Bitch Magnet - The Epic of Joyless Streets

These are lost streets, the ones walked by Bitch Magnet, anonymous streets whose memory brings tears to your eyes and you don't know why. Streets walked on a sun-drenched afternoon, on some ordinary day of an adolescence turning into adulthood, sometimes as empty as only the provinces know how to be. No, it wasn't the States, and at the end of those streets there was no Oberlin College, where John Fine (guitar), Orestes "Morfin" Delatorre (drums) and Sooyoung Park (bass and vocals) had decided to start a band. And yet that adolescence - you can feel it - is yours. Was yours.

You don't need to know the lyrics of certain songs to know they're about you, about your feelings, about what you once were. It's already all there in the sound. In that sound. In a rhythm section that sweeps you away like that wave you've always been too afraid to ride; in guitars that mercilessly spew back at you feelings you thought were long gone. There's no joy in Bitch Magnet's songs, but there's something else. There's everything else: epic grandeur, melancholy, rage, sudden illusions. The despair that grips you at night and the fear that strangles your voice in your throat. And that fearless vitality that gives you the strength to take a step beyond all of it. "Death is paid for by living," wrote Ungaretti, and listening to Bitch Magnet feels like feeling life running through your veins, as if it should never end. Only Husker Du can do that, only "Daydream Nation".

Too late for hardcore and ahead of post-rock, Bitch Magnet paved the road that allowed the former to flow into the latter. The starting point is the small town of Oberlin, Ohio; the year is 1986. The American underground is a multifaceted world teeming with extraordinary bands. Their aesthetics differ, but the revolutionary spirit is the same: hardcore is at the peak of its power, noise is experimenting with unheard-of languages, grunge is quietly brewing before its explosion, and math-rock is dusting off unexpectedly "progressive" tropes. A Parnassus that no twenty-year-old starting to make music at that moment can ignore. Sooyoung Park, John Fine and Orestes Morfin certainly don't ignore it - a power trio about to distill all those experiences into their short debut album. They call themselves Bitch Magnet. They'll give it everything over four years, with three albums each more gripping than the last, and then vanish - but thanks to them, dozens of other bands will literally see the light.

In their first two years, Bitch Magnet produced barely a dozen songs, eight of which ended up on their debut album. A sort of furious anthem to youth, Star Booty distills many of the most vital trends of American indie rock of the era. It kicks off at full throttle with the impetuous distortion of "Carnation" and "C Word", anchored to a frantically hardcore rhythm. Just five minutes of music and we're already at sky-high emotional levels. "Sea Of Pearls" then doubles down on the sheer heaviness of the sound, with guitars even more saturated in feedback and a rhythm section that turns menacingly granite-like. Grunge, which would conquer charts around the world just a few years later, is already there, ready to be used. Star Booty, then, doesn't just capture a precise moment in history ("Polio" humanizes the robotic noise of Big Black; "Cantaloupe" is a sordid chant worthy of Flipper; "Hatpins" pays homage to the sense of groove of Mike Watt), it also anticipates the future. Not just Bitch Magnet's own future, but that of the entire American post-rock scene: "Circle K" takes on that task, weaving the complex harmonic webs of Slint three years ahead of time, already hinted at too in the vivid gallop of "Knucklehead". If it weren't for its short length - not even twenty-five minutes - Star Booty could be a landmark album; as it stands, you still get the sense that something is missing from the tracklist. Maybe a "Joyless Street" and a "Big Pining", songs the band already had in their repertoire and which they would bring back the following year on what remains their masterpiece: Umber.

For their second album, Bitch Magnet abandoned the three-piece setup, bringing guitarist Dave Galt on board as a permanent member. The new direction is immediately evident: there's a greater richness in the harmonies, created by interweaving guitar textures, and a heightened power in the sound, made more substantial by riffs and solos that nod to the great saga of hard rock. The lightning-fast debut of Star Booty is still a vivid memory, but Umber breaks away from its predecessor quite sharply. You could call it one of the most fundamental transitional albums ever made, not in the usual sense of a record bridging two artistic periods of the same band, but as an album that decisively contributes to the transformation of one genre (hardcore) into another (post-rock). Umber is the freeze-frame of this process of mutation, and it marks the birth of post-core. A conceptually convoluted label, to be sure, but one that reveals a change within continuity: the engine driving the new songs is still the recognizable one of hardcore, but the body now takes on a new, gleaming shape. The album opens precisely with a track called "Motor", which is pure aggression against white noise. But above the chaos, the guitars rise epically, tracing sublime trajectories through the air, behind which the voice sketches out a difficult melody. The bass is possessed, and the drum skins drip with sweat and blood. This is a new kind of epic, built on an expressive urgency capable of absorbing hardcore, hard rock, power pop and noise. In other words, like going from MC5 to Dinosaur Jr. in the space of three minutes! The same devastating blueprint is replayed in the ferocious "Navajo Ace", "Joan Of Arc" and "Goat-Legged Country God".

