A Trip to Marineville

Cacophonous and anarchic, imbued with an insular irony, and inspired equally by punk primitivism and Krautrock experimentalism, the Swell Maps pioneered a hyper-intelligent yet unforgivingly amateurish approach to music-making that sounds now like a blueprint for all the aspiring art-school noisemakers that came in their wake. Never popular, always marginal, the band seemed to have operated with a sublime indifference to any potential audience they might have had, which makes them a contrarian's dream, the perfect band to listen to in order to indulge one's masochism and sullen anti-social tendencies at the same time, all without surrendering the cachet attached to being into something obscure that's not overtly silly. Because their records have been relatively hard to track down, the band acquired a path-breaking reputation perhaps out of proportion to their actual accomplishments, but now that it’s been reissued by Secretly Canadian (with a few bonus tracks and video material tacked on, but not with the integral singles "Read About Seymour" and "Let's Build a Car"), you'll be able to evaluate their bastard punk prog for yourself.

Released in 1979, the band's first full-length album, A Trip to Marineville (the title was taken from an episode of "Stingray") is slightly more accessible, but not because it has all that many hooks or melodies or anything like that. Swell Maps approach to song-writing involves pounding out a riff or chord progression over and over again (on chunky, thickly distorted guitars or on a piano) while unexpected noises and abstruse, sullenly intoned vocals are layered on top. Borrowing much from the loosely structured jams of Can, this strategy would ultimately be adopted by bands like Flipper and the Germs. Impenetrable at first, songs quickly grow on you, if only through their sheer repetition, their relentless momentum. On the cover is a photo of a house on fire, very appropriate to how the album opens, with well-orchestrated burst of three short, explosive tracks that run together seamlessly: the sneering "H.S. Art", which repeatedly asks "Do you believe in art?" with such scorn that it's clear you don't if you have to stop and ask; the metacritique of "Another Song", which seems to question its own right to exist as it co-opts pop-song formula, and the concise, incisive "Vertical Slum". The rest of the album eschews such tight focus, and progressively becomes more difficult listening. Songs that begin with crisp, throbbing riffs and well-layered guitars ("Midget Submarines" and "Harmony in Your Bathroom") have endings that stretch out and devolve into chaos. And the instrumentals mount up as well, starting with the innocuous piano and found noise fragment "Don't Throw Ashtrays at Me!" and moving through the drifting, meditative "Gunboats" and climaxing with "Adventures into Basketry", a spontaneous eight-minute noise fest that sounds like an autistic drum circle conducted during an air raid. This discursive experiment in discord certainly sound liberating for the band, but if you can't get lost in the accidental textures of random noises colliding and patterns disintegrating, if you can't get off vicariously on their freedom, you'll probably grow impatient with it all. More successful is "Full Moon in My Pocket" and "Blam!!" which are really one song, an extended homage to the quintessential Can epic, "Mother Sky". Using staccato bass notes to punctuate a fluid groove and elliptical lyrics to invite abstruse speculation, these songs are perhaps the closest Swell Maps comes to achieving an effective synthesis of deliberate artistry and open-endedness, suggesting for a few sublime moments that these are natural complements to each other.

Rob Horning

International Rescue

You'll have to be a pretty major Swell Maps fan to make heads or tails, at a glance, out of which songs on this 20 track compilation you may already have. It's all over the Swell map, including four songs that have never been on CD [including "Dresden Style (City Boys)," which was a single]; three that have never been released anywhere; three "unreleased mixes"; and a few songs that appeared on U.K. singles ("Let's Build a Car," "Real Shocks," "Read About Seymour"). While turning to the late 70’s early 80’s seems to be all the rage to inspire new bands these days, it’s almost stupefying that no one seems to have namedropped Swell Maps as an influence, or even discover them for that matter. If they haven’t been the source of inspiration for already established bands, International Rescue should arouse a whole new breed of amateurs to start up boisterous experimental garage bands. Based around the creative team of brothers Nikki Sudden and Epic Soundtracks, Swell Maps were underground heroes in their time fusing punk rock, noise pop and experimental rackets in Krautrock patterns to achieve a sound unlike any equal. If this happens to be your first, or only, Swell Maps album you get, its decent arty punk that's too monochromatic to sustain burning interest over the course of the lengthy program. It does however have a heartier sense of joie de vivre than many of the contemporary punk or new wave bands of the period, particularly in the vocals.