Urinals - The Other American Wave

New York's new wave of 1976-78 amounted to a return to the aims and forms of rock's early years (1967-68); and it turned that return into progress. Just as rock was born, on one hand, from the destruction of all the blues, vocal-group and folk legacies that had bogged down popular music since the early 60s, and on the other from the claim to existential and conceptual value in the act of writing rock songs, so new wave, technically, stripped away all the rhetoric and all the revivalism typical of the first half of the 70s, and set itself the goal of communicating, in every song, each author's own worldview. Out of this came forms and sounds, messages and contents, as irreconcilable as those of Ramones and Television, yet united, in sound, by minimalism and harshness, and in content, by introversion and alienation.

The new wave of the other American coast, of Los Angeles, could be called hardcore. But having used the term in a historical rather than ideal sense ("new wave" has been applied to every form of rock, from metal to singer-songwriter fare, whenever proclaimed as new), let's say that the new wave of Los Angeles was called (not exclusively, of course) Urinals. Less known, less appreciated, less self-aware, easily mistaken for post-hardcore (just as English new wave is mistaken for post-punk), the West Coast's new wave was, at the outset, far less explosive than its New York counterpart, yet just as capable of putting down roots that would mark the entire future history of rock. It is from this scene that independent or alternative rock is born. Indie is not simply underground rock as opposed to chart rock (death-metal or true techno aren't played on the radio either); it is the expression of a sensitive, anguished inner life, the cry of the metropolitan adolescent; and as such it demands its own forms (made of fast rhythms, noise, melodies both screamed and genuflected).

Los Angeles' Urinals, over three years, from 1978 to 1980, with their new wave, entered (even if no one noticed) the history of rock. And it doesn't matter whether those who came after knew of Urinals; what matters is that Urinals proposed devices and content a decade before they were crystallized and recognized. And a decade, in the very short history of rock, is an eternity.

In particular, since even within indie-rock there are its own distinctions, Urinals are the forerunners of indie forms typical of the late 80s, which have only become fashionable and appreciated today, now that they can be said to be close to post-rock: lo-fi and shoegaze. These forms, cerebral because minimalistic, monstrous because too frail, found numerous cradles especially outside the United States. If the matter can be said to have been settled first in the Scotland of Jesus And Mary Chain (1985) and then in the Ireland of My Bloody Valentine (1991), in more recent years the discourse of these peripheral lands, forgotten by the world and out of time, has been carried forward by young artists who, in the best cases, have had the good taste (the honesty) to make use of electronics. The reference is to Icelandic electronic dream-pop (Sigur Rós, Múm) as much as to the synth-pop of San Diego (Xiu Xiu). The Icelanders are by now beyond any existential concreteness through excess of dream, the Californians through excess of realism. All of them, however, acknowledge (or should) the artifice of an operation already accomplished in both form and content, and now revisited by pushing the former (electronics) and the latter (alienation becomes something to speculate on, something so worn and intrinsic that it's easy to forget it in order to escape into a fantasy that is ever more self-referential and powerless) to extremes.

Urinals were three university students who were roommates. John Talley-Jones (bass and vocals) was the leader of their venture. With a drum kit (three drums, two cymbals, a bass drum) and the rest of the gear stripped down to the bare minimum, the three of them managed to turn this enforced necessity into a deliberate virtue. A sound that was amateurish, at times unintelligible, minimal, miniaturized, but always sustained by an intelligence that never lets the listener's engagement drop. Between the live shows and the studio recordings there is no real break in continuity. Urinals offer songs lasting one, two minutes, where, between the English example of Wire and the American example of Minutemen, a third way takes shape, traced by a bitter, humorous, never vulgar sentiment, which would become that of the broader and more popular new wave. The English one that, split between synth-pop and post-punk, would reach all the way to the Italy of Diaframma (their most important recordings are on "Albori: 1979-1983").

Urinals are a post-hardcore band before hardcore itself had even reached maturity. Their sounds are harsh and always marked by sensitivity, desolate even when delicate: that's why they can be called new wave. And the comparison is with the English strain, not the American one. Generally we find a garage-rock base in the vein of Kinks which (via Byrds) nonetheless expresses faint, resigned, dark and adolescent moods. It's hanged-man's music, capable of moving us precisely because it plays it impassive (Joy Division), in this way, and in various guises, a defining trait of the 80s.

