Thirty years ago, ‘extreme music’ – for want of a term wielding a less gigantic umbrella – was in a serious state of flux. For lovers of the ear-bleeding, the ugly, the wyrd and deranged, there might be a case for 1986 being the most formative year since the beginning of rock. Now a lot of the musics that help to make this case (death metal, black metal, grindcore – all either in their infancy or still a formless cluster of cells) are outside the purview of this article, but aren’t wholly irrelevant, and can be left whirring in the background.
What this leaves us with is a wealth of releases which, if they shared anything, were a universal stylistic awkwardness – at a time when it was easy to do the exact opposite. For all the brash creativity that was taking place in 1986, it was also a prime period for guitar bands who, inspired to form by a certain scene or subculture, then elected to play music which slavishly conformed to its tropes. If you have a working knowledge of hair metal, thrash metal, jangly indie or hardcore punk, you’ll hear me on this one, I daresay – every genre has its genre exercises, its cookiecutter outfits.
Pretty much none of the bands I’m going to talk about could be called generic by any reasonable metric. Many of them, however, went on to inspire bands who certainly could. That’s the passing of time and the absorption of influence for you, of course. Despite the feeling – and it is all in the eye of the beholder, strictly speaking – that in 2016, there are generic noise rock bands aplenty, as subgenres go ‘noise rock’ is tough to define. (To that end, this piece is going to be pretty inclusive about what fits the term, as is tQ’s writing on the topic in general, I believe.) It’s rarely used as a badge to identify oneself, like punk is; it doesn’t cleave to a simple ideology or political position. There isn’t an agreed-on drug of choice, or a dress sense that could be snarkily condensed into one of those yourscenesucks drawings that were briefly popular about a decade ago. If anything, it kinda offers a refuge for people whose outlooks don’t fit conveniently into the restrictions of related, more easily defined scenes.
The state of hardcore in the States at this juncture certainly goes some way to explaining the popularity of bands like Big Black, Sonic Youth and Butthole Surfers – acts who palled around with the hardcore scene, but were never defined by it. One of the many disputed assertions in Steven Blush’s 2001 book American Hardcore is that it was all over by 1986; it wasn’t, but to the extent that a story needs an end, there have been worse uses of artistic license than this. Black Flag, the Dead Kennedys and the Minutemen all disbanded during this year, and most of the significant figures had cast themselves out through ambition – if not of stardom and cash, then of making art that challenged expectations and pushed personal boundaries. If not for hardcore, though, noise rock would be a wildly different animal.
Listen to our Noise Rock In 1986 Or Thereabouts Spotify playlist here
Here, then, is an overview of 1986’s definitive noise rock releases. Some of them sold tens of thousands of copies and others had pretty much no distribution beyond an immediate peer group.
THE BREAKOUT HITS
Big Black – Atomizer, The Hammer Party, Sound Of Impact
To my knowledge, no-one has managed to replicate the guitar sound that Steve Albini and Santiago Durango hit upon with Atomizer, the first Big Black album. It sounds like sheet metal being torn apart and the euphoria of intoxication colliding with the worst hangover of your life. It’s also a paradoxical thing – minimalist rock music that completely fills the room and overwhelms you. Completed by bassist Dave Riley, Big Black used a drum machine in lieu of a human percussionist – almost unheard of in underground rock at the time – which helped to give them cachet among industrial types. Yet they never really fit in with either the originators of the genre or more danceable high camp merchants like Ministry and Nitzer Ebb (both of whom Albini has gone out of his way to clown more than once).
Atomizer also highlights Albini as a peerless documenter-in-song of weird socialisation and human behaviour. The first two Big Black EPs, released in 1982 and 1983 and compiled on The Hammer Party, have ample doses of this: ‘Cables’, about hayseeds of the singer’s acquaintance who visited slaughterhouses and watched cattle being butchered for entertaiment, or ‘Seth’, about a dog trained to attack black people. Aided by the brief explanations in the liner notes, the full-length feels a bit like journeying into the mid-80s equivalent of the deep web.
