They Know Exactly What They're Doing: Helen Love's It's My Club and I'll Play What I Want To

The question is how did I manage to miss out on the Ramones-obsessed Welsh girl group Helen Love for so long? They've been around since 1993 and released four albums prior to the latest one, It's My Club and I'll Play What I Want To, which released last year. With a blend of punk, glam, bubblegum pop and electronic elements, Helen Love feel like the predecessors to bands like Robots in Disguise and Chicks on Speed. They don't take themselves seriously, and they come with some brilliant pop songs. With a pastiche of references from the 60s and 70s, Helen Love fuse the past with the future perfectly. At any rate, I'm going to review their latest album despite the fact it's come about a year late. They're that good.

Like Helen Love's previous work, this album is full of brief, speedy tracks and fantastic little spoken samples that remind me of a Sigue Sigue Sputnik album. The record begins with the title track, which had also been released as a single. It sounds like a Ramones song being played from a bubblegum pink jukebox in a Japanese retro arcade in the year 2050, replete with vocoder and laser sounds. Then the CBGB fantasy Debbie Loves Joey bursts in with guitar-laden pop-punk and cheeky references, including The Stranglers' Peaches. As its title suggests, the following track, Dance On (Solid Gold), takes its influences from disco, but adds an electro-rock feel while You Better Learn Karate is as crazy as anything Polysics could come up with as it kicks the stuffing out of you with hyperspeed. With its repeated snippet of "Great galloping gumdrops," The 1910 Fruitgum Company is an homage to the 60s bubblegum pop group of the same name; it has a bouncy compulsion to it that makes me think of Saturday morning cartoons and the abandon of a Kindergarten class.

After the whirlwind of Transistor Radio, the speed slackens for Jet, which features a snippet of the fantastic dialogue from the 60s Brit comedy The Likely Lads: "In the chocolate box of life the top layer's already gone and someone's pinched the orange cream from the bottom." "Bloody hell." With a springy use of synths, First Boyfriend recalls the ludicrous novelty in the mundanity of a first adolescent romance. A faster, pumping disco beat peppers Rodney's English Disco, yet another brilliant reference, this time to Rodney Bingenheimer's English Disco, a Los Angeles glam club in the 70s. At under two minutes, Honolulu Superstar is the fastest track on the album while Garage Band uses some jazzy piano interludes and surf rock to tell the story of forming your own band after listening to John Peel. The fun continues with Queen of the Disco Beat, which has blasts of brass and more than a passing resemblence to Rockaway Beach. An anthem to the homebound, Staying In has deadpan verses that are dry enough to peel paint. With 60s girl group flourishes, The New Squad Attacking Formation is a quirky track that makes me think of a gang of teenage girls on scooters terrorizing the neighbourhood. Released as a single, Junkshop Discotheque features a great guitar line as all of Helen Love's musical influences get jammed together very much as the title suggests. The album crashes to its conclusion with Saturday Nite, which surprises with a classical introduction before launching into yet another potential dance anthem.

Now that I'm aware of Helen Love, I eagerly await a new album called Stick It due out this year (it's preceded by the latest single called Calm Down Dad - a song in line with the theme of Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, but with a sarcastic sheen that mocks adolescence cool and with a hilarious piece of White Riot at the end). There's something old-fashioned and child-like about Helen Love, but they fire obscure and not-so-obscure references on all cylinders, reminding you that they know exactly what they're doing.

Debbie Loves Joey - Helen Love

1910 Fruitgum Company - Helen Love

Calm Down Dad - Helen Love

What We Do is Secret: Should Punk Be Exposed on Celluloid?

I am by no means an expert on The Germs; in fact, I'm not even really a fan. To be honest, I just never sought them out, nor heard of them til a few years back, but at the same time, I was intrigued by a biopic made about them, Rodger Grossman's What We Do Is Secret. I suppose that being an avid music fan generally makes me interested in any film about music, and punk as a cultural/sociological phenomenon has interested me for years. All I knew going in to see the film last week at Cinematheque was that The Germs were a chaotic punk band from California in the late 70's and that their frontman, Darby Crash, overdosed on heroin just before the day that John Lennon was killed, overshadowing his final bid for immortality. I also knew that Shane West, the actor who first found fame in teen romantic comedies and later as part of the TV show ER, had apparently gotten so completely into his role as Darby Crash, that he actually became a member of the recent reformation of The Germs, adopting the moniker, Shane Wreck. Considering this rather slim amount of knowledge, rather than pontificate on whether the film was too slick for the documentary style it was going for, or whether it was actually true to the band members' lives and the facts, I'm more interested in the broader issue of punk rock movies. This musing comes from the experience of being in last Thursday's audience.