Urinals never recorded a single LP. Just two EPs and a single. Since 1997 their material (with unreleased tracks and live recordings) has been collected on the compilation Negative Capability.

After 23 years, in 2003, Urinals reunited for a new, first album (What Is Real and What Is Not). As with Mission of Burma, this is a sign of sincere, if ultimately pointless, passion.

Urinals Ep (1979, 4 tracks, 6 minutes).

The band presents itself bare, essential and deeply engaging. The lack of technical polish is too knowing not to be deliberate. The recording is amateurish. Six minutes diving straight into what would become the darkest sound of the 80s - where the pale, youthful voices singing it stand out all the more. The masterpiece is "Hologram" (2:09), which could hold its own alongside the contemporaneous "Unknown Pleasures" by Joy Division: "Hologram" fuses Byrds (the guitar's jingle-jangle) with English new wave (which it in fact anticipated): ten years before shoegaze, we're faced with a minimalistic, dreamlike and inhuman track, an inhumanity crafted by a child.

The other three tracks are just as essential (and utterly different): "Dead Flowers" brings Wire's punk rhythm and attitude into folk atmospheres, but pitch black ones. "Last Days Of Man On Earth" describes, with bitter humor, a claustrophobic rhythm section and a guitar acting as a contrasting echo, the apocalypse of the inner self. "Surfin With The Shah" is yet another masterpiece; an instrumental whose lines already anticipate the whole of Sonic Youth: a contained, helpless, unformed psychedelia sketching an all-encompassing watercolor.

Another Ep (1979, 4 tracks, 4 minutes).

The record opens with "Black Hole", a Byrds-like miniature, sung in such a way that in just one minute it grips the heart with a frail, splendid epic quality (comparable to Nico): yellow and black make a strange grey, which is the color of this music and of this other masterpiece. "I'm White And Middle Class" has the speed and themes of punk, but certainly not its force or its extroversion: it's a derelict's song. "I'm Bug", another masterpiece (a monstrous, bled-dry blues) capable of laying the groundwork for what would become Albini's sound (Big Black, Rapeman). "Ack Ack Ack Ack" is a cover of their contemporaries Minutemen, one of the greatest bands in rock: Urinals, however, aren't so much copying the Minutemen's sound as founding it alongside them; it's a matter of stripping garage-rock songs down to the bone (and thus making them more exasperating), compressed and atrophied into the space of a minute.

"Sex/Go Away Girl" (Single, 1980, 2 tracks, 2 minutes).

"Sex" is the masterpiece that foreshadows Big Black, Pussy Galore and Jon Spencer: starting back from the tensest Jefferson Airplane of Grace Slick, it delivers an epic and desperate garage-blues, perverse because it's suicidal. "Go Away Girl", on the other hand, paves the way for Meat Puppets: two liquid phrasings followed by a ferocious, thunderous hardcore blast. The Urinals really do seem to have no limits (not even in choosing a name picked with full awareness of being ignored or mocked, whether or precisely because they deserved attention and to be taken seriously).

Among the rest of the Urinals' catalogue (some thirty tracks), at least "Scolastic Aptidude" deserves mention, its fatalism gathered into a frantic rush hindered by reckless noise interludes (a recklessness that, say, the Cure always lacked, and that in Zappa sometimes became an end in itself), as well as "I Hate", a shapeless, desolate piece of noise ribbed with shrill riffs torn apart by screams. "Salmonella", meanwhile, is one of the earliest grunge tracks ante litteram.

In a class of its own is "Presence Of Mind". It's like the extroverted version of the introversion of "Hologram": by the late Seventies it would teach rock to all who came after: noisy, powerful garage-rock like the early Kinks (just listen to the maniacal guitar riff), a dark gait worthy of Joy Division, searing Velvet Underground dissonances. The vocal is a black, childish and desperate scream. The rhythm section is as taut and exasperated as on the Dicks' "Hate The Police", a track with which it shares the rare state of being rock at its fullest (neither too loud nor too quiet), as well as the inspiration of a fascinating, entirely inward-turning cancer. In these two minutes you can already hear Sonic Youth, and with them the sound of much of the Eighties. The track deserves a place among the great unknown classics: Rocket From The Tombs' "So Cold", Drive Like Jehu's "If It Kills You", Rapeman's "Budd".

Out of the Urinals would come 100 Flowers (100 Flowers, 1983) and Trotsky Icepick (six important albums for Gregg Ginn's Sst label between 1986 and 1992).

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