#regulator watts

[lethatechnique]

[questcequecestqueca]

[hardcorefornerds]

Just got my copy of the Regulator Watts The Aesthetics of No-Drag LP reissue in the post... probably the album I’m most excited to see in full 12″x12″ glory instead of the (at best) 400x400px online image.

Graphic design by Jason Farrell, of Dischord’s Bluetip, applying a visual style he describes in an interview as targeting a “synthesis of reid miles blue-note sophistication/simplicity with a jetsons-like mid-sixties futurism”

[invertebrat]

HOOVER UNION

[musicsgreatesthits]

October by Abilene (Slowdime, 2000)

There was a disproportionate amount of time spent adding artists to my Launchcast Yahoo! Radio Station profile. I found a lot of bands through that radio station. I'm pretty sure I would add bands that I never ended up listening to or maybe not for a long while. I assume it was mostly to feel like my tastes actually had weight. Eventually, the radio station played a band called Hoover. This was one of those bands that I would not appreciate until a couple years later. I was not used to the way they sang and yelled and felt like it didn't really fit. However, I never discarded them because of it. Hoover had really dug their own weird spacey, dub influenced hole in punk rock. Since I was younger, I tended to lean towards the more cathartic parts but somehow I knew there were layers to the music that I couldn't appreciate until I was older. Either way, I spent every day finding new bands and grabbing as much of their music as I could. Eventually, the craze settled and I began to let it all sink into my skin. I was really interested in what Hardcore For Nerds, a great blogspot dedicated to music, called the Hoover family tree. They began to document every band those members shared. June of 44, Regulator Watts, Crownhate Ruin and then finally there was Abilene.

The way they described the band left me sort of impressionable. There it was again. I had found another weird band that I had hardly seen mentioned anywhere else and it was being talked about as some sort of monolith. Ever since I started crawling the internet for new music, I had run into that feeling. It was kind of addicting.

The words "slow burner" will always stick with me when I think of this band. This song crawls at an almost unbearable pace. It forces you to sit there and think. I get lost in myself when I listen to this song. This is the kind of song that takes multiple listens for you to realize all the tricks they incorporated. All the offbeat snare hits and barely audible vocals and the deafening space between each guitar note and how fluid the bass sounds as it crawls across each measure. The vocals are sparse and almost spoken. My favorite part is it's slow ascent to the climax. Probably because I can feel each instrument start to intensify very slowly.  I like how the quiet stroll gets interrupted twice. You anticipate a climax but it's taken from you at first. As someone else put it, "the guitars change it's swirling pattern and turn into an approaching pack of jet planes". I only wished the wavering guitar line at the end lasted longer. Along with the other songs on this album, this pushed me towards a new kind of patience that opened me up to more challenging pieces of music. And that's what can make a song so meaningful to me, when it spreads my patience thin and opens me up to newer ways of listening.

[hardcorefornerds]

Regulator Watts lyrics

Transcript of the Aesthetics of No-Drag lyric sheet as I was sent it:

the ballad of st. tinnitus- mother to the needle father to the bottle hope to the sound we follow only forever so the places sting the ring rings make the people sing candy bullet 0- hey boy a tall ride to the line 13 pegs to the state sign 95 at a standstill 7 minutes to go screaming wide and low put it down let it ride go get at the get go pemberton red- tiger unbeatable so tasted so sold again tiger unleavable 3 legged brass backyard stake me there i want it firecrackerjack tippy- an opposition to oneself martian through georgia dreck say reader needy the asunder no longer fonder anonymity has a number wrecked all about empire creates a stupor failed in compromise iced over dover mercurochrome- old grandads got my number sinking highballs hit me with it my mind blind at the same time singing to my own demise leftout if you roll it leftout to dry roll on 20th century ltd.- he rolls right in like a real american taking his fill given the chance he probably will he fits right in like heartland sin seedtick east- how deep's the mud on east seedtick? my blue star hangs low lum sad slow south lightning lucky blue star bless my head my home lightning lucky witchduck- high water in low tide bound and soaked burn in fire swim in fire hell waits on the wicked bent on fire huddled and red eyed you wicked kill hell waits this cycle's a sickle drown or burn hell waits death decides in river's no end this is your trial eleven- packed bags again let her stroll in stride out new towns full of scars mistakes badges she left road eyes know false idols (b.sullivan)- only seeing never holding they represented that success they proved there was access based on fear and reared like a nightmare too short was the ascent true wisdom disowned lost to the end they reared like a ghost reared it strong they bended not as real as it appeared to the end

