Album Reflection: Death Church

This album didn't come into my life until much later than I would have liked. But perhaps I wasn't ready for it until I had been entirely shredded by the modern American system of marriage, 9 to 5, go to church, conform, be a good girl, tuck in your shirt, eat your meat, shut up and take it, don't do your music as more than a hobby, accept the presidential options presented, your vote doesn't count, beauracratic clusterfuck of barbed electric fences keeping me from moving any which way without severe opposition. 

Growing up, I had a punk friend. He was a rarity in our town. We grew up in the same church. He had a giant Mohawk he would dye with kool-aid, a padlock he'd wear on a chain around his neck. He always looked so intense as a teen until he moved to Berkeley and got more the subtle Neurosis punk look of black band shirt, black jeans and dyed black hair. He was also very, very tall. He grew to be 6'4."

In his room out in the sticks, where we lived, he would corner me by the snake cages lining his walls and tell me what bands I should listen to. I hated to be told what to do, ever, especially by some dude who was almost 7' tall with Mohawk (INTENSE!) so I disregarded all of his advice. He burnt me a mix tape once, and asked me to meet him under the bridge. I guess I never showed up, and when I moved back to Oakland years and years later, he started up contact again, said he had the tape. I asked for it, and he told me it was broken. Also, he said, it probably has a bunch of pop punk on it, like Screaming Weasel. I'll likely never know what was on that tape, but the record collection of this long-lost fellow punk dude from my childhood was intense, so I got to work on learning his collection. We had the same taste in music to the point that everything he liked I felt like I should have already known because it was perfect, just perfect.

Including Rudimentary Peni. He had the trademark RP image, the fetus with umbilical cord, tattooed on his stomach, he was that into them. I was curious about this band he would talk about with hushed reverence, as if he were in a temple for punk when speaking their name. He told me about the lead singer,Nick  Blinko, and how he did all these crazy drawings for the albums and ended up in an insane asylum at some point. As I looked at the liner notes and drawings I felt happy, the whole DIY creative self-expression attitude that forms the core of any self-proclaiming punk with a backbone was represented on visual aspect alone. 

Death Church, of all the Peni albums, is the one I connect with most. The sound of the guitar alone on the entire album is crystalline thick fuzz bliss. Add to that some melodic complicated bass lines and poignant solid heavy-hitting drums with Blinko's voice raging out over it all in his British accent, screaming and shouting or in contrast speaking sometimes in monotone subdued manner, and you've got punk heaven. The chords, sound and lyrics are dark and intense, to the point where if you are bummed or in a rage or mad at the system crushing you in, this is the album you gravitate towards immediately. I can't believe it sounds like it does as just a three-piece.  

"Why is it that rock stars always seem to lie so much. Joe Strummer said he cared, but he never really have a fuck." 

Songs like Rotten to The Core and Inside ("No longer want to suffer this pain inside...") make my heart swell in punk solidarity. I can't get enough of the whole album. All the things I have a hard time explaining to people, like why I don't eat meat, are examined in Pig In A Blanket where Blinko rips a new asshole for those who engage in the animal abuse rampant today. Punk to me was always about getting people to open their eyes and pay attention. The songs on Death Church combine rage with shame with righteous indignation in a visceral one-two punch to your face kind of way.

I could gush about Rudimentary Peni for days, but let's leave it at this. If this album is not in your arsenal, go out and fucking get it. You're missing out. 

Album Reflections: White Lion

Yes, you read it right. White Lion, bitches. 

I was around 11 years old, maybe younger. My favorite tape, The Back to the Future soundtrack, had just been confiscated by my mom due to her claiming I was listening to it too much. To be honest, in retrospect I was: I would play the cassette all day in my Walkman and fall asleep to it at night. But I was devastated. Mortified. 

So I was in a strange limbo. I had no music. Fortunately, she hadn't confiscated my walkman, but this was dire straights. I needed help, and quickly.

I went to the next door neighbors house. Teddy, a guy I had a major crush on, lived there with his two older brothers, who were quite intimidating. But I needed music. Now. I knocked on their door and one of the older brothers answered. 

"Do you have any music I can borrow?" I asked. "My mom took away my tape."

The older brother snapped into action immediately. "Hold on a sec," he said, disappearing into the house.

He came back to the door with a white tape. "Here," he said. "Take this. It's all I got."

I looked at the tape. White Lion. Pride. 

I looked at him with gratitude. "Thank you," I said. "Thank you so much."

I put that tape in and listened to it so many times I can't really give you a solid number. The emo tunes, the hair metal guitar, the raspy voice of the lead singer: I felt like they were singing to me.

