MX-80 Sound

Had the Residents not welcomed them with open arms onto their label, making ends meet would have been just as hard for Mx-80 Sound in San Francisco as it had been back in their native Bloomington, Indiana... Their deal with Island had gone belly up, thanks to "Hard Attack," which in 1977 had sold maybe a hundred copies, if that. (Not to mention their debut EP, "Big Hits," even more radical and uncompromising.)

And yet, there was a whole world inside it — not exactly new, mind you (ask Pere Ubu for clarification...), but intriguing all the same: an immature mush (though only youth can be immature in that particular way) of art-punk laced with juicy, feverish noise-rock shortcuts. And yet, needless to say, they'd dug their own grave with their bare hands. In Indiana, after all, there was no scene capable of withstanding their sonic torture. Sure, the Gizmos had been among the forebears of new wave, but that was still cult stuff — and deeply underground, to be fair.

Bruce Anderson was without doubt the main architect of their sound: his guitar digressions, mostly orbiting around a dissonant thematic core, bring him closer to a certain strain of free jazz than to rock. The second guitarist, also singer and saxophonist, Rich Stim, was completely overshadowed by his bandmate's venomous improvisations. Rounding out the lineup were Dale Sophiea on bass and Dave Mahoney on drums.

San Francisco wasn't just home to the Residents. Chrome and Tuxedomoon completed the magical triad, which in 1979 — thanks to an article by Michael Goldberg in the "New Musical Express" — became, with the official "adoption" of Anderson's band, a perfect square. Of the four, the "immigrant" band was actually the least revolutionary. Even so, it was more than capable of stirring up a sense of unease, of oppressive dread, that caused serious "orientation" problems even on the west coast. Theirs was the rock of dehumanization. "Noise" was the most obvious symbol of that unease.

It's on "Out Of Tunnel" that the band's full potential surfaces. The references, more or less overt, are countless: from the Velvet Underground (too easy...) to the Stooges, from Black Sabbath to Blue Oyster Cult (the "white-hot" guitars), from the Ohio experimental school (Pere Ubu above all) to certain (rather eccentric, too) krautrock ventures — chief among them the guitar "inventions" of Manuel Göttsching of Ash Ra Tempel — and the "cosmic-psychedelic" excursions of the Karrer/Weinzierl duo (Amon Duul II).

While the rest of the band lays down a sound that's jagged but far from hermetic, Anderson's guitar flights (somewhere between Peter Laughner's "isolationist" psychedelia and John McLaughlin's avant-jazz excursions) blanket everything in a thick layer of feedback and distortion, often so impenetrable and obsessive it brings to mind an avant-la-lettre version of shoegaze — but without the faintest glimmer of "transcendence," since in the world of Mx-80 Sound reality dissolves entirely into the anguish of nothingness.

It opens with "It's Not My Fault," probably the punk song Beefheart never quite got around to writing. Swirling "heavy" inflections surface especially in a few guitar and drum passages. "Follow That Car" unleashes a sticky, insolent chorus. The energy here is pure new wave: furious, yet at the same time irredeemably sick.

The grueling, tumultuous "Fender Bender" can be split into two halves: on one side, the unstoppable twists of Stim's sax (at times reaching for atrocious dissonances that seem to irreparably shift the song's center of gravity toward a point of no return); on the other, the rhythm section (syncopated, metallic, front and center) and the guitar (here and there falling in step with Stim, but always ready to unleash acid, treacherous phrasing — you might even catch a whiff of Helios Creed's ghost...). A mechanical trilling is the perfect way to introduce "I Walk Among Them," murky and monotone, just like Stim's voice, more "Lou Reed-like" here than ever.

But the masterpiece goes by the name "Someday You'll Be King" (released at the time as a single too, paired with "White Night," Pere Ubu-esque to the bone): between one break and the next, the six-string presses on, vigorous and convulsive; epic in its own way, relentlessly emotional, the song, despite its power-pop trappings (more Husker Du than Replacements), remains a knife-edge assault — the cathartic kind, taken to its furthest extreme.

The sudden, repeated digressions turn the noise-rock of "Frankie I'm Sorry" into a monstrous experiment in sonic destabilization. The carnage becomes an orgiastic ritual in the finale of "Gary And Priscilla": Anderson duels to the death with the rhythm section — precise yet schizoid on their end, extremely degraded and cacophonous on his guitar. A "deformed" sax cranks the alcohol content up even further.

Stim's "crazy saxophone" returns on "Man In A Box" (further hampered by spastic "metallic" blasts), while "Metro Teens" has a bassline that's pre-Sonic Youth, and a visceral Anderson solo that's pure "automatic writing."

Closing things out, "Face Of The Earth": Mahoney's "railway" drum roll, Stim's Brechtian declamations and Anderson's malignant dissonances. As if to say that, deep down, we're still in the age of post-industrial paranoia; and that their San Francisco wasn't, after all, so far removed from the dark, glacial one that the other great bands of the era were combing through with musical formulas that were nothing short of revolutionary, decisive for the development of rock. Just as, if only for the briefest of flashes, Mx-80 Sound's Bloomington, Indiana, was too.

With many thanks and best regards...

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

02/11/2006