I didn't quite know what to expect as far as audience members, but I did assume they would behave like regular audiences that usually attend the independent/arthouse films that Cinematheque runs. I forgot to factor in the possibility that actual Germs fans might come to see the film. About ten or fifteen minutes into the film, I realized my mistake as a large group of "punks" continued to heckle and shout profanities at each other and the film for its entire duration. And they also kept leaving and returning (I know this because I had two girls in pathetically short skirts climb over me about six times). And they thought it would be rather "punk" to light up regular cigarettes in the non-smoking theatre. I know I'm old and I don't consider myself a punk (I love punk music and its aesthetic, but at heart, I could never have been a true punk), but this chaos around me, which emulated the chaos presented in the live shows on screen, really annoyed me. If I had wanted to feel like I was at a punk show, I wouldn't have chosen to watch a film about it. As I braced myself for flying bottles, which never did appear, I kept thinking, "Why show up to a film if you know you won't like it?" and "Why stay for a film if you clearly think it's crap?" In the angry haze of that entire hour and a half, straining to hear dialogue and actually follow the narrative, I didn't think too deeply about my situation. At the time, I did appreciate the life imitating art imitating life dynamic that was happening, but I didn't contemplate the possible reasons for why this was happening. All I really wanted was for Darby Crash to die already, so I could go home.

Now that my head is clearer and I don't wish to bottle every single one of those punk kids, I wonder about whom punk films are intended for. Are they intended for actual punks, or for the more objective voyeurs of punk? Should punk even be made into films? And what kind of films should they be? Just by looking at the list of punk films listed in Wikipedia, it becomes apparent that punk has definitely been filmed to death whether as documentary, mockumentary, or biopic. Whether those that ascribe to the punk subculture actually find The Great Rock 'n Roll Swindle, the Julien Temple mockumentary about the Sex Pistols, and Temple's later Sex Pistols documentary The Filth and the Fury, credible or not is hard to say. Footage of The Germs was included in Penelope Spheeris's documentary The Decline of Western Civilization, which featured other bands of the time like Black Flag and Circle Jerks, and perhaps the fact that it was real footage of the band rather than a neatly constructed narrative with leitmotifs would appease punk fans. At the same time, punk's power and identity was bound up in the pose of sneering and the rejection of everything, including art, which even documentaries ultimately are.

While documentaries featuring live footage of punk artists might seem more credible and true to the punk experience than creative endeavours or biopics, those who are members of the subculture want their subculture to remain as such - not paraded around by those they believe could never truly understand it. If I remember correctly, a lot of the punks in the first showing of Derek Jarman's Jubilee stood up and left. And his rendering of the UK punk scene was pretty nihilist and graphic - unlike the more tempered and formulaic What We Do is Secret. I wonder how many punks actually attended showings of Sid and Nancy.

Punk, like other subcultures, lives and thrives underground to spite the mainstream that either panics about it or wants to co-opt it, and I suppose the point is that punks would never be satisfied or happy about their subculture on celluloid no matter how much a filmmaker tried to enter the inner sanctum of the subculture. And in punk there is no inner sanctum anyway - nothing's supposed to be sacred. But then why should punks care about how their bands and subculture are portrayed on the screen either? Obviously their subculture in which nothing has meaning means something to them. It's a catch-22 that applies specifically to punks - they're supposed to hate everything and consider everything worthless in some sort of snot-nosed arrested adolescence, aspects which make you wonder why they bother caring to be a punk in the first place and which, in turn, led to punk's rather rapid downfall.

Apparently, the re-formed, and likely "reformed," Germs, with Mr. Wreck as their vocalist, played last year's Vans Warped Tour and will once again play this year. I can see why this might rankle both Germs fans and punk fans in general, especially considering the last I heard of Shane West's musical endeavours was a pseudo-punk effort that had a song on the A Walk to Remember soundtrack. Yes, alongside tracks by Mandy Moore and Switchfoot. Then again, anyone who thinks the Vans Warped Tour is punk shouldn't be too fussed anyway.

