#d.u.d.s.

Nearing the last of my columns for the print version of Maximum Rocknroll; this one was from #429 (February 2019) & if y’all are quick, you still might be able to pick up some back issues. 

Since I just finished putting together my requisite top ten of 2018 list for MRR, which always feels so unnatural and stresses me out way more than it probably should, I feel like I’ve earned the right to mentally shift gears here for a bit and start my final column of 2018 by talking about what I’ve actually been listening to as this year is about to end, even if it’s mostly things that came out almost four decades ago…

Fringe post-punk resurrectionists Bunkerpop Records are back with their first release in two years, a reissue of the 1985 four-song 7-Inch Round Black Thing EP by Auckland, New Zealand’s art-damaged provocateurs ?FOG. Vocalist Sam Swan landed in the group after her stint in the short-lived LIFE IN THE FRIDGE EXISTS (whose “Have You Checked The Children?” remains one of the most eternal classics of ‘80s Kiwi DIY), and both projects shared a decidedly shambolic approach with inclination toward performative theatricality. ?FOG ultimately took things into a much more confrontational direction—deep, propulsive bass lines colliding with urgent drumming, stuttering razor-wire guitar, and deadpan lyrical recitations marked by pitch black, tongue-in-cheek sarcasm (especially on the fiery feminist take-down of “Fatman With a Big Dork”). The choppy rhythms and dueling male/female rant between Sam and guitarist Lindsay Fog on “Five Heads of State” puts ?FOG on a very EX-like axis of agitated skronk, and there’s even some distant echoes of the Rough Trade school of spiky AU PAIRS/DELTA 5-style UK femme-punk in “Move Your Brain,” if that particular sound had then been refracted through the cracked lens of harsh-edged avant-noisemakers like the GORDONS over on New Zealand’s South Island. Between this single, the two recent NOCTURNAL PROJECTIONS LP collections, and the THIS SPORTING LIFE CD anthology, 2018 has been a pretty solid year for bringing renewed attention to some of the weirder and less musically linear products of the early-to-mid ‘80s NZ underground, but this one is an especially obscure delight to have been rescued from the archives. (Bunkerpop Records, bunkerpop.bandcamp.com)

French coldwave group COLDREAMS released a two-song 7” that’s since become one of the formative (and most highly sought-after) touchstones of the genre’s mid-’80s second wave, so the straight reissue of the original single that just recently turned up on Parisian label Camisole is a nice end-of-year surprise for any Factory Records-meets-4AD freaks out there. While COLDREAMS borrowed from the detached presence and bass-anchored minimalist post-punk rhythms associated with the early Euro coldwavers like CHARLES DE GOAL and KAS PRODUCT, their approach was also much less mechanical and dystopian, instead leaning toward gauzy, ethereal melodies not entirely dissimilar to those of goth-tinged dream-pop combos like COCTEAU TWINS or even Faith/Pornography-era CURE. You can almost picture frost forming on some dimly-lit window as the swirling synths in “Morning Rain” blur right into Géraldine Sala’s sweet-yet-somber vocals, but there’s an almost breezy undercurrent amidst all of the longing and gloom that spares COLDREAMS from any overly melodramatic darkwave pretensions. While that song is great, but the sparse B-side “Eyes” is the real gem here, quietly drifting in the same mysterious and otherworldly minimal wave/synth-pop atmosphere as cult heroes SOLID SPACE, and it’s just as chillingly beautiful as anything on that group’s much-beloved Space Museum. (Camisole, camisolerecords.bigcartel.com)

Not reissued (at least not yet), but something that I’ve been playing a bit lately: RAZOR PENGUINS were from Columbus, Ohio, and their debut two-song 7” from 1981 was an exercise in bleak, incisive post-punk that largely deviated from the sort of warped and deconstructed weirdo sounds generally associated with late ‘70s/early ‘80s Ohio DIY (think ELECTRIC EELS, DEVO, PERE UBU, et al). There’s definitely some psychic connections to be drawn between the post-industrial decay of the Rust Belt and the grey, brutalist urban landscapes of London and Manchester, so in that sense, it’s entirely fitting that RAZOR PENGUINS would have turned to the early output of 4AD and Factory Records for their primary source material—JOY DIVISION, obviously, but also slightly less canonized groups such as CRISPY AMBULANCE or IN CAMERA who had a similar affinity for sinister bass throb, martial beats, and vocals delivered with a desperately anxious edge. The single’s frantic A-side “Paris” is a perfectly dark discotheque smash for the black peacoat and clove cigarette crowd, all needling guitar, loping bass, busy hi-hat, and anguished shouts like they were trying to come up with an American response to SECTION 25’s “Girls Don’t Count”. On the flipside, “Indifference” gives in to the band’s starker goth leanings, existing in some parallel universe where Ian Curtis never died, NEW ORDER never existed, and JOY DIVISION had simply gone into semi-secrecy to come up with a follow-up to Closer after relocating to the middle of Ohio. RAZOR PENGUINS wound up putting out one more 7” in 1986 before totally falling off the radar, but it couldn’t reach the same heights at this one. Midwest post-punk gold!

D.U.D.S. - Immediate - skronky postpunk that’s being described as The Fall meets Liquid Liquid

The latest release from D.U.D.S. is a deepening of the sinister sonic territory they have been exploring, in various forms, since they formed. Bass lines and percussion lope through the undergrowth while jagged guitars pierce the ears. Then there’s the brass section, which works less as a means of driving home a song’s point, than as a warning that whatever comes next is unlikely to be anything you expect. Lyrics are still somewhat hard to make out, emerging from the rhythmic chaos at intervals, as though you were listening to the recording of an Old Testament prophet, preaching from the ruins of the twenty first century. I don’t know what kind of band D.U.D.S. are supposed to be. There are labels you could apply to them, terms like ‘wave’ and ‘punk’ with various prefixes designed to qualify the fact that they don’t really sound like anyone else. Immediate makes that fact all the more obvious and all the more compelling.

Sometimes you catch something unexpected which resets a switch, excites and engages. I caught D.U.D.S. a couple of years ago on a whim, they were visiting Newcastle supporting their debut album. I had never heard them or of them but the moment their perfectly disjointed music hit the room, I was all smiles. Warping brass shapes through the room entwined with guitars played as percussively as they are melodically, the whole sound coalesces into a rolling ball of spiked energy.