Tag Archives: punk

From the Vault

From the Vault: Lung Leg

One of my Christmas presents to myself was the acquisition of a new USB turntable. I haven’t had a record player in several years, and I missed it terribly. Yes, I am one of those snobs who thinks vinyl sounds better than other formats. I have no problem listening to CDs or MP3s, but every now and again, I enjoy hearing music played in this format. I don’t think it’s old fashioned so much as decadent, an indulgent treat like sipping a 12-year-old scotch.

Other than aesthetics and my own pretentiousness, the reason I wanted a record player again was to hear some stuff that I only have on vinyl and which has never been released in other formats. So within minutes of popping it out of the box and setting it up, the very first thing I listened to was “Krayola,” Lung Leg’s portion of a split 7″ from 1998. I remembered adoring this song, and the passage of time didn’t diminish that love at all.

Lung Leg–a quartet of Scottish lasses–made their only American tour around this time as the opening act for The Make-Up. It must have been the only Make-Up tours I didn’t see, because I definitely never saw Lung Leg, and I have a uselessly encyclopedic memory for Bands I Saw and What Bands Opened For Them. I used to catch the Make-Up live at every conceivable opportunity, both because they were an amazing live band and to atone for being to young to ever see Nation of Ulysses live. I also purchased all of their singles, of which there were roughly eight billion (all later collected on I Want Some).

The two bands collaborated on a split 7″ around the time of their tour together. The Make-Up’s side (“Pow to the People”) was quality, of course, but the Lung Leg portion blew me away. The driving beat and insistent guitars, contrasted with vocals that are almost whispered, the killer fadeout that leaves you wanting more…perfect in every way.

Since I loved this song so much, I went out and bought the only other Lung Leg release available at the time, Hello Sir, a collection of two early EPs. I was profoundly disappointed, because it was nothing like “Krayola” in style or substance. It sounded somewhere equidistant from Beat Happening and Shonen Knife. At the time, I found it angular, silly, and amateurish. After one listen, I tucked it away in my record collection, where it stayed untouched for well over a decade.

Listening to that compilation again after all these years, my opinion has softened considerably. The songs are quite enjoyable for what they are; I was mostly mad because of what I expected them to be. I also recently acquired Lung Leg’s only LP, Maid to Minx, and found it eminently listenable. The production is considerably better than that of the EPs, and there are a few glimpses of what I liked so much about “Krayola,” particularly the title track.

Nothing quite measured up to “Krayola,” however, which I suppose is ultimately unfair. If you can manage one masterpiece, that’s one more than most us get in our lifetimes.

Note: I suspect this version I’ve digitized may be running a tiny bit fast. So, you know, caveat emptor and all that.

[audio:http://66.147.244.95/~scratci7/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Krayola1.mp3|titles=Lung Leg, “Krayola,” Pow to the People split 7″]

Download “Krayola” here

Pointless Nostalgia, Tuneage

The Past of the Future!

I recently wrote a post about my days in a band, one that focused on the unfortunate aspects of the experience. However, those days were not all bad. In fact, they were almost all great, some of the greatest times of pure, stupid joy I’ve ever had. Rare are the moments that I am able to shut off my brain and just have fun, and many of them happened when I was in this band, or rocking out to friends’ bands, or just hanging out with them and being colossally dumb.

That’s why I’m pleased that someone has seen fit to chronicle this scene on its own Facebook page, Save the OCNY Music (OCNY = Orange County, New York). If you were around there/then, it has lots of photos from the time (some of me, like this bizarre picture of yours truly in a West Point cadet’s jacket; you’ve been warned) and some music clips that will cause a Proustian rush of memories. If none of this is familiar to you, you may still enjoy checking it out. I know I always like to see photos of a scene gone by, something made by and for kids that they loved madly.

You can also check out an ever expanding archive of music from said bands right here. My band’s first demo can be found there, as can the first demo from Life Detecting Coffins, which I cannot recommend too highly.

I am very happy someone is saving this stuff for posterity. Enjoy.

Pointless Nostalgia, Tuneage

My Heart and the Real World

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While working the $1 LP table at the WFMU Record Fair this past weekend, I occasionally browsed through the boxes, hoping to find something awesome, or hilarious, or awesomely hilarious. I believed I’d discovered an example of the latter when I stumbled upon a ludicrously designed record sleeve. It featured a cluttered ink illustration involving Satan and skateboards and blunts, with a needlessly complicated script tsomewhere in the Venn intersection of Ed Hardy, Bones Brigade, and bowling shirt. The sheer number of needless embellishments suggested the artist had a deep phobia of white space.

The album was a punk comp from a SoCal label dating to the late 1990s. Most of the band names didn’t ring a bell, except for two. One was a group an old roommate used to toss on his stereo from time to time, much to my chagrin. The other was a name I hadn’t thought of in years. Or had tried not to think about for years, because I associate it with one of the more profound, soul-crushingly disappointments of my life. It was a very early 20s kind of disappointment, dating to a time when I did not have a firm grasp of life or what aspects of it were truly important. However, the feeling still stings.

Many eons ago, in my increasingly distant college days, I decided to form a band. I recruited my brother and other friends from my upstate hometown to fulfill my vision of Black Flag meets the Stax/Volt box set meets early, bitter Elvis Costello. When asked, I said the kind of music we played was Hardcore Soul. In truth, the results were a lot closer to the former than the latter, and you would have had to dig very deep to hear real evidence of those aforementioned influences, but the pairing of hardcore and soul was too great to pass up once I’d thought of it. Anyone who had pointed out that I should have written Ian Svenonius a royalty check for all the points I cribbed from Nation of Ulysses would not have been wrong.

I wrote most of the songs on bass, because I still didn’t have the chops or dexterity to play guitar (and barely do now), while leaning heavily on my drummer to devise appropriate beats, a task he was quite good at.* I also decided that I would be the frontman and sing all the songs, if only because they were mine. To know if I was any good at this, you’d have to ask observers. I do know that I enjoyed doing it immensely. I was always uncomfortable in my own skin, unable to assert myself, but while onstage, I was able to adopt a self confident persona that was impossible for me to pull off elsewhere. I knew I wanted to be a writer, but writing was solitary, the very definition of delayed gratification. When I played a show, or even just practiced, I could immediately demonstrate my firm belief that this band was the greatest goddamn thing ever.

* The band’s singular claim to fame is being sampled in a Le Tigre song, but the truth is, it’s not the full band being sampled. Just a thundering beat from our seven inch, because our drummer was that good. He’d later go on to play for one of my favorite bands, the criminally ignored Life Detecting Coffins.

I named the band Record Ignite!, after a weird little shop I found during one of my trips to The Bronx.** It had clearly been a music store at one time, but had given up the ghost and halfheartedly converted to a bodega. It still possessed one sad cabinet full of cassettes, falling on each other like a failed domino sequence. The name of the store–probably chosen by someone whose familiarity with English was passing at best–sounded much more dangerous than it probably intended to be, which is why I loved it. I added the exclamation point to further emphasize the broken English weirdness of it all. (Those who pointed out similar punctuation in Wham! received dirty looks.)

** While a student at NYU and spending far too much time alone, one of my solitary pastimes was to get on the subway, disembark at a random station, and wander around a neighborhood I’d never been to before. Somehow, I was never murdered.

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