Lexicon Devil - The Germs

Circle One - The Germs

"This Isn't Shoegaze - This Is Suicide": Titus Andronicus' The Airing of Grievances

Though Titus Andronicus' The Airing of Grievances came out last month, I only just discovered it last week, and I felt it merited mentioning. With their combination of a raspy, Conor Oberst-like howl, unwieldy shoegaze distortion and jubilant guitars, this New Jersey band, who are named after one of Shakespeare's most ignored plays, embody existential angst in a way that is diffcult to ignore or dismiss. The Airing of Grievances is the sound of growing up and realizing that the world owes you no favours and that leaving the womb was probably one of life's biggest mistakes. Titus Andronicus hit all the reference points for hopeless youth, including Camus, A Clockwork Orange, and Bruegel's Landscape With the Fall of Icarus, which features the drowned Icarus's legs sticking poignantly out of the water.

While singer, Patrick Stickles' vocals are often so distorted with breathless anguish, it's worth looking up their songs' lyrics. They reveal an openly personal story, including references to Stickles himself and the band's hometown of Glen Rock. Opening track, Fear and Loathing in Mahwah, NJ, includes the fabulous line "People will tell you that if you don't love your neighbor, then you don't love God, but no god of mine would put light in such unrighteous eyes" - vicious poetry - and the first minute of the song drags along like a dirge only to burst into a full heliotrope of rage, reaching for a sun that it can unwillingly follow but never touch. Songs like My Time Outside the Womb and Arms Against Atrophy explore variations on the theme of wishing you had never been born. The latter includes the line "Even though things lately may have been real horrorshow, I'm wishing I was back in utero," which, deliberately or not, namechecks both Burgess's phenomenal A Clockwork Orange and Nirvana's swansong album. Titus Andronicus, an eponymous song, includes a spirit and melodic sensibility that reminds me of British Sea Power's latest efforts but with a spitting and snarling Johnny Rotten over top, and its constant chant of "Your life is over" is like a re-working of the Pistols' "No future."

And of course the next two tracks on the album are entitled No Future and No Future Part Two: The Day After No Future. The former is one of those songs that perfectly describes the helplessness of depression. To slower, meandering guitars, Stickles rasps his way through words like "There's still one shoe that hasn't dropped yet. It's hanging on by an aglete. This world seems like a nice place to visit, but I don't want to live in it." This track, with its companion song, forms a fifteen-minute nihilist opus that stretches from a mournful ballad to banging bass drums and chiming guitars. Closing track, Albert Camus, sums up the alienation of the whole album with a reverby darkness that feels like being held under a rockpool while your brains starts exploding into stars from lack of oxygen. Too self-actualized to live in blissful ignorance, Titus Andronicus puts up a screaming front, exorcising bitter disappointment.

Titus Andronicus aren't gazing at their shoes behind bashful fringes. They're looking the world full in the face and going down fighting.

Titus Andronicus MySpace: http://myspace.com/titusandronicus

Titus Andronicus Blog: http://titusandronicustheband.blogspot.com/

Fear and Loathing in Mahwah, NJ - Titus Andronicus

Albert Camus - Titus Andronicus

Everyday is Like Sunday, Except for Blue Monday and Ruby Tuesday, and...Well, Friday I'm in Love: Weekly Mix #7

Though it came and went in the blink of an eye, of all the musical movements, punk tends to live on in the imaginations of people. Just look at the number of documentaries, books, academic studies, magazine cover stories, compilation albums, and fashion aesthetics that still draw on punk. Whether it really was as revolutionary as it seemed, punk has definitely become iconic and continues to influence new bands with its sneering nihilism and DIY-learn-three-chords-and-form-a-band approach.

My personal connection to punk is one that actually started relatively later in life than for most. I was about nineteen when I first got into punk. Unlike most angsty teenagers, I wasn't particularly rebellious as a teen and I didn't feel all that angry at the world just yet. Once I left high school, things definitely changed. I became pretty disillusioned with everything - I didn't know where I was headed and all the promises that education made seemed pretty useless. I spent two years taking a communications diploma, knowing that I hated the field because whether I took journalism, public relations or advertising, I would be selling my soul everyday, and learning that I was more than likely bound to become a capitalist prole for the rest of my life. I was frustrated and directionless and...then I found The Clash.