[hardcorefornerds]

Visit Original Link

Regulator Watts - 'The Ballad of St. Tinnitus' from The Aesthetics of No-Drag (1998)

It can be difficult sometimes to figure out where really good guitar playing fits into 'punk' - especially in hardcore, but also and even post-hardcore - as a music of immediacy and no bullshit. Partly that's just a hangover from the prison of three-chord propaganda and a cultural distrust of indulgent noodling, but there's still a barrier to expressing admiration for something primarily in terms of virtuosity. Perhaps because on a technical level it can be outdone by other genres (particularly metal) yet what makes it great, to me as a punk listener, is actually something else additional and less quantifiable: I can't think of a better word than 'soul' (soul that is subjective, mutable and often historically/temporally contingent, of course). 

For many people, I know it is Fred Erskine's bass playing which makes Hoover, and I won't disagree - I just wish I had a better sense for rhythm to more fully appreciate it, rather than just a dim concept of complexity. In the later records of the genealogy, however, it is definitely Alex Dunham's guitar which has always stood out for me. Entwined within the twin-guitar shifting attack of Lurid Traversal, it takes the centre role in his later work. Three songs in particular never cease to captivate: the pure melodic earworm of '(312)' from Radio Flyer's In Their Strange White Armour, the deep and moody layering of Abilene's 'October' from their self-titled first album, and this one - arguably the most visceral, certainly the loudest, of them.     

There's a line in Lou Reed's Talkhouse review of Kanye West's Yeezus where he's talking about never thinking about music as a challenge to the audience - "you do this because you like it, you think  what you're making is beautiful" - and he describes his own notorious Metal Machine Music album as "if you like guitars, this is pure guitar, from beginning to end, in all its variations." I don't know if he's being entirely serious and honest - I haven't gone over the background to the album to divine evidence of the deliberate mischief one might suspect, but I don't really care either way - although I do quite like the record, as an experience. Actually, I misunderstood the statement at first not to be saying purely guitar (as I assume he means) but 'pure' guitar, which is a somewhat odd description of an album based on feedback and little or no deliberate melody. Distortion is technically impure as well, yet this is the song I think of when "pure guitar" as an overwhelming, metaphysical notion is proposed: 'St. Tinnitus' is aptly named for sanctified noise.

Of course, there's more going on than just Dunham's guitar alone. As is often the case, for a three-piece Regulator Watts bring a lot of noise and intensity. Bassist Cret Wilson (who doesn't seem to appear in any other band, Hoover-related or otherwise, although he is credited for the original Sea Tiger logo on the back sleeve of their album) underpins the wild squalls and swells of guitar with a steady rhythm that is mostly obscured, except when the screen of noise thins out to reveal it more distinctly. Around them the drums of Areif Sless-Kitain (who later went on to play in Bluetip, and is currently with this rather pleasing 'post-rock and psychedelic pop' project) dance with unpredictable yet precise shapes. The Aesthetics of No-Drag is an intensely spacious album, despite the apparent oppressiveness of Dunham's guitar (in songs such as this and bookending scorchers 'Mercurochrome' and 'Witchduck'), as it weaves its way in and around the groove of the rhythm section (the following track to this, 'Pemberton Red', is almost danceable!). Influences of jazz and dub, as in the rest of the Hoover family tree, abound on the record.

One of the benefits of getting back into my Hoover genealogy phase is remembering things I'd forgotten I'd had, like a transcript of this album's lyric sheet that another fan had sent to me in an email (I did unfortunately once have the chance of picking up the LP secondhand but missed it; however, I try not to be possessive about stuff like that, or at least not things I don't have). Anyway, it's supposed to be only a partial lyric sheet - Dunham once stating in an interview that he didn't like putting the pronoun 'I' down on paper - but it's useful in deciphering some of his tortured howls. Lately I thought I heard the phrase "lost my body to the music", which would be an appropriate and poetic reflection of the title, though not quite of the apparent theme of the lyrics. Instead I think it's just the repeated line "I lost my mother to the needle", as in the schema below:

mother to the needle

father to the bottle

hope to the sound we follow

only forever

so the places sting

the ring rings

make the people sing

"[I lost my] hope to the sound we follow": is that the personal statement expressing the nub of the emo catharsis, the 90s D.C. (and Chicago) sound; the soul of post-hardcore?