Monday, September 19, 2011

Wretched Music! Antioch Arrow! Featuring Kevin Shea, Electric Turn to Me, and Rick Moody!

Today is a strange day in so far as blog posts I’ve done about hipster music types that normally no one bats an eye at, got hits. Those included the post about why the band called Bitch Magnet are awful, why the band Electric Turn To Me squandered their talent completely, and why Rick Moody’s attempt to make a music album. These are largely people I’ve met by the way, Rick Moody and Electric Turn To me, one member of Bitch Magnet Jon Fine. I want to point out that because these kinds of entrees don’t get many hits, I am always considering stopping from writing them.
What is important to understand is that the blogs I’ve written thus far that have gotten the most attention are ones dealing with their being a subgenre of horror films during the 80’s that involved rape and impregnation of women by aliens and other monsters In one of which I made reference to the subgenre of Japanese animation known as “tentacle hentai” involving the rape of women/girls by monsters with tentacles, in particular with the girls in school girl uniforms. There is a strong mathematical likelihood that anyone that finds this post will be looking for such 80’s films or such “tentacle hentai” and not out of any interest in the band Antioch Arrow. Puts things in an important kind of perspective.
Then something deep within forces me to continue. It comes from a very sincere place inside. I sincerely hate Bitch Magnet. I actually recall that Jon Fine didn’t care for Electric Turn To Me. Electric Turn to Me was this incredible squandering of talent, but Jon Fine deceives himself- Electric Turn To Me were a slightly better band then Bitch Magnet. Bitch Magnet and the attempt at a music career by my former writing instructor Rick Moody are connected projects, David Grubbs was in Bitch Magnet, David Grubbs played in a wretched indie rock band called Gastor Del Sol, and then Jim O’Rourke played with Rick Moody. We are talking about a lot of awful, awful music right there. It all comes back full circle to musicians in New York that would be better if they put a microphone between their thighs, defecated in their pants, and recorded it. I’ve been writing about the Lou Reed/Metallica collaboration and you have die hard Metallica fans posting comments every where about how it “sounds like shit” based on 30 seconds of music. Metallica and Lou Reed “sound like shit”? It’s a slightly odd collaboration and neither Lou Reed nor Metallica are in their prime, but those are two of the all time greats right there. If that “sounds like shit”, what is Bitch Magnet? Those are shadows of Lou Reed’s ideas, maybe.
It keeps going and going with those people, if you dig into the various projects that they’ve been involved with. Jon Fine from Bitch Magnet, if you’ve read the other blog post you already know, but he played with my band Kevin Shea in Coptic Light. The other member of Coptic Light was Jeff Winterberg from the 90’s hardcore band Antioch Arrow.



They’re also pretty terrible. They did, however, turn into a goth band after Jeff Winterberg left, which is somewhat a redemption for the rest of them. Basically even very second tier goth bands are probably much better then the music I am writing about here. However, Antioch Arrow did not feel 100% natural as a goth band, it was as if they wanted to be a goth band with only a passing sense of what a goth band was. They never gained a real goth audience that I’m aware of, and I was heavily into obscure goth bands during the 90’s.
Now this blows my mind- the problem with Jeff Winterberg-era Antioch Arrow was that it was a whole bunch of sloppy, dull hardcore music-granted though, it was noisy. Yeah, Winterberg starts Coptic Light, he has a drummer with the speed and skill of Kevin Shea, and where is the noise? It’s nowhere really. I’ve written about gothic/industrial bands and metal bands having reached a creative impasse where more recent bands sound like re-constructions of 80’s bands? That’s nothing compared to the creative impasse of Coptic Light. Kevin Shea is the most misused drummer in rock and roll history that I am aware of. Once Jeff Winterberg had a musician with the technical capacity to pull of aggressive music successfully, he had abandoned making aggressive music.
More people care about tentacle hentai anyway.

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