Band: Scary Monsters
Format: 12-inch vinyl, 4 songs, © 1997
Genre: indie rock
Special feature: This band features Kurt Volk, now a graphic designer for Robert Rodriguez’s Troublemaker Studios, and Chris Hrasky, who went on to co-found the Texas band Explosions in the Sky.
Buy this record: $9 + $2.50 shipping.
Track lineup:
- “The Life And Times Of The Silver Writer”
- “Dream Queen”
- “Extraordinary Men Refined”
- “Blood Of The Hooligan”
Scary Monsters band members: Kurt Volk (bass), Chris Hrasky (drums), Brent Larson (guitars ,vocals)
Liner notes:
Recorded by Scary Monsters in Chicago, Spring 1997. © 1997 Twenty Four Forty Songs
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Even back in the days, when all of us were full as blimps with the then-novel romanticism of sandals and simplicity and mucking about in this middle-class cerebral game, climbing along the raggedy raggedy edge between the sometimes-sheer grace of the incomprehensible, the ineffable, the velure illusion dressed in cap and bells, and utter vertiginous nonsense; even back in those days maybe, we’d forgotten that we needn’t lean out and say: come in a little closer friends … that we needn’t wade out knee-deep in poppies and mythos, or pile quarters up higher than the sky in the arcade, or stand in wet concrete even.
And then.
And then you know in our violet hour, though we felt sure that we’d spun much closer to the root of our souls, came the shivering and the praying: You son-of-a-bitch You son-of-a-bitch You son-of-a-bitch.
The angel, the aesthete, and the music all born amid the turmoil and the trembling of this violet hour. This meaningless middle-ground. This touch-and-go phase. This drug-colored haze. This helium addiction.
High enough, maybe, on lighter-than-air gases or on the wax wings of the vestal virgin to find in our fingers our own untiring desire to believe, to grasp the very firmament, the keen cutting line of the horizon; anything other than the liminal, than the sad sweet poetry of echoes in the face of father and son. This fancy and a sycophantic string of words in inane order, both swirling into peaks and points where perception dances on our teeth, like angels on the head of a pin, until we shake our heads like the middle-weight championship prize-fighting dogs chewing everything into bother and oblivion, letting all of it fall in rags of wet drizzling newsprint. To this opiump-induced maze of blind whiteness and meandering.
And the quiet afterword.
An afterword of dim and hysterical lyrical strains and brief melodic measures which filter in at high tide and out again at low — filling in words to a fairy tale told in a thousand languages — and drums, tight like caged orangutans, pounding out punctuation, and that, you know, is the goddamned synergism. The point where mystery turns to myth. Where every word suggests the song and every song suggests the words and so they become inextricable and all a part of the same. The fulcrum between irreverence and veneration, the wide sliver of space between the dog’s teeth and the orangutan’s ass, where the game playings and leaning are swallowed and the helium has taken us high enough to see the poppy trail, the concrete prints, and the quarters all leading back to the arcade and an unfinished game of asteroids.
And this is what we have come to. To the mythos and the magic of time travel, of jesters, and of monsters which may well be our own self-prescribed brand of myopia, but here beneath the croaking of deep bruise-colored tunes, we follow a long trail of quarters back to a distant day, before we began.
— Silas Zobal
Buy this record: $9 + $2.50 shipping.
Front and back covers
