Friday, December 16, 2011

The Best Bands You've Never Heard:Angel Witch, The Treacherous Three, Christian Death, and MORE!

The problem with doing blogging for me is that there is a rigid pattern to what I do that gets hits and what I do that the world ignores. If I post a short story, write directly about U.S. politics, write about literature, I generally won't get more then 10-30 hits. If I write about either a.) metal (in particular black metal) or a gothic/industrial music or b.) a movie that fits neatly into the horror/cult section, then I can get as many as several hundred hits. That doesn't mean that I will, it means that I can. The pattern is nearly without divergence. It becomes like playing two notes over and over again. There is some room within that for me to be a little bit Lester Bangs about it and interject humor and my own personality a little bit, but it's still very constraining. I don't even think it fully allows me to represent my musical tastes completely accurately. I've had a growing disillusionment with bands developing for years now, going back to about 2003. It is not what is of deepest interest or concern to me, to be honest. Musicians have annoying tendency to be far leftists. I've had crazy musicians send me threats on-line. It's a mess. It does happen that people e-mail my reviews to others or repost links to my bogs somewhere, which is flattering. That happened recently with something I wrote on Psychic TV, who I've grown to hate. I was in New York during the 2000's when The Strokes and dozens of fecal indie rock groups started getting tons of press for no good reason at all. If perhaps by blogging about better bands than that, I can steer fashions at all away from that happening again, then I will do my duty.One thing is that it does force me to really dig for music to write about. I just recently responded to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction choices for 2012 by noting that Guns N' Roses, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and the Beastie Boys were not the best bands of their times, and pointed to The Cult and Voivod as being better bands. But why stop at Voivod and The Cult? I think with rock and roll you do have to dig a little bit to get the real deal bands. There are utterly failed and pointless musicians and band that never got much attention because they didn't deserve it. Guns N' Roses and the Beastie Boys I would say were only really okay bands ever, and I think Red Hot Chili Peppers are actively a bad band. The Beastie Boys themselves were fast to point out they were ugh indebted to other lesser known bands. They cited The Slits, Bad Brains, X-ray Specks and an early hip-hop band I'd never heard of called the Treacherous Three. It makes sense, they started as a punk band and then got the white people playing black music bug and switched over to early hip-hop. I'm not a hip-hop person, but I looked up the Treacherous Three, which was sort of fun. Hip-Hop was a very different entity 30 years ago. With slight reservation, I guess it is fair to say that the punk bands that the Beastie Boys cited, The Slits, Bad Brains, and X-ray Specks probably also represent underrated and unsung pockets of music. I'm less crazy about the punk bands the Beastie Boys referenced. On the topic of bands to make the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in recent years, Metallica is actually an amazing source of information on lesser known bands worth commenting on. Metallica recently did their thirtieth anniversary show which featured a whole slew of guest stars. The singer for a fairly obscure band Sweet Savage, Ray Haller, joined Metallica on stage: There are a number of excellent bands that might have disappeared into relative obscurity if not for Metallica sighting their influence or covering them. Diamond Head, Angel Witch,and Sweet Savage are underrated and excellent bands from the NWOBHM- New Wave of British Heavy Metal- period of late 70's early 80's heavy metal made a comeback in Britain. Metallica began almost as a NWOBHM cover band. Metallica have referenced these bands here or there. The entirity of the NWOBHM '79 Revisited collection that Lars Ulrich of Metallica compiled back in the 90's is available on YouTube, thankfully. Angel Witch I think are particularly good. I really feel they should have been huge, it just never quite happened. Of course, since I was upset to see The Cure nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame but not make the final cut, that brings up the subject of goth again. With goth you can almost call the entire genre underrated. If you look back into the beginnings of goth, it is daunting to look at someone like Ian Curtis of Joy Division knowing that he created all the music he did before killing himself at the age of 24. For some reason he's on my mind today, but I think equally daunting if slightly well less known would be the case of original Christian Death lead singer Rozz Williams who also killed himself, but at the age of 34. There are movies about Ian Curtis, but i think Rozz Williams really is a largely unsung musical genius. Rozz Wiliams he had a couple of good bands, Premature Ejaculation, Shadow Project, along with Christian Death. It is sort of fun to try to imagine how popular music might sound different if the bands like the bands mentioned here had become as mainstream as Guns N' Roses or The Beastie Boys. It might be fun to see one or all of these unsung bands get an unexpected revival. As bands like the Strokes, Interpol, The White Stripes rose and grabbed far too much press, that was a real cancer upon the arts as far as I can see. It seems an unfortunate inevitability that bands and the whole culture of "projects", "shows", "'zines", "labels" etc. is going to remain central to the arts for a very long time. If I have to be exposed to it, I would rather that culture veer towards the influence of Rozz Williams or Angel Witch than towards the Strokes or Pavement or other such excrement. That's probably way too much to hope for. I think this crap with the hipsters and their fecal indie rock can keep going and going. Regardless, here's looking towards the future in 2012….

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