"Douglas Leader" picks up where "Circle K" left off, but this time the entwined harmonics of the strings, the singing that dissolves into a whisper, and the drastically slowed rhythmic pace define, with no room for misunderstanding, a striking (and moving) anticipation of Slint and Codeine. It's no coincidence that Mike McMakin, in the producer's chair here, would later also work on the recording of "Frigid Stars". Moments like this help explain the title Umber ("shadow earth"): a brownish pigment, tending toward bronze and burnt tones, as the spartan cover art demonstrates, elevated into a symbol of a mood suspended between melancholy, rage and tenderness. Enter, then, the desperate ballads of "Clay" and "Americruiser", there to remind us that tenderness is only a moment's truce in the turbulent flow of existence: guitars and bass trade fleeting caresses before a storm of feedback arrives to sweep them away. Every track on Umber is extraordinary, but even if Bitch Magnet had recorded nothing but "Big Pining", that alone would have been enough to guarantee them a monument - if not in rock's Olympus, then at least in the crevices of our hearts. Here, the wall of sound raised by the guitars seems impenetrable even to the drums' masterful syncopation. The sonic landscape appears sealed off, claustrophobic, hermetic. But there is a way out, and it's the simplest one: surrender to the power of the voice and let loose an ineffable melody. The second poetic paradox is "Joyless Street", which reveals yet another impossible melodic thread beneath the piled-up distortion and explosive syncopation. Before the end, though, the apocalyptic crossover of "Punch & Judy" lends the overall feverish atmosphere an almost thrilling twist.

Umber came out in the late Eighties, but it speaks a language that, at least as far as the American sound is concerned, unmistakably bears the stamp of the following decade. It's no accident that bands like Fugazi, Jesus Lizard and Rodan - to name just three from a list that could run on for a couple more lines - would take its lesson to heart. The side effect of a masterpiece like this is that it's so definitive it leaves no room for a follow-up, not even for its own creators. It's against this backdrop that Ben Hur showed up in record shops in 1990. It's a record with the merit of not recycling its predecessor's winning formula, but at the same time with the flaw of neglecting the songs themselves. That might sound like a specious objection against a band that clearly made sonic exploration its main weapon, but on closer inspection, the songwriting on Star Booty and Umber is of such a high standard that Ben Hur's noticeable dip makes its eight tracks less emotionally striking. But no less interesting. In fact, Bitch Magnet's final album is perhaps their most ambitious, since even more unusual harmonic solutions and increasingly intricate rhythmic devices are grafted onto their already well-honed style. In practice, Ben Hur places the emphasis on odd time signatures and the angular timbres of math-rock, foreshadowing the gospel that would later be preached by Shellac and Don Caballero.

For the occasion, Galt bowed out, and Bitch Magnet went back to being a power trio, angrier than ever to boot. Only on the apocalyptic "Valmead" does the lineup allow itself a small change, swapping out John Fine's guitar for that of David Grubbs, who rechristened himself Shannon Daughton for the occasion. A veteran member of one of the most devastating hardcore bands of the Eighties, Squirrel Bait, Grubbs made a valuable (his dissonant style is unmistakable) but minimal contribution to Bitch Magnet's story. And although he's often presented as an actual member of the band, in reality his role needs to be drastically scaled down, limited to taking part in the 1989 tour.

Ben Hur's masterpiece is the syncopated "Dragoon", with its ten breathless minutes caught between dreamlike chords and stinging riffs, sudden stillness and lightning-fast restarts. "Ducks and Drakes" doesn't ease the tension, if anything it ramps it up, sharpening the bass strings like the blades of a power saw sinking into the complex rhythmic patterns laid out by Delatorre. Strangely enough, it's the rhythm section that gives the song its body, while the delicate melodic theme woven by the guitar acts almost as a complement. The legacy of hardcore reappears, transfigured but still recognizable, in "Mesentery" and "Gator", leaving the chiaroscuro of the melancholic "Crescent" to embody what, structurally speaking, can be called the only real song on the record. Another bold track is "Lookin' At The Devil", which opens with an atmospheric intro in which the guitar phrasing mirrors the bass arpeggio, but soon crashes into an almost heavy roar, later revisited with more convoluted shades in "Spite Y Malice" too. Even if it doesn't reach the heights of Umber, Bitch Magnet's third and final studio album would also prove influential, both for its sound and its experimental attitude. And perhaps it's a twist of fate that five of its tracks were recorded in Tortoise's Chicago by the ever-visionary Steve Albini.

At this point we've moved into the Nineties, and other protagonists of the American scene are champing at the bit. Bitch Magnet step aside. Sooyoung Park would continue his career in Seam until 1999, while Delatorre and Fine would almost completely disappear from view. David Grubbs, finally, after the "Vlamead" interlude, got back in gear first with his band Bastro and then rewrote the history of (post-)rock with the essential Gastr Del Sol, another band that owes Bitch Magnet more than a passing debt of gratitude. Is the circle closed? Not entirely, because for many years Star Booty, Umber and Ben Hur were records that weren't easy to find, and perhaps that too played a part in the underestimation of the role Bitch Magnet had in rock's stylistic transformations. Thankfully, as the saying goes, time is a gentleman and always knows how to set things right. So, in late 2011, Temporary Residence released an elegant box set, simply titled Bitch Magnet, containing the American band's three studio albums plus eight bonus tracks. More specifically, Star Booty is enriched with alternate versions, rawer and murkier, of some of the key tracks from their brief discography. For its part, Umber adds only an alternate mix of "Motor", while Ben Hur offers up two tasty tracks, "White Piece Of Bread" and "Sadie", best consumed with great caution given their lethal potential. An unmissable opportunity for all those visionaries who never stop searching for beauty at the end of joyless streets.

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