F'ke Blood on Italy Records

The minimal arrangement, off balance timings and heavily compressed sounds of Young Marble Giants, The Feelies or The Embarrassment are the very definition of new wave and I haven’t heard it expressed recently as punk as F’ke Blood on this single from Italy Records. Not a new release by any stretch it looks like the Detroit band last logged into their myspace in 2011, and this single was out a good three years before that, but their facebook has photos of a possible new release on Urinal Cake? Looks like this single caught the attention of the other Detroit based label who organized a full length of this cool material which I’ll be looking for based on these two tight, manic tracks.

A-Side" Water Wings" has all the post punk nervousness, jittering chords and high pitch nasal whine of a band trapped in a tin can. The burst of bass guitar, weaving around this groove seems to jab in every measure. The phaser-y vocal in Devo style, their guitar goes from hardly brushed to a slappy, rigid, timed out beat. Fragments of a sweater unwinding, the literal plinks of a guitar are just cool and weird. Musically describing those jerky movements alongside this punk vocal is a perfect balance of all those minimal elements. There’s a menace in this being inhumanly rigid while Steven’s vocal goes the opposite way entirely. Even this solo, which should be a letting loose, is strict chords in successive stabs to the gut. The rest of the band comes in over the main vocal in jittery off beat time like the Buzzcocks. A creepy post modern mess of ‘I bet we have no choice but make a song out of this.’ Here's the formula boys just add cool frantic energy.

B-Side "The Band that Bled Real Blood" adds a broken cowbell to a 1,2,3,4 beat. Even less instrumentation this time, the chorus getting a little loose or Go Go's bubbly fun with vocals from Marcie. Steven’s high pitch in that PIL style while the guitar and bass lead this pop band section. It's a cool punk melody where they capture this loop and build higher and higher with shallow echo and a breaking change into chorus. Before they were just playing with the possibility and now it’s thin and barely cracking the peaks and valleys of the recording. The guitars are percussion elements, a scratch, a smacking hit, bizarre unnatural scrapes on the metal wound strings. I love this jarring mental sound, drilling into your head with all the charm of a well dressed mannequin.

Get this from UFO factory or XRecs or Italy, on black vinyl.

This is off their upcoming full length, check out the tracks from this single over at their myspace.

The Johnny Ill Band on Italy records

When I caught these guys a few weeks back at Moon II, Johnny happened to have both of their previous singles with them, including this one on Italy Records, my crack research team was unable to find a discography but I'm guessing this was an early one from the rough garage fuzz covering this one, three tracks at 33 1/3 becuase you shouldn't rush Johnny, it's not a god damn race.

What we have on the A-Side, "Cars" is a more distorted, raw sounding JIB, almost psych haze layered feel with this big swirly guitar, Johnny is probably straight strumming away under this improv feedback. This chorus really gets sci-fi thanks to Pete and that Moog pitch wheel, with Johnny is deadpanning this vocal about cars.
Which reminds me of that Sidewalks single by Tyvek, in a couple of ways, this is dabbling in that same sound, Tyvek is probably a little more extreme in their scuzz, and the lyrics are way more buried, but not by much. And if you get down to the vocal, it's basically the same kind of delivery and even lyric. Tyvek is wondering about engineering a sidewalk and people walking around and here JIB is taking that same no bullshit approach to cars.
There is a huge conspiracy guys, these cars that everyone have... they're straight up killing people...now it's either that Johnny's talking about literally getting hit by them or just all the auxillary things that cars bring to society...you know the wars, the pollution. I wouldn't think that this has anything to do with their Detroit roots per se but then Italy Records put out those early White Stripes singles, which leads to "The Big Three Killed my Baby", so from the outside, those sorts of ideas might just be added to the water supply.
This chorus vocal is chopped into syllables connecting on the fast snare beat...there's that cool detached style of The Soft Pack, but still feeling like kind of a nerdy younger brother...they aren't going to ditch you somewhere after the show, they manage to keep things informal and just plain fun in spite of the inherent seriousness surrounding music, the kind of thing that comes with the business side of things, worried about the proper B-Side remixes and pitchfork coverage.

