Black Eyes - Frontal assaults of punk-funk

Standard-bearers of the most abrasive and unhinged new wave, Black Eyes proved to be one of the most interesting bands of this early stretch of the new millennium, before splitting up following the release of their second album, the excellent "Cough".

Formed in Washington in August 2001, the band featured Dan Caldas, Hugh McElroy, Mike Kanin, Jacob Long (also briefly with Rapture), who had already played together under the names NoGos and then Trooper, and Daniel McCormick. Two basses, two drum kits and a guitar gave rise to one of the most creative sounds of the neo-new wave movement, drawing on echoes of original punk-funk and a certain strand of no wave, along with outbursts traceable to the evolved hardcore of the Dischord stable. Need some names? Certainly Pil, Contortions, Slits, Gang Of Four, right up to touching the extremes of raw violence in the style of Pop Group via Fugazi, if not even Blood Brothers, plus shards of pure noise in the vein of Killing Joke. Certainly the best of the new punk-funk generation, close to Liars in creativity and daring, several notches above !!! and Rapture, without dwelling too much on the mediocre Radio 4, deservedly the tail-end of the pack.

Black Eyes' music thus feeds on noise and free-jazz, a genuine lava-like explosion, an uncontrolled exercise in mixing styles, sounds that freely derail, exploding with no fixed structure whatsoever. It's the basses that make the sound minimally intelligible, building solid dub architectures, over which a jumble of noise and free forms are unleashed that would make James Chance envious. The intense percussiveness of the tracks doesn't hinder, but rather favours, the integration of every kind of effect, which is nevertheless co-opted and subjugated to the disharmonic march of the whole; it's not uncommon to hear sax lines treated like keyboard phrases. The vocals themselves, always strained and "screamed", are part of the flow, not as a soloistic element, but as a disruptive factor, bringing further chaos.

In truth, before the usual media hype in the specialist press, which in no time at all shamelessly built up a full-blown scene, there had already been a band capable of inventively resurrecting original punk-funk; we're referring to GoGoGo Airheart, on the scene since '97 and responsible for a handful of truly remarkable records. Michael Vermillion's band, producer of a rickety, limping sound, owing a debt mainly to Joseph K and the Fall in terms of sheer bloody-mindedness, had attempted, and "successfully" so, a fusion between early-80s sounds and American indie of the last ten years. But there you go, nobody noticed, until the first big money started pouring in with the likes of Rapture, !!!, Tv On the Radio, White Stripes, Strokes and the great bluff of the so-called "rock revival".

Getting back to the matter at hand, Black Eyes dates from 2003 and was released, appropriately enough, on Dischord. Produced by Ian MacKaye, the album contains ten tracks packed into 31 breathless minutes, a genuine battlefield pounded by storms of sonic lead; the five-piece are an unstoppable commando unit: tightly in sync, they play with the skill of veterans. The basslines are the tracks along which the Killing Joke-style metallic delirium of "Someone Has Is Fingers Broken" travels, while in "Pack On Wolves" a flurry of screams adds confusion to confusion, to the point where it's impossible to tell which instruments are even playing; danceable rhythms, then, but definitely not for the dancefloor.

In tracks like "Nine" and "On the Sacred Side" Black Eyes' inspiration detonates, taking the form of pure noise organised around predefined bass structures. The latter in particular is pure experimentation on rhythms, with more rhythms overlapping and alternating to the point of disorientation.

A demonstration of how the vocals serve as an element of creative disruption is "Speaking Tongues", with vocal doubling and an extreme, flayed-raw delivery that animates a track which, more than ever here, rests on a fluid, far-from-frantic funk dynamic. The band seems able to push beyond punk-funk on "Day Turn Night", an exercise in shamanic noise-making, obsessive, diseased, disturbing, that recalls the industrial sound of Factrix.

Black Eyes shows how to reach utterly original conclusions by blending sounds that had already been extensively explored.

Barely a year passes and the band tries again, not before announcing its own breakup. With the game already essentially won, Cough comes out, and it's another bullseye. Where Black Eyes excelled both in terms of sound and songwriting, on the new record the band seems obsessed with pursuing an even more personal sound. With almost every reference to hardcore eliminated — traces of which still surface in the aggression and repressed violence running through some of the compositions — the center of gravity shifts toward free-jazz, with the sax becoming the absolute protagonist. Sure, there are a few breakneck Blood Brothers-style detours ("Scrapes And Scratches"), but, for all the music's tightness, it often feels like watching the Contortions have a ball going wild over dub structures à la Jah Wobble; just listen to the excellent "Drums" in that regard.

There's no single track that stands head and shoulders above the rest, no "Day Turns Night" or "Letter To Raoul Peck" moment, but tightness is Cough's winning card. The compositions lock into one another, giving rise to one long noise-rock serpent that closes with "A Meditation", with atmospheric bass and sax squalls laying the groundwork for a chaotic dub-punk assault.

It's hard to find the right words to close this brief retrospective, except to say that these two albums hinted at enormous potential, and perhaps the best was yet to come. Either way, this is a band worth remembering.

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