I Learned Something Last Summer

Lest our meager readership begin to think that I focus exclusively on defunct bands, allow me to share a story from a few months back: I had just returned from a rocky month-long tour of the lower forty-eight. My neighbor and sometime artistic collaborator, Colin Frangos, informed me that he'd intercepted a Minneapolis band attempting to bypass the Bay Area on their way from Portland to Los Angeles and had booked them a night in San Franciso. Now, the last thing I wanted to do after 32 days of rock shows was go to a rock show, but Colin insisted that I witness this midwestern dynamo, so I dragged my rock-fatigued ass out to see The Blind Shake.

The closely-shorn trio played a hobbled set that night -- a missing baritone guitar forced one of them to play a borrowed bass and transpose notes -- but, gear quagmires notwithstanding, The Blind Shake brought a vibe that might be best described as equal parts prehistoric and futuristic. Impressed, I walked that night with two LPs, including their 2007 release, "Carmel":

Go buy this record.

Being a self-professed purveyor of succinct band descriptions and having gone on long enough with this treatise, I will now indulge my propensity for pithiness: this record is an unholy mixture of Hammerhead, Link Wray, and Devo. This description may be shamelessly reliant upon a knowledge of American outsider rock, but, if you get my meaning, you grasp the weight of my claim.

If you don't get my meaning, I nonetheless heartily encourage you to check out The Blind Shake and, if you like what you hear, work backwards from there. After all, if you're reading this, you're probably broken -- your rock should be broken, too.

Noise Metal, Broken Rock

In the summer of 2004, SF Bay Area impresario Conan Neutron invited my band to perform at the 3rd Annual Noise Rock Picnic. He also booked a band out of San Jose named El Buzzard for the same show. This act that will forever stand as a bright, bold check mark Conan's "plus" column.

At first glance, El Buzzard didn't hold much promise for me: the Orange and Green amplifiers, huge drums, and meaty guys left me expecting yet another stoner rock band, mining the long bankrupt vein of sub-Sabbathian doom. Then they let loose with their first minute-and-a-half serving of high tension drug psychosis. These guys were perverting the doom aesthetic with a colossal dose of paranoiac mania and it spoke volumes to me. A few months later, I would order their new EP, "Tranqilizanté Del Elefanté."

Tranqilizanté Del Elefanté

About the EP:

• Massive drums, seemingly tuned so low that the frenetically accurate pounding doesn't drive the songs so much as define a tight, deadened space from which there is no escape.
• Hooky, repetitive and distorted guitars and bass, never shrill and all occupying a low-mid tonal range sharply distinct from the domain of the hissing cymbals.
• Shrieking vocals, which, apropos of the band's name, evoke carrion birds fighting over the meager remains of some unfortunate creature.

These elements come together on "Tranqilizanté Del Elefanté" to imbue an ineffable appeal to what should be a repellingly claustrophobic vibe. El Buzzard called this music noise metal. I hold their masterful blending of acumen and savagery to be one of this decade's finer specimens of broken rock.

Everything you could ever want from El Buzzard (except a reunion performance) can be found on the El Buzzard website.

The Crown Jewel of Broken Rock

It was the Fall of 1994 and I thought I was a punk rocker. Kurt Cobain had killed himself a few months prior and I’d just abandoned the desert wastes of my adolescence for U.C. Berkeley. The cornucopia of psychotropic possibilities was just opening to me when I noticed a used CD by a band called the Cherubs. The cover featured a man floating face down in a bath tub and was emblazoned with the words "Heroin Man." The unrepentant mean-spirited intelligence of this image spoke to me, so I shelled out six bucks for the CD.

This record changed my life.

From the first split second of "Stag Party," in which a piercing phone-off-the-hook signal anticipates the lurching violence of an incomprehensibly blown-out avalanche of guitar, bass and drums, I was in love. When the temper-tantrum vocals at the start of "Mr. Goy" artfully implied a depravity without measure before the most raucous six-eight hook of all time made me want to kick in windows, I became obsessed. By the time the lumbering behemoth bummer of "Example Maiden Japan" redefined my conception of psychedelia, I was a faithful acolyte, prepared to hold my new god against anything the veteran punks of Telegraph Avenue were willing to volunteer as masochistic trip fodder, from Neurosis to The Crucifucks. This was heavier than metal. This was more visceral than punk. This was broken rock.

It took five years of school and ten years of steady employment to wake me from the fever dream that started in 1994. I missed Brit pop and nu-metal, as well as revivals of garage rock, post-punk and retro-metal.

Whatever -- fuck all that shit. Broken rock forever.

Cherubs fan page on DumbSpace.