Sick Thoughts-Deformation demo CS (2013)

I make an effort to post all sorts of music on Drug Punk, but Baltimore's Sick Thoughts is what I started it all for. Crude, lo-fi, loner rock that will never be popular among the masses. As usual with this sort of music, there's a crucial distinction between your records sounding like shit 'cause you're consciously aping a style, on one hand, and sounding like shit 'cause you're too poor and/or fucked up and/or ignorant to do otherwise, on the other. Sick Thoughts is definitively in the latter category, and kudos to this dood.

If you made it through that paragraph, you already have a pretty good sense of what Sick Thoughts sounds like. He's even cruder, however, than most of the lofi trash I post here: at several points on the tape, in fact, the guitar and drum(machine) are out of sync. My favorite track is "Something I don't Have": it opens with directionless tone, then the ram-bam-fuckyouma'am (almost) 4'4 time sleaze kicks in. Dood talk-sings like a drugged newscaster about "you and your bullshit," and I caught the drums sliding out of time at least twice. The song is so crude and slipshod it sounds like two tracks were mixed on top of each other without anyone noticing. "Ugly" continues the descent into wasted oblivion: choppy, clipped drumming and trashed guitar patterns partially mask the drunken burble-singing. "Ugly" is so crude, it's almost avant-garde at times. Fucking majestic.

 The blown-out 4-track (lack of) recording value and slurred vocals make for a grey, muddy porridge overall. This demo is the perfect soundtrack for drunken apathy, being depressed while zonked on speed, drinking too much cheap red wine too fast, yelling at your significant other when s/he is trying to help you out of your self-induced misery, and in general being a stupid dumbshit. I've done all of those activities, so I know what sounds good while executing said idiocies. This.

Make some bad decisions and get fucked to SICK THOUGHTS! Physical copies will be available at the end of July on Southpaw Records. Dood is apparently opening for Oblivians in August, so any drummers in the Bodymore area should help him out by playing. Stay tuned for more from this guy, which I'm hoping will be forthcoming very soon.

Makeout Creek-No Peace Forever EP (2012)

The Aussies have been carrying the torch for quality weirdo music in a big way lately: Royal Headache, Kitchen's Floor, Cured Pink, Meat Thump, Wonderfuls, Rat King, and now Makeout Creek. Dunno what it is about the Antipodes but whatever these fuckers have been drinking, someone oughta ship a case of it to the States, pronto!

Lester Bangs said in a Creem article back in ~1973 that, given the ossified nature of the music industry and fans' expectations of their heroes, the only places that were gonna produce any music worth a damn would be on the margins. I dunno shit about Australian culture but it's hard to get more isolated than the Land Down Under, geographically speaking anyway, and as far as I can tell it's done nuthin' but good for the music.

Anyways, Makeout Creek is firmly in the ultra-lofi tradition sketched out by brilliantly minimalist records like X (Australian, duh)'s "Live at the Civic, 1979" LP and Kitchen's Floor's Too Dead to Notice EP. If these chuckleheads didn't record live straight into a boombox, they did a good job of making a real studio sound like that. Sometimes that just sounds like coy affect, but on this EP it makes it that much more fun. The singer sounds like he's yelping to himself down in a fucking echo chamber somewhere under your mother's basement, the guitar thrashes along in its own idiosyncratically enjoyable groove, and I'm pretty sure the drummer only owns a hi-hat, snare drum and kick drum. Mo Tucker filtered through Beat Happening, dontchaknow.

I can't make out any of the lyrics except for scattered snippets, but I'm sure I'd agree with the charmingly snide commentary issued from abovesaid echo chamber. The songs sorta run together, granted. That can result in one of two conclusions: that the record is a muddlesome piecea shit, or that the band is going for a unified sound, and achieves it. It has a dirty, gutteral vibe that manages to avoid sounding contrived. That's quite the feat in this age of instant-access internet horseshit. Makeout Creek will be the soundtrack next time I decide to piss off my room mates with, and I quote, "that horrible American noise you love!" (I'm living in Italy so Anglo culture has a bloblike sameness to them, I think).

Listen to it! Then buy it!