Custody Battle

10” 2010

I think of Custody Battle as the refined version of Anomic Suicide. It contains Travis and Pickle from said band and adds Zombie Religion singer, Loren, on bass. The sound is similar to Anomic Suicide’s in that it sounds like all the good players from the early SST bands formed a band that somehow didn’t suck. The playing is tighter and the songwriting has gotten slimmer and more minimalist and more focused. This is also the best recording of any of Travis’ many bands that I’ve heard. Because I know these guys it’s hard to separate how mean this sounds from what nice mellow guys they are. The music makes them sound deranged and heat fried. Ain’t one trace of that hippie love folk shit that is popular in all the bars up in Flagstaff. This is the type of music you can only see in basements and house shows where underage kids are getting loaded and making out and rocking out. Easily one of the best bands in Az. right now.

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Anomic Suicide

The First Four Years CD 2003-2007

I think Anomic Suicide played as “The Skags” when they first started, but I only saw a couple of their last shows when they were firmly established as Anomic Suicide. They had a good four year run, which in Flagstaff band years is more like twenty years. One of the main songwriters was Travis Coutts who came on my radar when the Cuntifiers played with his old band, the incredible KGB, in Flag once. Travis and the rest of these guys have been a major influence on the Flag scene through their many bands (Emo Wars, Custody Battle, Lipniki Kids, Wedding Band, Landlord, KGB etc.) and by throwing a ton of local parties/shows for many great touring bands. Anomic Suicides’ sound sometimes comes off like raw early 80s hardcore punk, as the Black Flag style art work and title suggests. Other times it feels like they were listening to a lot of Jawbreaker or Replacements, but most of the time it feels like they were eating a lot of acid and listening to Flipper and Sonic Youth or early Amphetamine Reptile bands. Some songs are thirty seconds long and some songs are nine minutes long. Drummer, Pickle, has a sledgehammer style of playing that works with all their styles. Whole thing is rough from conception, to playing, to recording and probably could have been trimmed to a best of rather than complete discography, but there is a rough beauty that comes through in enough of these songs to make it worth checking out.

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H.O.A.

Fighting the Lost War of the Anonymous demo cass. 2010

Here’s a current band out of Tempe whose demo I picked up a Toxic Ranch last week. Bill told me it was some pretty good noise out of Phoenix. I said “noise like Amphetamine Reptile stuff?” and he said “no like Throbbing Gristle.” Naturally I was intrigued and if Bill says its worth checking out it usually is. But I think we both missed the mark on what kind of noise this is. It reminds me of the early 90s riot grrl stuff, but only aesthetically, because it seems like its three young girls who have no idea of how they're "supposed" to play their instruments yet are still able to create great interesting music. This is way more creative than most of the stuff like this that was done in the 90s. I would fit this somewhere between contemporaries like Trash Kit and Finally Punk while giving a nod to Crass and Huggy Bear. It’s very menacing, a little creepy and so good that HOA (along with Gay Kiss and Sorrower and a few other newer bands) gives me hope for Phoenix.

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Lenguas Largas

Live on 602 Radio 2009

Here’s a live radio set by an early incarnation of the live version of Lenguas Largas. They play songs that have all ended up on their records, but here they’re slow as hell and super dreamy and hazy. The drugged out desert rock tag always gets stuck on these guys, but none of them really even do drugs. Here you wouldn’t know it because it feels like their high as hell, like they each took a hand full of Quaaludes and tried to walk through knee-deep mud, only with noisy psych punk music. Add some booze, Mark Beef and Ricky Shimo and you got a pretty winning formula. Drummer on this recording, Chris Kohler (Sexy) was replaced by Levi Reyes (Swing Ding Amigos) who was recently replaced by Brian Bollt (Sabertooth Snatch, Line of Fire). Brian’s drum style is more crystal meth than Quaaludes so the latest incarnation should be interesting. Another great live set from 602 Radio in Phoenix.

