#impetus inter

[themidwestmo]

impetus inter “an infinite capacity for romance” insert

[buttererer]

Impetus Inter - Iowa Test Of Basic Skills (1995)

[annihilate-this-week]

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Impetus Inter - Havana

I want to share this with y'all because it's rare as fuck and very formative for me. Impetus Inter were a band from Minneapolis in the mid-90s, which brought together members of a bunch of different MPLS bands that didn't sound anything like each other (Destroy, Bloodline, Billingsgate, etc). None of them sounded anything like Impetus Inter, either. This band was one of the chaotic hardcore bands of the mid-90s that I was most floored by, and when my first band got the opportunity to open for them at our fourth show, I was SUPER stoked. It was in some grotty basement (in the house that now has this mural on the side) and they just blew me away. At one point, their drummer was playing so hard she knocked her floor tom over midsong and just carried on like nothing had happened.

Anyway, Impetus Inter only managed to record two EPs and a comp track (this one) while they were together. The members later recorded all of their unreleased material for an LP, An Infinite Capacity For Romance, but that was after the drummer, Amanda Huron, had moved to Washington DC. Instead of having her on drums, the two guitarists took turns playing drums on the LP. They rerecorded this song, under the name "Havana Youth Club," and it's good because there's little you can do to take anything away from this song, but it wasn't like this version.

This is the real Impetus Inter, recorded while they were an active band, with all members present and accounted for. This version of "Havana" is significantly lower-fi than the version on Infinite Capacity For Romance, but it's actually Amanda Huron on drums and they actually recorded all of their parts while they were standing in a room together, so there's a real ferocity to this version that isn't present on the rerecording. Dave Hake's vocals were a big inspiration to me throughout my time as a hardcore singer, and the way he sounds like he's screaming as hard as he possibly can makes the heavy parts of this song so much more intense. I also like the structure--the chunky midtempo riffing full of stops and starts, which turns this song into a series of miniature buildups and explosions. The moment before each chorus when the entire band stops except the drummer, who hits her snare once, then bam! Everything comes back in with an immediate downward key change into the chorus. Oh, that is just a killer. But so is Dave's unaccompanied scream just after the relatively subdued bridge, at about 1:57, which transitions into a modified version of the main verse riff in a lower key, which makes the whole thing that much more menacing. Oh god, so awesome.

I loved this kind of music so much when I was younger because it was totally spastic and full of trapped kinetic energy that was constantly exploding everywhere. I never got why tough-guy kids moshed hardest to the kind of leaden, midtempo grooves that every post-1992 moshcore band ripped off from Earth Crisis--it was always the kind of thing that Impetus Inter does on this song that most made me want to dance. But I mean, that's also dancing defined not as karate-derived syncopated spinkicks and fist swings, but instead as uncoordinated yet probably dangerous spastic flailing; the kind of thing that everyone behind you laughs at you for doing. Then again, that basically describes my stage presence throughout my musical career, so there you go, I guess.

P.S. I ran into Mark Wilcox of Impetus Inter a couple of months ago when his current band, No Statik, played Richmond. I mentioned the show where my first band had opened for Impetus Inter, and he totally remembered us after 19 years. That made me really happy because I am a big dork.