Accordingly, that lawlessness can double back on itself, and does so on ‘Jordan, Minnesota’, the opening track. Musically a catalogue highlight with an eviscerating main riff, it’s based on a then-contemporary child abuse scandal in the small, eponymous town; only one person was ultimately convicted and whatever really happened, Albini’s telling involves a wild amount of conjecture. Moreover, Big Black’s live performances of ’Jordan, Minnesota’ infamously amped up the disturbing factor, in a fashion that would almost certainly not fly nowadays. Sound Of Impact, a quasi-bootleg LP which has sold for £30 or more for as long as I can remember, is a pretty choice example of this.
Butthole Surfers – Rembrandt Pussyhorse / Blind Eye Sees All
Mostly recorded in 1984 but held up due to various wrinkles, the second Butthole Surfers album is probably as far away from demonstrable rock music as they ever got. Prior to this, the Texan band – while confrontationally, aggressively bizarre – had clear roots in punk and psychedelia. The nine tracks here are driven, often as not, by spliced and looped tapes, processed vocals and sampled flimflam; their cover, if it warrants that description, of The Guess Who’s unpleasant ‘American Woman’ is more like Steinski with the jagged edges of Cabaret Voltaire.
In hindsight, and compared to some of their more lurid moments, ‘Creep In The Cellar’ feels almost mournful, while ‘Whirling Hall Of Knives’ is a momentous, no-brakes John Cale dirge with rare gothic grandeur. Fair warning for Locust Abortion Technician, which arrived in 1987 and is the consensus pick for the Buttholes’ best. Still melts my mind that a band who approached songwriting like this would headline Brixton Academy a couple of years after Rembrandt Pussyhorse’s release. Also of note from this year (and technically more contemporary, in that it was taped in early ‘85) is Blind Eye Sees All. This video alternates between raucous live footage and protopseudo Behind The Music interview gibberish, with a ropey camcorder trained on all five Buttholes, sitting in a huge bed. Gibby Haynes confirms his status as the alpha of the band by doing nearly all the talking, and the stream of lateral-thinking baked garbage he comes up with off the dome proves compelling for much the same reasons the Butthole Surfers’ music is.
Sonic Youth – Evol
Sobering, kinda, to think that of the four groups I’ve picked out initially – the four biggest in noise rock at the time, it’s fair to say – Sonic Youth were the most aurally good-natured, the ones who seemed intent on causing an admittedly eardrum-skewering mode of bliss rather than walloping you on the bonce or volleying insults your way. Evol, the NYCers’ fourth studio album, is replete with tender moments: ‘Tom Violence’ and ‘Shadow Of A Doubt’, tracks one and two, contain nowt that’d scare the bushy-tailed alt-rock fanbase Sonic Youth would pick up in later years. Matters are cranked a notch for ‘Star Power’, which features some textbook Thurston Moore guitar skree, and ‘In The Kingdom #19’, a barely intelligible short story set to free improv klang. Evol’s most ferocious, and most enduring, number is ‘Expressway To Yr Skull’, whose vinyl track time is listed with an infinity symbol on account of its final locked groove; before this, as vicious a wall of guitar as they ever put their name to and a creepy crawl bassline from Kim Gordon (who is a bit of a peripheral figure on this LP, only singing lead on the slight ‘Secret Girl’).
Sonic Youth, like all these bands, were wilfully ‘difficult’ in their own way, but intelligent, driven and accomplished in another. Full to bursting with pop culture ephemera (1986 also saw the unveiling of their Madonna-obsessed alter ego, Ciccone Youth), they gave good quote to the music press and didn’t scrub up too badly either. Other bands of the era, given the same opportunity for success, could have thrown far more mud in the eye of the establishment – in which case they would have surely been subjected to the kibosh quicksharp, and never got to appear on The Simpsons.
Swans – Greed / Holy Money / Public Castration Is A Good Idea
Of the initial four bands in this article, Swans were the only one with no links to the hardcore scene – although their agonising glacial grind has gone on to have considerable bearing on HC bands of the the last decade. Like Sonic Youth, however, they got their break in New York’s no wave movement, before eclipsing it by locking into a singularly extreme vision. Released in quick succession with themed artwork, thus usually considered siblings, Greed and Holy Money represent a mild easing off from Swans’ two preceding LPs – the barrage of machismo leavened by Jarboe featuring for the first time, but still do a roaring trade in both noise and rock.