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the Fells

Fun Date 7” circa 1994

This is my favorite Fells 7”. The A side is exactly what you’d expect from the Fells—a noisy amped up garage punk party stomp with some weird Melt Banana-esque noise being made by the guitars and too-cool-to-be-bothered-to-actually-sing monotone vocals. However the B side, “Easy Rider”, is like no other Fells song I ever remember hearing. It’s still pretty raw, but there is a kind of psychedelic melodic feel that never entered their mostly 50s influenced sound. They’re actually playing chords rather than just pounding power-chords. Vocals are still monotone, but somehow smoother. The whole song feels smooth and that’s a term I wouldn’t normally associate with this band. This had to be one of Heath’s songs because I don’t think Jeff had enough soul to write a song this good.

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Run-On Sunshine

Memory Game cass. 2011

If you’ve been to a show in downtown Tucson in the last 10 years and there wasn’t a short skinny guy with a funny hair cut named Mullarkey dancing right in front of the band it’s because there was a better show going on that night and Mullarkey was at that show. For many years at shows he was mostly a spectator, but he has recently had an explosion of creativity that first manifested in his karaoke displays, then the band Monster Pussy, then Run-On Sunshine and now every time I run into him he tells me about some new really unconventional project he has in the works. Run-On Sunshine is extremely unconventional consisting mostly of Mullarkey singing. There is sparse instrumentation consisting solely of acoustic children’s instruments provided by Autumn Bree (Kamikaze Autopilot), a fine singer in her own right, who actually has a much larger range than Mullarkey’s mostly monotone approach, but she doesn’t sing here. This is pretty strange music that is not for the causal listener, but there are some catchy melodies and Mullarkey’s love of Calvin Johnson is evident. The lyrics are as intimate as the delivery and are mostly autobiographical and very heart-on-sleeve, with moments of brilliant insight, like when he is reminiscing about his recollection of the old days and thinks “…these memories could be altered to fool myself” which is a thought that has entered my head many times since I started this blog. 

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Swing Ding Amigos

First demo circa 1999

The Swing Ding Amigos were originally from Nogales, but spent most of their existence in Tucson after brothers, Isaac and Levi Reyes, along with El Jimmy moved up here. This early recording finds them still a little wet behind the ears and still really pumped on Scared of Chaka, their most obvious influence at this point. They would eventually evolve a sound of their own that was faster and tighter than Scared of Chaka and just as catchy. I think the most interesting song here is the last one “About Today” which was a hidden track and doesn’t sound like any of the other songs on here. Some people might know this as the Ramen demo, because other versions have a Top Ramen cover, but I think I got one from a batch of one-of-a kind hand made CD-Rs probably thrown together for some out of town shows. Or I could be wrong and that might be a whole different demo. I got to spend a lot of time on the road with these guys when they would travel with the Blacks. They are extremely fun guys to hang out with. Currently Isaac is kicking ass with Lenguas Largas who Levi was also playing with until about a month ago when he moved to Phoenix. Brandon Ugstad and I are supposed to make a record with El Jimmy, doing a bunch of songs he wrote, and we were hoping to do that this summer, but we’ve been so busy with other projects we haven’t had a chance to even meet up yet. This is the first of many great recordings by this band that I will eventually post.

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La Merma

Ciudad Fronteriza cass. 1997

At this point (15-16 years) La Merma has got to be S. Arizona’s longest continuous running punk band. Maybe even the longest continuous running punk band in the whole state (or would that be Blackfire or some PHX band I don't know about?) . The funny thing about that is that they’re not completely from Arizona or the U.S. They have the rare distinction of existing between the third world poverty of Nogales, Mexico and the scary militarized zone Nogales, Az. has become. Their sound reflects a similar dualism combining American Southern California melodic punk, like early Bad Religion with a heavy Spanish punk influence, especially from Eskorbuto, who they sound a lot alike and they praise here in their song “Eskorbuto.” The riff in La Merma’s “Mi Ciudad” is a pretty blatant rip off of Eskorbuto’s “Cuidado!” but they add their own twist to the song so it comes off as less a rip off and more of a folk-tradition tribute to one of their beloved influences. "A Bailar" is my favorite song here and worthy of many a mix-tape. This is their first release and despite many line up changes over the years they are more active than ever recently touring on the East Coast and in Europe and are currently recording their newest record in Tucson.

