Chronophage — Musical Attack: Communist + Anarchist Friendship (Post-Present Medium)
“Anti-Miracle” swoops into earshot on an adrenalized jangle of guitars, a thicket of sounds made up of string-scrubbing, bass-bumping, drum pounding, piano twinkling overload. The vocals, as ever, wind up from inside the sound, a gentle curve of melody amid dense pogoing cadences. Depending on what you focus on, the song is either a pop-punk banger or a graceful, fey baroque pop gesture, the Clean or Felt, contingent on where your inclinations lie.
In other words, more of the excellent same. Dusted has long admired Chronophage’s marriage of punk energy and pop lyricism, going back as far as 2020’s Th’Pig’Kiss’d when we noted that “The slash and twitch and onslaught of their songs might put you in mind of the Fall, the Swell Maps, Fire Engines or, more recently, Protomartyr, but the nervy, baroque singing calls more ornate post-punkers to mind, Microdisney and the Monochrome Set, for example. “ The self-titled in 2022 posed the same intriguing contradictions, while a solo disc from Chronophage front-person Donna Allen this year showcased punk stutter and pop hooks with even greater clarity. This new EP, the first new music from the band in three years, picks up where they left off, the propulsive hammering of opener “Self-Education” giving way to florid pop gestures in “Swords ‘N Sandals.”
You might be forgiven for thinking Chronophage had taken a turn towards the harder end as the EP opens, since “Self-Education” has one of the best pounding, pummeling, drum-and-bass driving opening cadences this band ever produced. Yet even hear, Donna Allen’s trebly, sing-song-y chorus crests over the roughness like lotion on dry skin taking that jumpy energy and channeling it into a kind of longing. Likewise “We Must be Evil” rushes and stutters, the drums bunching up in frantic fills, the bass rapid fire but steady; the song hops from one foot another, ecstatic and unnerved, as Allen, again weaves sustained note solace through the turmoil.
It's all rather good, and arguably more interesting than undiluted punk or pop might be. The time eaters (that’s what “chronophage” means) continue to munch on both sides of Alice’s mushroom, except instead of bigger/smaller, they careen between croon and jolt.
Miranda Spatula and Nowhere Flower — Around and About You (Post-Present Medium)
“Oak Parks” is an entropic blues, its sweet, heart-tugging hook corroded by murk and echo, the slash and clamor of guitars paced by a slack-gaited drum machine. Fuzzy, sleepy, faintly dissonant vocals slip and slide over the melody. Consider it an acoustic, home-spun version of Bardo Pond’s most shamanic moments, or a Linda Smith cassette left to warp in the afternoon sun. This new collaboration between long-time Dusted favorite Miranda Spatula and her West Coast sometime bandmate Lila Jarzombek is beautifully, dizzyingly unstrung.
Miranda Spatula is much loved around here for her rough but charming work with the Spatulas. Lila Jarzombek sometimes plays guitar in Spatulas, but her primary project is Nowhere Flower, a low-fi guitar and beat machine ditties. The two worked together on this project, collaborating both in person and via digital exchange, making songs that sometimes turn into drones and drones that equally tend to coalesce into songs.
Some of the cuts are relatively well-behaved lo-fi pop songs, as, for instance, the rambling title track, which strums and bashes around a thready murmur with a wild squall of middle eastern woodwinds going off in the background. Pitched somewhere between the Jeannine’s gem-like garage pop and the Shaggs’ self-taught anarchy, the cut is raw and dream-like, but very much a song. There’s a bit of early VU in these trance-y sounds, a use of dissonance and overhanging tones to suggest a pathway to transcendence. “Riffs” especially howls with a Velvet-y way, letting the guitar wind sinuously through shadowy realms of hiss and moan.
Two late album cuts, titled “Art, Dance, Movement” parts I and II, sink further into third-eye reveries. The first one floats a buzzy long note under muttered spoken word, the poetry almost swamped under the drone. The second slows down mystic, psychedelic guitar to a crawl, a vocal melody careening and eddying within its molasses-slow arrangement. It falls apart in the most beautiful way, dissolving into a pool of sensation that shimmers like the rainbows in a puddle of motor oil.
The Intima — peril and panic (Post-Present Medium)
The Intima slashes and swipes. Its rhythms pound in a boxy but unhinged manner. Its guitar riffs jut briefly, belligerently into the mix. Its lyrics come in a ragged sprechsung spray, leavened only very slightly by tonal variation. The magic ingredient, though, is a wild skirl of violin—courtesy of Nora Danielson, who later played with the Mountain Goats, Mira and Tara Jane O’Neil. It wheels and careens and shrieks, never out of control but not exactly well-behaved either.