‘Fool’, which opens Greed, is like a genuinely hateful version of the Bad Seeds (for whom a case could probably be made that they should be in this overview, but if we don’t stop somewhere we’ll be here until they drop the bomb), whereas ‘Heaven’ is an unheralded ancestor of early 90s funeral doom. It’s hard not to see a certain strain of received wisdom about these two records – that they marked the start of Swans’ sink into softened accessibility – as either questionable, ill-disguised griping about Jarboe, or merely silly noisier-than-thou posturing. They add up to 70-plus minutes of intense bleakness with power plant rhythms, tougher than concrete wrapped in leather. (That said, if you really don’t feel these albums are quite brutal enough, 1986 also gave us Public Castration Is A Good Idea: another semi-official live album, recorded on Swans’ UK tour that year, and deemed by a few to be the heaviest live album by anyone, ever.)
WHAT I CALL ‘PROPER’ NOISE ROCK
Defined by: a lo-fi or inexpert recording; a slow, sludgy tempo; the distinct feeling that some or all of the band are fans of heavy metal and/or 70s hard rock; and a lowbrow outlook, albeit perhaps with an ironically raised eyebrow.
Thirst For Knowledge, the second single by St Louis’ Drunks With Guns, is genuinely foul-sounding degenerate murk. You can hardly make out a word Mike Doskocil is yelling and when you can, it’s "I GOT MY DICK IN ONE HAND… AND A ROPE IN THE OTHER!". It’s hard to locate any context for DWG: they never toured, hardly ever played live and lived in a city with almost no punk scene.
Flipper and No Trend inspired them, Doskocil has said, but those guys were evident smartasses; you really can’t tell, listening to Thirst…, if these yahoos were genuinely and medically peabrained. Damn record rules, is the thing.
Rubber Room, the debut seven-inch by Halo Of Flies also launched the Amphetamine Reptile label – run by HOF vocalist Tom Hazelmeyer – so it, and its followup Snapping Black Roscoe Bottles, need to be acknowledged here as an ‘86-vintage noise rock building block. The band themselves hadn’t really found their sound yet, mind, with scrappy hat-tips to Hendrix and Blue Cheer the order of the day. ‘Can’t Touch Her’ nevertheless previews the blue-collar blast of which the band would swiftly become capable.
Thanks to a large, expensive boxset which reissue zealots The Numero Group are releasing, the longstanding issue with White Zombie – that it’s very difficult to find any of their records from before they became a comedy industrial metal band – is soon to be resolved. This will include ‘Pig Heaven’, the New York band’s self-released second single. Its Cramps-derived rockabilly slop (this is more of a compliment than it sounds) is slightly less whacked-out than much of their output up to 1989, but is given a topping of pencil-necked HC geekery via the vocals of Rob Straker, or Rob Zombie as he later rebranded himself.
Killdozer, who followed up their addictively clammy 1985 album Snakeboy with a six-song EP, Burl, could well be the band who dragged Touch & Go Records away from their hardcore origins for good, and into the realms of noisy peculiarities. Burl’s highlight is ‘Cranberries’ where we find Killdozer’s Michael Gerald relating Buttholes-level lysergic fantasies over death blues played with metal claws.
Saving the best for last, Kilslug’s Answer The Call, an album everyone with a specific enough interest to be reading this should hear. You’ll have to pay collector prices or break the law, but do what you gotta do. Equal parts basement-metal bombast and Flipper self-abasement, Rico Petroleum has a brilliantly blunt guitar tone for the ages while Larry Lifeless’ vocals slobber with the demonic fervour of a suburban preteen blasted on high fructose corn syrup. ‘Make It Rain’, about the joys of drinking blood, should be a lock for your next seductive mixtape.
OTHER FAIRLY RELEVANT AMERICAN HAPPENINGS
Austin, TX’s Scratch Acid were the band who first foisted David Yow on the world, prior to the formation of The Jesus Lizard. Just Keep Eating, their second album, also features TJL bassist David Sims, and both are in preemptively slash & burn form here. There’s a sozzled, dark cabaret swing to portions of the record, possibly as close as 80s noise rock got to Tom Waits. The Melvins have since dug up demos from as far back as 1983, but didn’t issue any wax until three years later – a self-titled six-song EP recorded on a two-track machine (improbably, in that there’s an audible degree of separation between the instruments) and released by the C/Z label. Surreal mathematical sludge that sounds like a trial run for Gluey Porch Treatments, their ‘87 debut album – one of the songs here features on it – but already sounding pretty much unique, among their Pacific Northwest peers or anywhere else.