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My Gun Named Trina

Class Clown Reformed 7" circa 1997

This is the other band I know of from Tombstone, “the town to tough to die,” where I saw a seven year old kid smoking cigarettes last time I was there. MGNT came along after the first wave of Cochise County bands. I’m sure all these guys grew up seeing those early bands, but they are removed from that scene by time and sonic differences. They drew more from post-Operation Ivy 90s ska-punk bands, but like Hell Day there is a naïve originality that adds some charm to it. It’s an early recording from Scott Becerra’s 4 AM studio in Sierra Vista and you can tell that the band and Scott were still getting their shit together, but the rough recording adds to the charm. The guitar sounds like a banjo and the saxophone sounds like a clarinet. If this was recorded in a proper studio it would be over polished and way less fun sounding. The songs are pretty catchy and that holds the whole thing together. Guitar player Ray Walker would move to Flagstaff and be integral to the Robothouse scene there in the early-mid 2000s, putting on shows and playing in bands like JETOMI and, more recently, joining and quitting Feel Free. Drummer Chris Ziegler would move to S. California to work as a writer and occasionally play music. I used to randomly run into him at shows or parties when my bands were playing out there regularly.

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Hell Day

Raw Flesh Mind cass. circa '94/'95, Ugly Like My Butt cass. 1993

Here’s one by request, but coincidentally was on my short short list of posts. Hell Day was from Tombstone and is the third in the holy trinity of Cochise County Hardcore.There were many other bands, but there was a sonic kinship between Malignus Youth, Head Space and Hell Day. Hell Day would put their own spin on the sound. The vocals are the focal point and where the MY/HS influence is most evident, but they opt out of blast beat speed and drawn out jams for more of a straight punk sound. The vocals and melodic guitar and bass work make it sound like more than just simple punk though. Slight pop and jazz influences show up too. There seems to be a naïve originality to it, like being isolated in Tombstone limited their exposure to music so they took every type of music they heard and mixed it into a pot and came up with something unique. This is only one of two punk bands I ever heard of coming out of Tombstone. You would think that a town that celebrates violence, death and murder would be a punk mecca, but then again less than 2,000 people live there so Hell Day and My Gun Named Trina are actually real rarities. I think Hell Day relocated to Tucson eventually and were actually practicing in the room next to us on Pennington St. They were around a long time but only played sporadically and I never met them. Apparently a third demo exists. If anybody has it I want a copy.  

Raw Flesh Mind download here

Ugly Like My Butt download here

Primates

demo 1993

I was looking at the list of bands that Ryan Butler has been recording at his Arcane Digital studio and a lot of them are from Yuma. Besides the Wongs the only other Yuma band I know of was the Primates. The first time I ever played music in front of people (with a band called Block) was in Yuma at a show in an Elks Lodge. Almost 20 years and hundreds of shows followed but that show was by far the wildest I’ve ever played. One kid broke his arm in the pit, went to the hospital, had it set, and came back to the show! If my memory serves me right those Yuma shows were set up by a guy named John McCloud who played in this band, Primates. It’s too bad this band existed in Yuma in ’93 and not Tucson in ’99 because they would have been kin to the Blacks and the Spites with their love of the rawer early grunge sounds of Mudhoney and American garage punk. Last time I remember talking to McCloud he was going to try out for a Scottish-punk band, the Real Mackenzie’s, in Canada. (insert Rolling Stones/Scottish/Bestiality joke here).

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the Wongs

Reanimate My Baby Lp 1999

Here is an earlier Rousseau project.  This will be the first of a few posts that gets away from Phoenix, Tucson or Flagstaff and into the smaller, weirder towns in Arizona. The Wongs were originally from the god-forsaken town of Yuma but relocated to Phoenix. They might have been in Phoenix by the time they recorded this, but I like to think of them as a Yuma band. They actually sound like they should have been from Tucson in the mid-90s with their super catchy garage punk stomp. It’s as good as, if not better than many of the Tucson garage bands from the 90s. Released on Rip Off Records, but I bet they didn’t have to beg Greg Lowery to put it out like the Spites did for their 7” on Rip Off.

