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MATTER: 'Die Kreuzen At The Crossing' by Steve Albini, January 1986 ('October File')
Forget for a moment all the things
associated with the phrase. Try for a second to hear the words as they
were spoken in this context for the first time. Hard Core. Yeah. Severe,
powerful, unrelenting rock noise, with the beat hyped and up and the songs
overloaded with unrestrained enthusiasm, savvy and sheer grunt. Forget
that an idiom has developed which parrots those sentiments without delivering
on any of them. Imagine a band that could not just fulfill but reinvent
at every turn. Oh, you mead Die Kreuzen? Yeah.
They pack the gut-level wallop of
early Killing Joke or Pop Group and the musical inventiveness of Wire,
Gang of Four or Birthday Party. They play with the precision and cutting
keeness of the Ruts, the bent, savage personal fury of the Swans, and above
all, the energy of Motorhead. Discharge. No, fuck Discharge. The Butthole
Surfers. No, fuck the Butthole Surfers. Die Kreuzen.
"We don't seem to catch on real
quick like a lot of those bands with a gimmick, with the approach we take,"
says drummer Erik Tunison. Which is not to say that people haven't tried
to invent gimmicks for them. In the band's nigh-on-five-year history, they've
been labeled everything from a skate thrash band to a speed metal band.
And a Flipper ripoff, if I remember correctly. Anyway, all those definitions
are fucked. They can't be a speed metal band, because I hate the stuff
and I dig Die Kreuzen. Personally, I think they're more like the intersection
of Einsturzende Neubauten and Aerosmith, with a hyperactive drummer sitting
in. But then, that's probably fucked too. Just buy their second LP, October
File, when it comes out early next year on Touch and Go, and save me
the trouble and embarrassment of trying to type out what they sound like.
This summer, in a "branching out"
move, noted rap label Profile even offered the band a contract. Initial
excitement about the offer soon faded, however, when the band took the
contract to a lawyer friend, who translated it into real people language.
"Yeah, he thought it was pretty
funky," said Tunison. "He said he was surprised that the label even sent
us a contract like that if they knew a lawyer was going to see it."
Some of the contract's inherent
funkiness lies in the clever payment scheme the label had outlined for
the band's royalties. The band's royalty payment would be used to pay for
all recording costs, album and video production, or any other expenses.
In short, the band wouldn't realize a dime from records sold until the
label had deducted every invested cent. In the meantime, however, the label
would be taking it's profit off the top.
Among other things, the label also
reserved the right to re-edit, reissue, remix and rerelease anything the
band recorded while under contract. Since the contract term was five years,
the label could conceivably keep the band in debt, unable to record for
anyone else, and obligated to produce albums which the label would make
a profit on.
Die Kreuzen not ready for the bigtime?
No, Jane, bigtime not ready for Die Kreuzen.
Die Kreuzen have as much to do with
conventional hardcore (that is, the shitty kind) as they do with Broadway
soundtracks, which is thankfully zip. They are one of a rare but growing
group of bands for whom contemporary divisions and nomenclature mean squat.
Art band, punk band, dance band, noise band, rock band, basically who the
fuck can say. Yeah, they're all of that. And none, really. We're gonna
have to come up with either new terminology or a new perspective, since
bands like these guys, the Butthole Surfers, Sonic Youth, Live Skull, the
Minutemen, Volcano Suns, Braking Circus, Amor Fati, Slovenly, Hunting Lodge,
Controlled Bleeding, the Swans, and a scad of others are finally beginning
to stretch their influence and appeal over a broad audience and range of
aesthetics. There's at least something to like about all of those
bands from almost any perspective.
When Die Kreuzen started in Milwaukee,
it was a punk rock band, which is about what anybody would expect. In the
beginning, see, punk rock was a big enough pasture for anybody to run around
in, making all sorts of giddy noises. It actually took some time for punk
rock to confine itself to the clichés and empty sloganeering of
another fucking genre. That makes four, doesn't it? Disco, heavy
metal, easy listening, and punk rock. Anyway, right from the start, they
were different.
Dan Kubinski's voice, which at its
most subtle resembles a four-speed stripping its gears, gives you the impression
that whatever the hell he's singing about, it really means a lot to him.
No detached ironic commentator, he screams from way back in his head, and
his face gets all fucked up and his eyes close and he flops around like
some anorexic speed freak and holy shit that fucker's going to hurt
himself like that.
Watching Die Kreuzen is like watching
some huge car crash or industrial accident. You are at once transfixed
by the spectacle of it all, stimulated by the noise, and a little worried
that something might fly loose and whack you. But you creep up there to
gawk, not really knowing if the whole thing is some sort of evil machinery
set up by the big Mark Pauline in the sky to flail itself to bits in front
of an audience that will never really get the point anyway.
Hell, they're even part of a nebulous
band-of-sorts called Boy Dirt Car, whose varied, loosely-termed industrial
noise has been a scene bane for years. BDC are also big on the car crash
aesthetic, and their performances are every bit as physical, violent and
overpowering as any hard-to-pronounce European squad.
Herman Egeness, who at one time
sported the most billiard-table-flat haircut in the world, plays a weird
aluminum-necked guitar with an evil precision and cunning sense of melody
that makes him one of the most distinctive sounds in rock. If Wire liked
Black Sabbath. If Keith Levine shot speed instead of smack. If Andy Gill
were in the Buzzcocks. Somewhere in there lies the Egenessness.
More than other thing, though, what
separates Die Kreuzen from the pack of thrash-type band-things out there
is their adventurous nature. They will go way out on a limb if they have
to. Their timing is flawless, so when Tunison and bassist Keith Brammer
through those bizarre rhythms and instantaneous speed shifts, they hit
home with the muscle of a well-practiced sucker punch. The tension builds
up to some ridiculous pinnacle, and blam, the riff hits the pavement in
a swift, graceful suicide. Its father beams with pride as a song well-reared
lives a successful life on its own.
This is all bullshit anyway. Here
I
am, acting like some sort of Rock Writer, trying to Enlighten All You Little
People out there to something you've had plenty of chances to find out
for yourselves, but didn't because you were too busy letting other people
tell you what to listen to/like/admire/worship. "The number one record
here at W-whatever-the-fuck-college, for the fourth month in a row, is
the R.E.M. album followed by, for the ninth month in a row, the new Smiths
album. In just a moment, we'll have some shitty local new-wavy pop band
come in and tell us why they think they sound so god damn original, and
then at noon, Spliffy-T Ras Almighty Bernstein will be in with the reggae
show we've been putting on the air to show how diverse, pan-cultural, and
certainly-not-racist we are." I shouldn't have to write this article. You
ought to be out there looking for this music. You aren't doing you're
homework. Lousy "rock" music is being bought in mass numbers, any British
band with a disco beat and U2 guitars is being hailed as some sort of advance,
and Die Kreuzen are still stuck in the fucking thrash/heavy metal ghetto,
playing in people's basements.
Make them rich, you bastards.
Now.