The B-Side, "Amphetamines" track is surprisingly slow, even for these guys, and especially for a song about speed...this must be on the downer side of the high. This one kind of erring on the punkier side of things, a little bit sloppy in that way that doesn't sound restrictively rehearsed with a warble of big synth bass tones. But hey...just because a song title is abut speed doesn't mean you have to go and obviously represent it in a song. It's going to be about someone who is on amphetamines. So they get this slower nervous kind of energy going, that paranoia, with deliberate, plucked chords, marionetted together and stiff. A rolling see saw rhythm, a single clink from a triangle ... in the end he always sounds hopeful, in spite of this unemotional delivery...there's no fucked up judgements or politics here, just calling it like he sees it.
"Tv Psychic" then, keeps Johnny's distant distorted vocal going, that shitty speaker coming off as more garage-y than usual.
When will the TV let you be psychic too? This time getting a little more abstract with what exactly he's talking about, almost back on Side A in a more pop psych land, with a nu wave stuttering....damn this could be a demo Devo track even, the back and forth clink of guitar sounds, a deliberate lockstep single note melody.

I really can't recommend that full length on Urinal Cake Records enough, still great weeks later, and you only have to flip it over like once every ten minutes.
Secret message in the gutter on this black vinyl, hand colored cars on the front of the sleeve! From Italy Records....$5 Bucks!

Johnny Ill Band at Moon II • 1-27-12

Got a chance to catch Detroits, The Johnny Ill band at Moon II over on the Hasidic side of south Brooklyn Friday night, and ended up meeting one of the guys outside who helped to build out the raw space not more than 6 months ago. They've got a Silent Barn type space over there with a balcony and your choice of PBR or glasses of champagne....really keeping it classy.

When Johnny goes on tour, they have a lot of people and equipment to think about - the multiple levels of keyboard, two guitars and bass, and thank god for Paul's somewhat minimal drum kit because all of this already can't fit into one van. This has to be laid back bunch just getting off on playing these straightforward psych-pop observations, or they would have imploded miles and miles ago. It's also surprising that the deceptively minimal sound of "In the Wintertime", came out of this big band combination. They're really paying attention to the details, which don't ever overwhelm the songs, especially the two tiers of organ which Pete uses sparingly and keeps this well out of the usual raw garage sound which they otherwise are successfully going for.

I think Johnny's not trying to sell the performance, or this post-garage minimal feel....this isn't a crafted persona...and I mean that in great way. Like Wounded Lion, Johnny Ill Band is that combination of the mundane bits of life while turning it into a good time sounding party. They aren't afraid to possibly sound ridiculous and at the same time make this track about the future something you want to hear more than once. It's not as easy as it sounds to carry a song about living in the garage or hating the wintertime as obvious as these songs are. This is a sort of a reinterpretation of the slacker aesthetic in the '90s and, although this might sound like that on first listen, Johnny really cares about these mundane observations. It's not with a punk attitude when he's talking about posture, you should really try to do something about it.
This storytelling style delivery of Johnny is at it's best on "Used to be Confused" combining a solid bassline, thumping along kick beat, and stabs on the organ. Johnny is straightforward laying the lyric down, not too emotional, when he raises his voice on the end of a verse it's just to fake the enthusiasm. Let's not get carried away.



Their recordings are almost documenting the compulsion to create, and thank god Johnny is talented, and trying to temper some of this smarty pants instrumentation with an barely emotional vocal about his washing machine. When he sings about it being stolen because of where he lives, it's not with any kind of hatred, he isn't railing against injustice when he says he has to hide his things, it's just the way it is.
In winter, you can't play baseball, it's a fact.
It's done with this kind of naive openness, not the way some friends on facebook overshare their daily details, but in the way that he's really got a compelling personality that isn't trying to glamorize anything...it's almost a challenge for The Johnny Ill Band to see if they can pull this off musically. Matt and Cree have to come up with a little extra, the single note solo and the bassline hook is going to be brutal, just as raw as humanly possible. Pete on organ isn't going to ever overplay his hand, almost winding up into a windmill with the time he's got in between chords, a perfect compliment to these concrete personal details.

Johnny was nice enough to have copies of their amazing full length, Ask All the Doctors on Urinal Cake Records which I have been listening to nonstop, plus a couple of singles on Kaboodle Records and Italy Records. They've been flying under the radar for far too long for me and I got a chance to see Matt Larson from the B-Side in person and that was exciting.

They're currently on their way back to Detroit after wrapping up this mini-tour and I hope that the washing machine is fixed or at least not stolen because they've got some major laundry to do.