One loose comparison was San Francisco’s Clown Alley whose ‘86 LP Circus Of Chaos sounds at times like early Melvins meets crossover thrash and who featured two future Melvins members, Mark Deutrom and Lori Black.
The latter of those was a rare female presence in this scene, noise rock being an overwhelmingly male domain even by the general standards of 80s underground music. As such, there’s all the more reason to celebrate Thalia Zedek, who released a twelve-inch EP, Sleep Asylum with her band Uzi in early ‘86. From the Boston, MA scene of the time, Uzi’s only record combines snappy, fluid rhythms with swirly postpunk and in-the-red, effects-heavy guitar – Mission Of Burma meets the Banshees isn’t a mile off.
Zedek’s next band, Live Skull, already had a few records and a fair NY rep in Swans and Sonic Youth’s slipstream before she joined on vocals, taking over from Marnie Greenholz. Their 1986 effort Cloud One is a marriage of no wave brashness and gothic rock structures with bafflingly terrible sleeve design. Very much of its time, as is The Ice Machine by Breaking Circus – a Minneapolis group who featured Todd Trainer, now of Shellac. If I were asked to highlight a personal favourite 80s LP that absolutely no-one else cares about (which I suppose I implicitly have been), this is as good a shout as any: 12 songs of measured pummel, a kind of mechanically precise take on deathrock with all manner of hooks.
Pussy Galore was an incubator for future Underground Rock Icons, and indeed pretty popular in their own right – at least, they’d come to be, after the release of Groovy Hate Fuck, their second EP. Sporting vaguely offensive titles, the odd bout of metal-bashing and a legitimately crappy production, there’s a touch of the collegiate, the milquetoast even, in Jon Spencer and band’s attempts to rattle sensibilities. Still, I’m not going to bag too hard on a band that trained Neil Hagerty before he formed Royal Trux. Also, the idea of sad rock establishment bastards getting salty about disrespectful kids is always worth a weak smile, so kudos for their practice-room cover of the entirety of the Stones’ Exile On Main Street, although given it was a cassette issued in fairly limited quantities, not sure how many of said bastards would have heard it.
THE REST OF THE WORLD
Noise rock’s 1980s legions were without question dominated by the United States, even if not all of its ancestry was (Sabbath, Joy Division, Les Rallizes Denudes, Faust). Snail mail and word of mouth eventually linked the proverbial hands across the nations, however. Equally, a lot of bands from the UK, Europe and Australia evolved this way through happenstance.
Head Of David’s self-titled debut LP sounded like Mötorhead taking a crash course in postpunk, or Loop (whose first record was also an ‘86 baby) tagteaming with Big Black. They cover Suicide’s ‘Rocket USA’ on it, and otherwise appear mustard keen to ape Alan Vega’s nihilism-in-shades lyrical tack. It’s a fairly slamming album, one that foresaw Midlands cohorts Godflesh two years later – Justin Broadrick was briefly Head Of David’s drummer between leaving Napalm Death and forming Godflesh.
John Robb’s now-reformed Membranes were pretty brisk workers, releasing two albums, a compilation and two singles this year. Songs Of Love And Fury even includes a number titled ‘1986’, which is nice. I’ve never properly connected with their records, in truth: they seem caught inconclusively between the hyperactive jangly fare that Robb hailed in his 2009 book Death To Trad Rock and the meaner, nastier American imports the band were guzzling at the time. I’ve no problem assuming that they were a welcome upping of the ante amidst mid-80s Brit-indie, however. Save maybe for the Liverpudlian rockabilly blare of early Walkingseeds and Inca Babies’ cranked-up goth/Fall hybrid, there isn’t much other age-appropriate UK stuff we can shoehorn into here.
Similarly, mainland Europe and Scandinavia was responsible for a slew of incredibly noisy and fucked up records in the mid-80s, but not much you’d call noise rock in good faith. Sweden’s Brainbombs existed in some form from 1986 onwards, but didn’t release anything for a few years. One major exception was Gore, who came from the Netherlands and played immense instrumental metal. Hart Gore sounds years ahead of its time and, along with its followup Mean Mans Dream, was reissued by Southern Lord in 2008.