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Earthmen and Strangers

LP 2009

I thought that Ryan Rousseau could do no wrong, but sometime in this last year I saw the current incarnation of Destruction Unit and I did not like them. They dove into a moody, dark, gothic post-punk sound that reminded me of the fist time I saw Digital Leather with just Sean and Arrow playing keyboards and singing, which I thought sucked. Nevertheless Rousseau’s songwriting skills are better than ever, but it’s more evident in Earthmen and Strangers, my favorite project of his so far. Everything is more thought out and controlled compared to his noisier punk bands, but it still has enough punch to keep the head bobbing. There is some mood and reverb, but it’s not dark and overdone. “Bartender” is just about a perfect song. “Photo Lie,” which also shows up on a Digital Leather release is done here. I don’t know if Sean or Ryan wrote it, but both versions are great. There is also a quitter, tamer version “Desert Snow” than the one that appears on Tokyo Electron’s AZ 238 LP. He’s taken his familiar song structures and let them open up and expand into poppy new wave indie rock songs rather than just shoving the music down your throat like some of his past and current work. It’s mature, but in all the right ways.

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G-Whiz

Eat At Eds Cd 1992

I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for pop-punk. Of course I love the first wave of Brit style power-pop like Buzzcocks and I really love the more-punk-than-pop sounds of bands like Sicko and Statues. J Church is one of my all time favorite bands, but that’s not what I’m talking about when I say pop-punk. I’m talking about the super sappy, heart-on-sleeve, every song is about a girl that broke your heart style pop-punk. G-Whiz perpetrated this style as well as their contemporaries in bands like Big Drill Car, Green Day, All, Chemical People, but never got the amount of attention those band did. Unlike most bands I write about from the early 90s they did extend their reach beyond Arizona. I’m pretty sure they were strictly based in Phoenix, but their singer used to live a few houses down from us when we had a punk house in Tucson’s Iron Horse neighborhood circa ’92-’93. I’m sure he and the rest of the neighbors were ready to give us the Feederz treatment (exile) by the time we all moved out of there. Four months later we had another punk house three blocks down in the same neighborhood and that place made the first place look like a children’s day-care center.

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the Feederz

Jesus 7" 1980

Plenty of info can be found out about the legendary Feederz other places on the web so I won’t waste any time talking about their hi-jinks or show antics, but I will say that getting kicked out of town is some pretty wild west shit (and that was in the 1980s) and that if Frank Discussion pulled some of that shit in Phoenix today Arpaio would throw his ass in Tent City. But the music is as interesting as their history. It was firmly planted in early 80s hardcore, but not the orthodox bonehead hardcore like all that Boston shit. More of the thinking man’s hardcore that was lyrically sharp and sonically diverse like the Dead Kennedy’s or the Minutemen, but still low brow enough to write a song like “Jesus.” All their LPs are currently being re-repressed by Broken Rekids. When I got the first repress of their first LP (the one with the sand paper cover) I discovered that it ended up in my collection next to the Fells LP on Estrus, so I pulled the shrink-wrap off both of them.

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JFA

Live 1984 Tour LP

This is one of the first punk records I ever owned which I picked up at either Wrex or Zips on the eastside of Tucson. My early knowledge of punk music came either from my sister or from Thrasher magazine and JFA was one of the more prominent bands featured in the magazine at the time. They were real skaters and they played music that was good to skate to. It was mostly hardcore punk, but borrowed from surf music, George Clinton and Bowie. I got this in the late 80s and it wouldn’t be until the mid-2000s until I heard JFA’s proper studio recordings. I had seen them live a few times, but the records were out of print and easy computer access to old recordings was unheard of. When I finally heard their studio records I thought they sounded so slow and lifeless compared to this live recording that had been seared into my brain for so many years. Sure everything was clear, tightly played and precise, but that was the problem. They lacked of the wild chaos and reckless abandonment that this live recording captured.

