash owes as much to gross-out existentialist writers like Georges Bataille and Charles Bukowski as it does violent horror features of the previous decade.

But really, this probably the best way to summarize the experience that is Street Trash:

Time Warp Tuesday - Minimal Man

Blossoming out of what would eventually become a fertile San Francisco post-punk scene in the late '70s and early '80s, Minimal Man was the work of Patrick Miller, an artist who was experimenting with both sound and visual elements. Miller proved to be the only constant for the band, which would feature a rotating cast of members for the duration of its existence.

In a very similar fashion to artists like The Screamers and GEZA X, Minimal Man was a sort of bridge between the abrasive second-wave of punk, which featured artists ranging from The Germs to The Cramps, and the new wave and post-punk that would dominate the early half of the '80s. Playing what would eventually be dubbed "synthpunk," Minimal Man can actually be seen as one of the first direct influences on post-punk, along with more well-known contemporaries like Joy Division. Miller's use of tortured screams and dead-eyed spoken word passages stretched across desolate soundscapes of industrial noise and ghostly synths to create environments that could echo the madness of "Loneliness" or clearly enunciate the soul-crushing reality of love, as in "To Hold You."

Even today their influence can still be found in the lo-fi electronic noise of artists like Brooklyn's Blank Dogs.

Minimal Man - "She Was a Visitor"
Minimal Man - "To Hold You"

White Suns - Waking in the Reservoir

Following in the warped tradition of noise-punk pioneers like Scratch Acid and Lightning Bolt come the Brooklyn-based noise-monsters White Suns.  Though, their debut album, Waking in the Reservoir, was released in February of this year, critical praise has seemed to be strangely mute.  They're releasing a new cassette through Amsterdam-based label NEO Projects, Resurfacing, which can be found here.  To experience the body-shattering racket they conjure up two tracks off their debut are below.

Your Weekend Jam

Ford & Lopatin "I Surrender" (2011)

'80s fetishists Ford & Lopatin just released an Adult Swim-approved video for their new song "I Surrender," although there seems to be complications with actually finding the video.  The song itself utilizes Autre Ne Veut's insane vocal talents over a Fever Ray-esqe backing to conjure up imagined nostalgia for '80s synth-pop ballads.  Or, like the guys below.  Dig the random shirtlessness.

Attack of the Sex Zombies~!

Shivers (1975)

Shivers is the film that introduced the world to auteur and all-around sex-fiend David Cronenberg. Cronenberg, like many young directors, found it far easier to gain notice making low-budget horror features than working his up through the studio system in hope of maybe one-day being granted the possibility of helming a film with an actual budget. Unlike many of those same directors, Cronenberg wasn't satisfied making violent, misogynistic slashers that exploited the lowest common denominator's lust for blood and nudity. Instead, he subverted that lust, luring unsuspecting audiences into an exploration of themes that he would continue to pursue for the majority of his career (and to some extent, still does): man's disconnect from reality, modern science as a means of transformation (both physical and mental), and, more important to this rant, sexual taboos.

In the title I jokingly refer to Shivers as, "Attack of the Sex Zombies," but in actuality, that would be the best way to describe the creatures in the movies. They attack blindly in pursuit of one purpose -- sexual fulfillment. In much the same way George Romero used zombies as a metaphor for racism and blind consumerism, Cronenberg uses the zombie as a metaphor for sexual repression.

Shivers, Cronenberg's first feature, introduces us to a group of residents living in a new high-rise apartment complex. Throughout the course of the film the residents become infected with a parasite that turns each into a mindless zombie intent on infecting others through a kiss. Despite the timid nature through which the parasite is transmitted, the zombies increasingly display stranger sexual tendencies ranging from incest to rape and eventually pedophilia.

While many might look at this as an example of a filmmaker attempting shock for shock's sake, it's important to look at the context in which this film was made.

Created in 1975, Shivers can be seen as a direct response to the sexual revolution that was in full-swing throughout most of North America. The characters contained therein are mostly average, everyman archetypes that are forced to respond to a world gone crazy with sex fiends. The interesting part is that the zombies, while viewed as a menance, aren't necessarily villified. Their sexual perversions are used to give the audience an uncomfortable feeling, but are not necessarily condemned.

At one point, we see two mostly nude young men pursue the hero with the implication of homosexuality, but in a lesser movie the two would've been bludgeoned to death with a phallic stand-in or killed in some other non-ironic manner by the hero to allow the audience to return to a state of "heterosexual normalcy." The hero is never granted this opportunity, and in fact, must hide from the deviants, leaving the audience emasculated. Cronenberg doesn't allow anyone the chance to feel morally superior. He forces the audience to confront what are viewed as immoral sexual behaviors. Is this because he himself condones the actions? I don't think so.

In many ways, Shivers can be looked at as both a horror movie and a pitch-black satire. The sexual revolution in the late '60s and early '70s created a generation more open to their own sexuality but it also produced a backlash from those in conservative circles who viewed most if not all young people as deviants. Shivers is parodying this notion of a world gone crazy with sex by taking it to such an extreme degree; it's lumping together all forms of sex as deviant, regardless of their nature. In an interesting twist, the zombies themselves retain almost everything about their original personality they originally had, they're just now completely sexual beings ruled entirely by their id. This is taking the conservative view of young people as sexual monsters and turning it into the joke it rightly is.

Another interesting footnote to Shivers is that it actually acts as something of a harbinger for the AIDs epidemic of the '80s. The zombies in the film must infect each other through sexual contact, although in this case it's merely a kiss. But it is something of an eerie coincidence especially given Cronenberg's later remake of The Fly, which explored the AIDs epidemic in similar pulp fashion.

An Overview of Weird

weird

[weerd] adjective, -er, -est, noun 

adjective

1. involving or suggesting the supernatural; unearthly or uncanny: a weird sound; weird lights.

2. fantastic; bizarre: a weird getup.

3. Archaic . concerned with or controlling fate or destiny.

Describing and then categorizing what is and isn't weird used to be a simple process; what isn't normal?  Despite no one knowing exactly what normal was, people knew what wasn't.  Whatever stood out wasn't normal.  Whoever stood out wasn't normal.  If you stood out you weren't normal.  The one thing everyone wanted to be was normal.

Somewhere along the way, be it the '60s, the Kennedy assassination, or the birth of David Lynch, things got weird.  People began standing out.  The devil was in the radio, evil lurked on-screen, and the world was no longer the safe, normal place it once was.  Where did this come from, and who was responsible?  Certainly it wasn't Ma and Pa idly withering away in Suburbia, nor was it the advertising executives selling America's soul on Madison Avenue; so, where was this weird bubbling up from?

Beneath the surface of normal suburban bliss there have always been strange and wonderful freaks communicating in a language foreign to most.  Their images can be bloody and horrifying, or they can be sedate and haunting; their noise can be piercing and abrasive, or it can be like a narcotic deceptively soothing you into a state of sublime dependence; and their words...oh how their words can tear at you until you're left questioning your place in this world.

This is a tribute to everything strange and bizarre and disconcerting and unsettling and wonderful and beautiful and weird.  This is about weird.