 "Lonely Nights" became one of my favorites immediately. I swore the singer was singing about me, a girl likes a boy, the boy likes someone else--did I know that would be the story of my life? I had crushes on a few boys who didn't like me back. It all made sense. The next song, "Don't Give Up," became another anthem. "Are you tired of working 9 to 5...don't give up." I didn't work 9 to 5 but I was tired of going to school 8 to 3. I could relate.

I fell asleep every night soothed by emo glam metal before emo was even an official thing. The harmonies, the crazy cheesy lead solos, the raspy voices... bliss to my 11-year old ears.

"Lady of the Valley" was another epic anthem and a favorite on the tape. Most of the songs seemed to talk about crying and growing old. It's like, at 11, I could feel existential compassion. These dudes were warning me of what was to come. They wanted to be kids still. I was a kid. They really were singing to me. "All Join Hands" made me want to raise my hands in solidarity. "Fight for the lives that are real!" As opposed to the lives that were not real...

Looking back, I wonder though, how many times can you sing about children crying on one album?

But the best song on the album for me was "When The Children Cry." Oh man, what a tear jerker. Rock dudes singing about the kids, of which group I belonged to. Rock and Roll that cared about me? It wasn't long before I was diving into Guns "N" Roses and Black Sabbath and Alice Cooper and other big bad rock n' roll bands, leaving poor neglected White Lion to the dogs, but I'll never forget they saved me in a period of anguish after my mom confiscated my favorite tape. 

"Whoaaah, all you need is rock and roll."

Album Reflection: Pretty Hate Machine

Recently, I've been digging back into the music that formed me when I was wee, though it never really goes out of rotation. One of the albums I listened to over and over in my earliest years was "Pretty Hate Machine", by Nine Inch Nails. This album, not unlike many early Cure albums, is a work of art in production I appreciate more every year.

Even now, when I listen to PHM, I recall lying on my stacked bedroom mattresses with the lights off, trying to sleep. I'd taken some acid. A girl who was about 12 was staying the night at my house. Her name was Catherine and she hung out with the downtown park kids and I, drinking wine, smoking pot, talking about music. She wouldn't shut up, it was her first time. I'd done it enough times that there was no thrill for me, most trips were not very intense. I couldn't have been more than 14 years old. I put on PHM and told her to tune into it and be quiet. I drifted off listening to, "I am justified I am purified I am sanctified..."

I remember driving around with older friends, listening to "Kinda I Want to" and "Ringfinger." Anyone who liked NIN was an automatic friend. Growing up Mormon, the lyrics struck me. This idea of temptation, doing something even though you're not supposed to. I reveled in it, felt a kinship with the protaganist. "Blast this," I am sure I said to the older teenagers driving me around.

My friends were hippies, but I had an affinity for all things dark and twisted. The album satiated my inner need for creepiness and complexity. I couldn't relate to the Grateful Dead, the band many of my older friends were obsessed with, though I tried.  Twisted reflections: These I could relate to. "I know it's not the good thing, and I know it's not the right thing. Kinda I want to..."

Today, I was listening to PHM while taking a nap on the couch at work and it all washed over me. My older friend, Kim, who was a 5' 11" bombshell, had just moved to my city in the Bay Area from Texas. We became fast friends for a spell before she got into boys -- they were wild about her, giving her free speed and coke. Soon, I'd lost her, she was shipped back home to her dad's in the Lone Star State. But before she disappeared, in her immaculately sparse clean bedroom the size of my living room, we would watch the VHS tape she had for Broken. It felt so wrong, but so right to watch a man being shredded by a meat grinder OF HIS OWN VOLITION. It seemed there was nothing like this ANYWHERE. While our hippie friends were shouting peace love, beating a decades dead horse, glittering up for Grateful Dead shows, we listened to Broken and felt the pull of a subterranean darkness we knew we were a part of, a world that was waiting to get us. A world we could outwit by getting ourselves first: "I'd rather die than give you control."

Listening to it made me feel I wasn't alone, that even though relationships with god and fellow mankind were fraught with peril, I could still love. Then, when all else failed, I could go into my darkness and sing about it. Redemption came from deep scars, which I already had at that age.

The transitions throughout the album, how one song bleeds into the next, each taking you down a spiral staircase to a deeper lair... the sparseness of the album coupled with intricate layering of just the right elements. Samples, echoes, grit, shadows on the wall. Hollow moans, clenched teeth. 

I can go back to PHM any time and remember it like the first time.

Oh, that first time.