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the Vinegar Sting

Coronado Historic District Sampler CD circa 2002

Dick told me that Lenguas Largas have been playing some pretty good shows in Phoenix recently. The only time I ever had a good string of shows there was with the Blacks around 2000 when we would play parties at a house in Tempe occupied by members of the Vinegar Sting and Jack Doyle from Underground Railroad to Candyland. We played with the Vinegar sting a lot. They reminded me of some of the earlier Phoenix bands because there’s an anything goes aesthetic and the Sun City Girls were an obvious influence. Sometimes they did sets of all Sun City Girls songs. They were also informed by the Minutemen and some of the more artsy emo stuff from the 90s, like Harriet the Spy or some of the noisy rhythmic San Diego bands or even the Make Up on a song like “ACU.” It sounds dark but they are fun people. It sounds like they take drugs and that’s because they do. They’ve had to go on hiatus because their love of drugs has landed some members in trouble with the law, but they’ve been playing as recently as last year with new material. Years ago at a show at Cannery Row their drummer Andy did a crazy drummer freak out thing and his snare drum fell off the stage, which was on the second floor, directly onto the head of a girl, who was on the first floor and who was trying her best to ignore the band. Huge gash, blood everywhere and I doubt it’s related but the bar didn’t stay open much longer after that.

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the Teds

the Eighties Are Over 7" 1981

Over 30 posts and I’ve managed to totally ignore Phoenix. Any proper Southern Arizonian is supposed to hate all things Phoenix because we think we’ve figured out how real desert city life is supposed to be or something like that.  Or maybe it’s just some stupid college/sports rivalry that’s seeped over into larger aspects of the culture. I’ve always found the politics of Maricopa County to be fucked, but you cannot deny that Phoenix has produced some of the best bands in the state and the nation. So I thought that I should start giving Phoenix some of its due. If this is a site about the fringe music of this state than you can’t ignore Phoenix because some of the weirdest and wildest shit ever was produced there. Shitty drugs, intense summer heat and poor public transportation makes people weird. I never lived there and have only played up there occasionally over the years, so I don’t know a lot of the people involved, but I do have recordings that I think are great and should be shared. So let’s start at the beginning of Placebo which was the premier punk/weirdo label in Phoenix. This first release by the Teds isn’t as weird as the label would get with Sun City Girls or the Dry Lungs comps. and it’s not as intense as the JFA or Mighty Sphincter stuff. It is however pretty damn good punk with a post punk, new wave and Killed By Death vibe. “Modern Guy” sounds like it could have been on one of the Jam’s early records while “Telly Surveillance” and “Digital Doris” have a dissident, minimalist stiff new wave sound. This is good shit and a good way to set the mood for the record label that Placebo would become. I don't actually own this record. I found it somewhere online and I can't remember where, but I give many thanks to the people that share these type of hard to find gems.

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Head Space

Fragments cass. 1993 

I’ve heard Malignus Youth was a big influence on Head Space and I’ve also heard that Head Space was the big influence on Malignus Youth. They were definitely big influences on each other, but I’ve always thought of Head Space as the elder and more mature of the two groups because their sound didn’t always rely on breakneck speeds and they sometimes went into long drawn out jams reminiscent of the Doors or Santana and other hippie music. Maybe because they were from the hippie town of Bisbee and Malignus was from the military town of Sierra Vista. The melodic vocal arrangements both these bands used were way more complex than most bands that got called punk. With Head Space’s mellower songs it sometimes comes off like 60s folk or psych, which is territory Malignus never ventured near. But there are also moments of blast beat fast-core with melodic rapid fire vocals. It’s complex in a way that most people probably won’t like and sometimes a little heart-on-sleeve hokey like Cap’n Jazz, but I like most of it and I think it’s essential listening to anybody that was interested in Malignus Youth and later Pathos.

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Malignus Youth

Ephemeral--Missa Brevis ('89-'94, released on CD '98)--Practice '88

Most people either loved or hated Malignus Youth. I think they had one of the most unique approaches to the hardcore punk genre ever and expanded the elements of speed and melody in ways no band had done before or has done since. So you know which camp I’m in and a lot of their hardcore fans consider this posthumous release their masterpiece because it contains “the Mass,” songs 18-23, a hardcore/punk interpretation of a Catholic Mass sung mostly in Latin. Yes, it’s weird and a lot of the punks had problems with the religious overtones, but love it or hate it you can’t deny the uniqueness of it. The songs that precede it are some of their great signature songs that never made it to vinyl. I also added a file that I found on Soulseek which contains older jam room versions of songs from their earlier vinyl releases, but without song titles.

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