Bitch Magnet

It was the 25'46" of "Skag Heaven" that split the hardcore epic in two - the only album (leaving aside the 17 minutes of the debut Ep) by that fundamental, legendary outfit from Louisville, Kentucky, Squirrel Bait. Yet, for the rage and nihilism - and why not, the poetry - of that starting point to be transfused into new, more complex scores, often "mathematical" and cerebral, but still sharp and furious, further tweaking was needed.

It's 1988 when Sooyoung Park (vocals and bass), a student at Oberlin College in Ohio, forms Bitch Magnet together with friends Jon Fine (guitar) and Orestes Delatorre (drums) - the definitive missing link between the evolved hardcore "in nuce" of Squirrel Bait and the cataleptic, decisively "post-" evolutions of Slint, from which bands of the calibre of Don Caballero, For Carnation and Gastr Del Sol would later draw their own - divergent - conclusions.

Truth be told, you won't find much of this on the debut Ep, "Star Booty", still too mired in murky hardcore waters, all sparkling rage soaked in feedback and mock-lysergic fuzz. For the real revolution, we'll have to wait until 1989, when, following the arrival of guitarist David Grubbs, "Umber" was released on Communion.

That's how the lesson of Squirrel Bait was joined by another - even more fundamental from a strictly musical standpoint - lesson: that of Big Black, whose harmonic and rhythmic innovations, already steeped in a climate of impending tragedy, were revisited through an "intellectual" lens, via an emotional-performative tension that summoned the math-rock precursors of Blind Idiot God.

So it is that, right from the opening, acid digressions and geometric rhythms turn into an exuberant romp that fuses in one go the Husker Du of "New Day Rising" and the catchiest Pixies of "Surfer Rosa" ("Motor"). The addition of a second guitar keeps the underlying feedback tension high, while allowing Grubbs to sketch out now power-pop chromaticism, now metallic slashes, but with a transcendence born of John Fahey's solitary delirium, in close communicative dialogue with Delatorre's catastrophic drumming. "Navajo Ace" follows a fairly similar arc, though amid the hallucinated guitar spirals and the fractured but "mechanical" bass-drum interplay, a decade of art-rock to come is already glimpsed. Likewise "Clay", in its slow march detonated by the noisy deflagrations of the six strings (which, in their "saturated spatiality", owe a debt here to Bob Mould's guitar "wall of sound"), lays out a theorem of accumulation and dispersion that the Slint of "Spiderland" would push to sublime heights. A riff in perfect hard-rock style launches the head-held-high anthem "Joan Of Arc", suspended between static flare-ups and tremolo stretches. The black hole of "Douglas Leader" opens right in the middle of the heart: the frailest, almost imperceptible chords; the despondent vocals; everything drifting along banks of guitars looped into the void. An example of the "ballad at ground zero" that hundreds of bands would come to know by heart.

In "Goat-Legged Country God" the ghost of Big Black looms large (scruffy hardcore with psycho-industrial chasms, but in a more melodic key), so much so that even Park's vocals seem to evoke Steve Albini's subdued, morbid delivery - without, however, venturing into abulic, autistic meanders, and perhaps precisely because of that, ending up amplifying its "negative" and "sinister" charge.

"Big Pining", on the other hand, dishes out a memorable chorus, set amid vigorous eruptions of "atmospheric" noise that, like an incandescent drone, lap at the melody, making it even more emphatic and, ultimately, "visionary". "Joyless Street" gallops dizzyingly through tangents of noise-rock sophistication and micro-"progressive" digressions, momentarily conjuring a "deviant" version of Dinosaur Jr. - sharper and structurally more faceted. The definitive patricide, however, comes with "Punch And Judy", which erects a sonic maelstrom capable of prefiguring new and bolder solutions, chipping away at and simultaneously synthesizing several genres: the industrial of Big Black (whose apocalyptic rampages are dissected step by step); the avant-noise of Sonic Youth (downgraded to a mere backdrop element); the unruly, tumultuous math-rock of Blind Idiot God (which serves as the macro-structure in which the two previous genres converge). The result is one of the most revolutionary tracks of all time, a true summa of a decade of research in rock experimentation.

Rationality and irrationality end up merging, fused into a single aesthetic design in which every contradiction between impulse and reflection dissolves. Little or nothing remains of Squirrel Bait. "Americruiser" confirms it, if further proof were needed: drums that slide silently into the background; a spoken delivery that is Slint before Slint (but only just...); atonal collapses that sharpen the sweetness of guitars building themselves a shell of aching melancholy through the reiteration of a few chords, drenched in imploded rage and streaked with fear... held in check, but impossible to hide. And then, as if under a sinister light, the final seconds slip away into silence, slowly, teetering between reverb and echoes of a chord... just one... now merely muttering an unheeded prophecy.

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27/10/2006