The band had its prime run in the early aughts, formed around two brothers, Andrew and Alex Neerman, the bass player Themba Lewis, and the classically trained violinist we mentioned earlier. Its sound was angular, aggressive, a chug ramped up to daring speed. Here, they sound a good bit like the Ex, especially the version with Tom Cora. That’s because the Intima does the same thing as the Ex with its stringed instruments, turning them from implements of lushness and ease into assault weapons. The violin is every bit as punk as the guitar here. Contemporary accounts suggest that they were very, very loud.
The Intima made two EPs and a couple of singles during the aughts and recorded this sole full-length in 2003. They’ve never been happy with the way the original version sounded, though, and during the pandemic, the band asked Jason Powers to remix the music using the original tracks. A 2003 radio play of “The New Savage,” (all I could find, track starts at 1:05) confirms that the sound has been sharpened considerably. The remix reinforces the spine of drums and bass, particularly, giving the music a rougher, rawer, more live sound.
Best of the bunch, though, goes to “Blue Coffins” a strident, in-your-face post-punk rampage that’s a lot like Gang of Four, except for the violin pulsing and moaning under the verses and cutting out for the wild lands in the intervals between them. The women in the band sing, too, lacing the song’s straight-up-and-down militarism with keening ululations. Chaos and precision jostle for predominance here, as they do in all the best punk songs. There’s enough discipline to prevent a muddle, enough untethered catharsis to sidestep boredom.
The Intima called it quits soon after the first version of peril and panic hit the shelves. Danielson and Lewis left the band and soon started showing up in collaboration with K Records mainstays like TJO and Mirah. Andrew Neerman runs the Beacon Sound Record. But a sharper, better version of a mostly forgotten band’s only full-length has a way of conjuring renewal. In October 2024, the Intima reassembled for its first shows in 20 years, though with a different violin player. You have to imagine that they’ll still be fierce, loud, outside the usual and ahead of the curve, even now after two decades of hiatus.
Blue Dolphin — Robert’s Lafitte (Post-Present Medium/Cleta Patra)
Robert's Lafitte by Blue Dolphin
If Texas is its own country—and a kind of scary one lately—then Texas punk is its own world. Blue Dolphin, out of Galveston in the previous decade, cranks the cowpunk to blur speed, letting whammy notes fly like cartoon arrows that vibrate on impact. Its manic instrumental energy collides with the uninflected cool of poet/seer/jokester Sarah Sissy, who mouths surreal absurdities with a certain cracked glee. (For instance, from “Emerald Cherry”: “She had a six lot of green midget shrimp/Marianne left her adhesive nametag adhered to the sidewalk today/Large webs of mass between the gaps in her mind/Pickled water fades as the sea begins to rise.”
Robert’s Lafitte, apparently named for a Texas gay bar, collects the entirety of all three of Blue Dolphin’s mid-teens cassette recordings and adds four new songs. It’s the whole catalog of a band that barely left an internet trace. Guitarist Barry Elkanick has the longest CV, including stints in Institute and Chalk. Cody Phifer, the drummer, held a similar role in Chronophage for a few albums. The two women are harder to track down, but the source of much of the band’s crazed, B-52s-on-crack appeal. Candice Metalier punches out antic, giddily hoppable bass lines, while Sissy kicks in the manic, magic words.
“Licking and Kissing,” the title cut from Blue Dolphin’s first cassette, is a twangy, rockabilly, pogostick, jumping up and down frantically for two eventful minutes. Elkanick plays like a bluegrass picker on the lam, while Metalier thumps a “Shave and a haircut, two bits” riff on bass. Sissy is intoning something about “Two Pairs of Hands, while the drums push frantically, maniacally, from the rear.
“Natural Child,” one of Two New Songs from the second cassette, runs both slower and thicker, with dense, dissonant guitar sound and rolling explosions of drums. It’s less cow punk and more garage punk and might sound a bit like Elkanick’s Institute, except for the high, rhythmic chant of Sissy.
That seems to be the narrative arc, since the four new songs are notably slower and more exploratory than the cassette material. “Virginal Mystery” by far the longest cut at 3:51, adds the twinkle of harp to its buzzing distortion. “Ravaged by the Stars” is more like sound collage than punk rock. But “Buying Time” blisters and thunders, an alienated sing-song of “We take the wheel” adding a jaunty insanity.
It’s not really clear how much traction Blue Dolphin every got, or how they fit into the universe of Texas punk rock bands or even whether the project continues beyond this career summary. It’s an antic, invigorating ride, however, and worth tapping if only for the adrenaline hit.