Any decent history of noise rock has to extend a major hat tip to Australia, which by this point had already done its bit and more via releases by X, The Scientists, SPK, Slugfuckers and Beasts Of Bourbon. There was also Sydney’s Feedtime, who released their first LP in 1985 and followed it the next years with Shovel. A sly punk-pop sensibility to their songwriting is booted into touch by an appropriately earthmoving guitar sound; sax and slide guitar pile in for a scrap rather than trying to break the melee up.Mudhoney have cited Feedtime as an influence, and it’s pretty easy to trace a line from ‘Fractured’ to Superfuzz Bigmuff.
Grong Grong only released one album – licensed to Alternative Tentacles outside Australia after Jello Biafra was smitten by a live performance – before damaging themselves beyond repair with heroin. In that sense, they’re perhaps the band The Birthday Party could have been, except not in a positive way. Grong Grong is majestic though, fetid Junkyard vibes for those of you sexually attracted to swamps. Before birthing the tearjerker instrumental beauty of The Dirty Three, Mick Turner and Jim White made rackety punk in Venom P. Stinger (both) and Fungus Brains (Turner only). Respectively responsible for Meet My Friend Venom and Fungus Brains in ‘86, both bands were impolite, sardonic and committed to barreling electric blues through too much amplification. Very Australian, in short.
If most noise rock bands from the old colony were rockers before they were noisers, then in Japan the reverse was true. As in Europe, Japanese hardcore bands were unleashing demented wads of feedback-streaked grot round this time, but culturally speaking it was really a different movement. The debut EP by Yamatsuka Eye’s Boredoms might have been ‘rock’ at some point in its gestation – hey, their later records (mostly) are – but was a gurgling goonscape of cutup sonics and primitive improv by the time it reached disc. The label responsible for its release, Transrecords, also issued the first record by Ruins, aka brutal prog whiz Tatsuya Yoshida and a regularly changing band. Six songs in ten minutes, what ought to be billowing epics are wedged into an alarmingly tiny timeframe, yet retain all their violent grandeur of Ruins’ Rock In Opposition forbears. No-one else sounded like this in the mid-80s… did they?
If any bands back then sounded like High Rise did on II, then I’ve fucked up by not including them in here. Which maybe means that it’s High Rise who don’t belong here… nah, this is zero parallel sense-strafing rock & roll demolition and it deserves to be blasted from every conceivable platform. They used to go by the name Psychedelic Speed Freaks (keeping it for their record label) and it’s hard to put it better than that: freeform biker metal blaze with half-submerged vocals and no real beginning or end. It’s one of those albums which, while it’s playing, you lose touch with the possibility of anything else ever sounding this good. Comets On Fire, Birds Of Maya and Heavy Blanket can all be assumed 21st-century fans, but couldn’t match High Rise for energy even if they pooled their collective resources.
WHAT OTHER HORRIBLE NOISE WAS HAPPENING THAT YEAR?
Doom metal (Saint Vitus’ Born Too Late). Drone rock (Spacemen 3’s Sound Of Confusion). Metallic hardcore (Cro-Mags’ Age Of Quarrel). Rock & roll hardcore (Poison Idea’s Kings Of Punk). Japanese noisecore (Gauze’s Equalizing Distort). Absurdly fast European thrash (Protes Bengt’s In Bengt We Trust; Lärm’s Straight On View and No-One Can Be That Dumb). Absurdly fast British thrash (Extreme Noise’s Terror’s split LP with Chaos UK; Satanic Malfunctions’ first EP; Napalm Death’s From Enslavement To Obliteration demo). Various spiky, nerdy British bands, often found on the Ron Johnson label and on bills with The Membranes (Bogshed, Big Flame, A Witness, The Shrubs). Power electronics with guitars and none of the ‘transgressive’ Nazi wank that was especially popular at the time (Total, Hard + Low). Ultra-raw black, death and thrash metal played by loon kids in Scandinavia and South America (Mayhem, Vulcano, Sepultura). And Illiteracy Will Prevail by Fecal Matter – a demo tape recorded by Kurt Cobain and the Melvins’ Dale Crover, featuring prototype versions of Nirvana songs. There you have it: noise rock, responsible for some of the most fucked up, least commercial guitar music ever recorded and a band who would go on to become the biggest in the world.
Tomorrow, The Second Summer Of Hate: Noise Rock In 2016