Songs from their debut album, like Clash City Rockers, White Riot, What's My Name and Career Opportunities, were life-changing - they expressed all the frustration I felt through crashing chords and Joe Stummer's nearly incomprehensible vocals. I soon purchased other Clash albums and started reading anything I could about the band. In my pursuit of all things The Clash, I found the rest of the 1976-77 UK punk scene: Sex Pistols, The Damned, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Buzzcocks, The Adverts, and X-Ray Spex. Their songs were provocative, nihilistic, and the farthest thing from romantic - everything I wanted in music at the time.

Not only did the blistering music grip me, but I embraced the punk aesthetic. I wanted to dress like a punk (of course I realize that the whole idea of a "credible" punk fashion actually reveals punk to be one of many poses that was, in many ways, similar to movements before it) and annoy people. When I backpacked through Europe at age twenty, I made sure I visited Camden Town and purchased a London Calling t-shirt and a pair of tartan bondage trousers from a dodgy store where I had to try on clothes on a landing. Eventually, I expanded from the UK punk scene to its American predecessors: The Ramones, Iggy and the Stooges, and New York Dolls. Out of all the punk bands The Clash will always remain my favourite because they stood for something more than nihilism - they made politics cool and managed to ride out the punk wave with dignity and innovative blending of musical genres.

Punk had its variations and interesting blurring of styles - bands like The Stranglers, The Jam and Ian Dury & the Blockheads don't sound punk in the typical sense (the fact Paul Weller is generally regarded as the Modfather points to this overlapping of genres), but they are nonetheless always considered to fall under the banner of the punk scene. Eventually, punk turned into a cartoon along with Sid Vicious, who unfortunately seems to be the most iconic punk of all, and ultimately ended with the same fate as most subcultures: defusion and diffusion. Of course many of those who started out in punk moved on to great things in the post-punk period, and some like Adam Ant and Billy Idol re-fashioned themselves into MTV stars. When I misguidedly attended the Vans Warped Tour four years ago (an event which will apparently haunt me for the rest of my life), I got to witness the defusion and diffusion of punk taken to its logical conclusion - a completely commerical and co-opted affair with bands that yelled at kids to vote because...well, just because. Of course most of the bands were actually pop-punk and/or that debauched term, emo. The message was to rebel by consuming as much as possible in a parking lot with a half-pipe. Needless to say, I felt very lost in my Clash t-shirt.

For a decent history of British punk, read Jon Savage's England's Dreaming, and for something more academic, read Dick Hebdige's seminal work Subculture and Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces. As for punk on film, watch Derek Jarman's Jubilee. I didn't try to be particularly original in making this mix - it's actually fairly typical of punk compilations. But in the end, I think that they're the songs that drew me to punk in the first place and I don't see the point of being pretentious about it and searching out the most obscure tracks. I'm going to call this mix A Riot of My Own, and just like punk itself, it hammers away and runs its course quickly. But it feels brilliant.

Kick Out the Jams - MC5

Personality Crisis - New York Dolls

I Wanna Be Your Dog - Iggy and The Stooges

Blitzkrieg Bop - The Ramones

Blank Generation - Richard Hell and the Voidoids

Chinese Rocks - Johnny Thunders

God Save the Queen - Sex Pistols

White Riot - The Clash

Orgasm Addict - Buzzcocks

Pogo Dancing - The Vibrators

New Rose - The Damned

One Chord Wonders - The Adverts

Nobody's Scared - Subway Sect

Zerox - Adam and the Ants

Hong Kong Garden - Siouxsie and the Banshees

Ready, Steady, Go - Generation X

In the City - The Jam

The Saints Are Coming - The Skids

Peaches - The Stranglers

Sex and Drugs and Rock 'n Roll - Ian Dury & the Blockheads

Suspect Device (Alternative Take) - Stiff Little Fingers

Teenage Kicks - The Undertones

Oh Bondage, Up Your's! - X-Ray Spex



Weekly Mix #7 (Megaupload)