(New Album Review) Chrome- Feel It Like a Scientist

Helios Creed’s Chrome has released a new album, Feel It Like a Scientist. It is a shame that he won’t be bringing Chrome on a U.S. tour, though they did recently play a festival in Los Angeles called Berserktown.

Together as Chrome, Damon Edge and Helios Creed pioneered weirdo art punk, exerting a strong influence on much of the punk and noise made in the following decades. Even for their idiom, Chrome made music that was overwhelmingly strange– deranged punk running wild against an uneasy backdrop of menacing vocals, weird synthesizers, shortwave radios, and televisions. In a way, because they have strained so aggressively for such profound, bizarre symbolism, with little thought given to aesthetic pleasantness or even to having a clear-cut ideological “point”, Chrome are one of the most “punk” bands to ever exist. Moreover, their experiments with technology certainly prefigured the transition of sampling into mainstream music. For years, they were really just a name to me, and that’s all they may be to you as well at the moment, however I must emphasize that their albums Half Machine Lip Moves, Alien Soundtracks, and the underrated Red Exposure are essential listening.

As Chrome’s fans may already know, Damon Edge sadly passed away in 1995. He had been in contact with Helios Creed before his death, and they had been discussing reforming Chrome as a duo (from the mid-80’s up to The Clairaudient Syndrome Damon Edge had been recording under the Chrome moniker without Helios), and it’s sad that he was taken so young by heart failure before this reunion could have happened. Helios has soldiered on for Chrome parallel to working on his own solo albums, and these new Chrome albums aren’t half bad. Feel It Like A Scientist is actually the first new Chrome album in about twelve years.

Creed’s manifestation of Chrome is admirably consistent not only with the work he and Damon created together, but with the Chrome that Damon made on his own.  It’s actually hard to tell a Damon-era Chrome album apart from Helios-era album. The main point of difference lies in Helios’s guitar playing– the Helios Chrome is more of a rock affair than Damon’s vision. For this record, Creed formed a new band, including vocalist Anne Dromeda, guitarist Keith Thompson, drummer Aleph Omega, bassists Lux Vibratus and Steve Fishman, and synth player Tommy Grenas. The band collectively wrote the album’s lyrics, but Creed also included some lines originally written by Damon.

Feel it Like a Scientist is considerably better than Ghost Machine and feels a little more like a Chrome album than the jammy (but nonetheless interestingly-crafted) Retro-Transmission. This is a good album that will sate old fans of the band– there are many moments here where one can feel the spirit of Chrome resurrecting for the first time in years, particularly on “Prophecy” and the haunting ambience of “Nymph Droid”. Just as they did decades ago, the feverish punk energy and the alien madness come together to create something really damn cool. This is a reunion album to be reckoned with.

(New Album Review) The Chewers- Chuckle Change And Also

Here’s a submission I received around a week ago, a rather charming bit of homegrown surrealism: Chuckle Change And Also, the second album to date by West Virginia’s The Chewers.

Self-described “freaks from the woods”, The Chewers (Travis Caffrey and Michael Sadler) do a good job of screwing around on the creepy avant-rock wavelength. Disjointed guitar riffs, demented fiddles, and primitive drums stutter in time with monotone monologues of murder and weirdness– it’s hypnotic listening. The Chewers are indeed very charming– perhaps best described as jaunty down-home punk-intellectuals. It’s nice to see a new band taking up the mantle of folks like The Residents, The Holy Modal Rounders, and Sun City Girls, and doing a damn good job at it.

What separates this pair from their artistic forebears is perhaps a tendency to lean towards a Southern Gothic style of country-folk, as one can see on tracks like “Smiling Samuel” and “Tornado of Stasis”. Personally, I think that the gothic country influence in their music is rather brilliant, because while all of these experimental-freak outfits have enjoyed telling stories, I’ve just never heard this Southern influence transplanted into this kind of band (except as a temporary pretense, as I’m sure that Sun City Girls have at some point or another imitated literally every genre of music ever to exist). It’s just another aspect of The Chewers that’s very refreshing, and it gives a special fascination to their music– these strange tales held me in suspense. I smiled a lot while listening to this album– it alternates between droll tales of weird murder and mad-scientist freakouts very gracefully. And The Chewers can be very funny when they go the route of full-on strangeness, particularly on “I’m Afraid” and “Some Folks”. This is indeed music “from the woods”, or as a musician I know once said, “music from the other side of the fence”– primitive and untamed. Their aesthetic is rough and at the same time grows on you easily, calculatedly sounding patched-together and hastily-thrown-in-gear as a way to hook the more discerning listeners. The Chewers make music that purposefully comes from a place of estrangement and fragmentation…I love it! We need more stuff like this out there, particularly because it’s harder to do a good job making it than I’m making it seem.

I can see these two going pretty far with future releases, though this release is itself pretty impressive. Here is their bandcamp, check them out when you can!

(New Album Review) James Ferraro- NYC, Hell 3:00 AM

I’ll start this review by stating that I don’t want to review the other hipper-than-thou hype monster that came out this year, R Plus Seven. Though there were a few songs on it I enjoyed, it was fairly disappointing, even though I like a lot of Daniel Lopatin’s other albums, particularly Returnal. And moreover, I didn’t like it or at least get it half as much as James Ferraro’s NYC, Hell 3:00 AM.

NYC has a distinct sound, but it’s somewhat difficult to describe. It frequently (“Close ups” and “Upper East Pussy” are two amusing examples) sounds like some kind of deliberately pathetic parody of corrupted nightclub-life hearthrob music like Abel Tesfaye’s The Weeknd. Or maybe it’s more like a stoned nerdy hipster rambling on about money and decadence over chopped-and-screwed Drake and field recordings of Brooklyn convenience stores. Hey, I tried.

If I seem dispassionate and glib in describing this music, I guess it’s because I’ve listened to a lot of strange music in my life. So, you know, I’ve been desensitized. And really, so-called Vaporwave music is more or less the music of complete desensitization. This genre is pretty much completely anomalous– it’s cool as all hell, but it would kill a party. It’s safe to assume that there were deeper artistic motivations behind its creation, but it’s synthetic, somewhat trivial. I’m not even sure who actually listens to it often, beyond a few thousand internet addicts. Nevertheless, NYC, Hell 3:00 AM does seem to stand out from this genre; it has more substance than the rest. There’s an agenda here.

So if the album’s title didn’t give it away to you already, the message that Ferraro is beating us over the head with is the hellishness and absurdity of the hedonistic urban hipster night life. Ferraro’s narrator-hearthrob is moaning into the mic about his emotions, about how he’s going to die of cancer from smoking cigarettes (“Cheek Bones” is totally hilarious, by the way), and all that, and then around him on the ambient soundscapes there are rats running through the gutters and people getting mugged– the sinister rumblings of the reality of the city. Disembodied robotic voices on the tracks repeat phrases like American Violence, Botox, and Money, the cultural narratives that underlie the city’s reality. Like I said, Ferraro doesn’t hesitate to beat us over the head with a message.

I may as well admit that this is an album that I didn’t completely enjoy, because, after all, it was deliberately crafted to sound disjointed, disorienting, and ugly. However, it’s an album that I don’t think I will forget soon. There’s something genuinely fascinating about tracks like the ominous “City Smells” and the eerily beautiful “Niggas”. I have to give Ferraro points for having a vision, even if it conjured an absolutely breathtakingly unpleasant album. Give it a chance– it’s good conceptual art, if anything.