Testors - Rock'n'roll with no frills

Testors were the foremost New York proto-hardcore band; though they could virtually, and occasionally, even be called hardcore - not for their content, but for the extreme forms of their sound.

Testors' music wasn't programmatic and systematic like that of the Ramones: and that's why the latter invented a genre while the former didn't. Testors arrived at their results more through instinct than calculation. In those same years, while the Ramones offered a skeptical, depowered yet sped-up take on rock'n'roll, Testors drew on the most primitive and hard-edged foundations of late-60s rock - especially Detroit's, but without ignoring English garage-rock - pushing them to extremes and filtering them through a disillusioned sensibility typical of new wave.

Testors were led by guitarist and singer Sonny Vincent, who grew up listening to the Stooges and similar bands that converged on New York from Detroit for their major shows.

With a deep knowledge and experience of rock, a guitar that was never technical but always expressive, torn between classic postures and the most brutal dissonances - a child of Hendrix as much as a offspring of new wave - and a virile, lived-in voice, pliable even as it was mostly pushed to the point of tunelessness, Vincent built the sound of Testors, one of the first bassless trios in history.

The sole release by Testors, the single "Together/Time Is Mine", shows how even in 1976 it still wasn't easy for a band to express its most extreme nature; how it still wasn't possible for those with the potential to play hardcore - simply because nobody yet knew what hardcore was. Within a year things would change radically; but in 1976 Testors were forced, if not to put on a pale copy of themselves, to show exclusively their more traditional rock side, even if in many respects that side could still be filed under the nascent New York new wave.

Fortunately the band left behind a wealth of unreleased recordings, collected on CD since 2003 (Complete Recordings 1976-1979, Swami). Nowadays this kind of reissue operation, while admirable on one hand, reveals on the other not so much nostalgia for a bygone era as the need - given today's shortage of good rock music - to go digging even into the most forgotten corners of the past.

From this collection of unreleased material, which therefore never passed through the filter of producers and the like, emerge a handful of tracks that, for their conciseness, speed and power, we could already place within the hardcore fold. They are: "Primitive" and "You Don't Break My Heart", dated 1976; "Let's Get Zooed Out", "I See", "Remembrance", "Madras Prison", from 1977; "Sick On Yesterday", "Black Book", from 1979. As the titles suggest, the themes are still the traditional ones of raw romanticism, indifference, immorality and sex. And even though they're delivered with a conscientiousness typical of the new wave era, we're still a long way from the social and existential concerns of hardcore.

The rest of the material shows raw, top-tier rock, capable of teaching everyone what it means to play rock live, with the barest of means and sustained only by their own strength and skill. Notable among others are the dramatic "Motor Drive" and "Purpose" - the latter opening with the claustrophobic guitar jangle that would later become a new wave staple; "Welcome To The Nation", a mighty hard rock track capable of wringing out all the remaining blues residue from MC5 and thereby anticipating Diamond Head; "It's Only Death", with a dissonant pathos somewhere between Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Stooges; "Aw Maw", opened by a minute of searing guitar distortion and continuing through rhythmic sobs and guitar flights bordering on out-of-tune, running the full gamut of Hendrix. Few can boast the courage and inspiration to deliver rock this direct, with no watering-down whatsoever, and yet never predictable.

An interesting comparison can be drawn between Crime and Testors, among the foremost punk-rock bands active in '76. The difference is that the former, on the whole superior - through their own merit, not through any shortcoming of Testors - played blues, while the latter played rock, showing how rock had broken free of rhythm and blues: by dint of hammering out the rhythm, replacing flow with the rise and fall of a terrain all jagged peaks and roughness. It's the difference between smooth and rough, something that goes beyond the gap between the five blues notes and the seven of rock.

That said, Vincent drew heavily on the more rhythmic, harder-edged blues, like that of the Rolling Stones on "Beggars Banquet" or Hendrix's on "Purple Haze"; nor does it prevent us from counting, among his ideal disciples, someone like Jon Spencer, for instance.

Amid general indifference, Vincent would go on, through various projects and in various capacities, to a career that continues to this day with albums like "Parallax In Wonderland" (1999), "Hell's Kitchen" (2000), "Cocked" (2002) and above all "The Good, The Bad And The Ugly" (2003), featuring no fewer than 11 guest guitarists, including Thurston Moore, Robert Quine and Greg Ginn - proof of the unconditional respect Vincent enjoys, at least among those insiders who owe him the most.

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