MONOSHOCK Walk To Fire 2LP demented garage psych '96 M-

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26

  MONOSHOCK

Walk To The Fire

Blackjack 024 scarce '95 2LP by wild San Francisco modern mind melting punk psych group. With insert. From Julian Cope's site comes this glowing review!:
WALK TO THE FIRE is a barbarian classic (what an oxymoron, ya moron!) that brings a smile to your face and sway to your hips and a lump to your dong from the moment you put it on. This record is as life-affirming as a noisy early morning fart on London’s rush hour Tube; rasping, stinky and utterly impossible to ignore – indeed, WALK TO THE FIRE is “enhanced by a very poor and unclean production job”, as its main protagonist once wrote of someone else.
My daughters have almost become immune to such vibrant aural passive smoking as Taj Mahal Travellers and Group Ongaku and Stockhausen and Father Moo & the Black Sheep. To them it’s just Novelty Compost you close the door to escape from. But open the door when Monoshock is playing and I get an earful from them. Like Comets on Fire, Chrome, Electric Eels, Rocket from the Tomb, Monoshock is more incendiary because it takes the traditional and fucks with it, in what Mr Runyan himself has described as an “engaging display of cave-fuzz”. That is, it takes the familiar and rummages about until an unholy alchemy has been achieved.

WALK TO THE FIRE opens with a kind of “Non Alignment Pact” mess of feedback, stops-start drums, and worried shake appeal howling, before “Crypto-Zoological Disaster” kicks in a “Silver Machine” boogie that ain’t no boogie at all. Twin vocals start complain-complaining about something inaudible and we’re off on the voyage. Mr Runyan is joined by BlackJack Records label boss Scott Derr on hogsgrunt Lemmy-type (Gibson?) bass and the rentaslob Rubin Fiberglass on drums. Monoshock’s Hawkwind-inspired roots.

“I Took you to it, Baby” is huge, fast and a riff to kill for: the Pistols “Liar” reduced to no chords and twice as fast. Dual snotbag vocals complain-complain over schplutter mutter drums and you don’t have a clue what they’z abaht. Like the Electric Eels “Accident”, they conjure up something you don’t quite wish to address.
“Hong Kong” is the early Buzzcocks’ “Time’s Up” with HIGH RISE LIVE guitar tone and fabulous lyrics, only one of which I can make out: “Got another strange idea… cut off my head so I can’t hear.” Punk twin vocals always clear my custard and this is the best example in years.
Then they end side one with “Astral Plane” by sinking even lower than the Electric Eels did on “Spin Age Blasters.” However, Monoshock’s song is even better than the aforesaid because of its scabies-catchy slug-slow riff and tortured cowboy vocals. Guest violinist Doug Pearson swerves this sucker right off the road, and Scott Derr picks up his bass bugle and single-handedly demolishes the atonal ugly-pathetic-ness of the entire Laughing Clowns’ oeuvre with several of the sweatiest tromboniest horn solos yet put on tape.
“I saw you baby on the astral plane,
You read my dreams just like a magazine.”
Side two responds to this achingly-awful genius by opening with the almost acoustic Stones space rock of “Tom Guido Philosophically Stoogely”. More dual vocals over an amphetamine “Street Fighting Man”, and hey, even some production ideas from extra guitars and overdubbed tambourine from Liquorball bassist Feast. Whoa! And those couple more references to “You Really Got Me” cain’t really fail neither, now can they?

“Leesa” opens with the whole band singing this girl’s name over and over and over, high and falsetto and half-asleep, while the Aluminium Queen oscillates in an Alan Ravenstine EMS manner and out of the gloaming rises your ultimate utility Instant Hawkwind riff. “Leeeeeeeeeeee-sahhhhh! Leeeeeeeeeee-sahhhhhhhh!” coo the half wits, like the Montague gang singing up to Juliet in an effort to blow Romeo’s cool and have her drop him. And boy do they succeed. Seven minutes into this blitz, she’s packed up and settled for an arranged marriage.

The song which closes side two is a huge revelation of the Runyan psyche, and it’s a tortured damned masterpiece. Beginning incongruously with the bass playing the riff to “In the Hall of the Mountain King”, “Separate Beds” is also the trickster in the pack; the Lokian spirit moving unexpected, unwatched and surely as uncalled for as The Stooges’ “Anne”. A beautiful and massively dark tragedy; an end-of-the-affair song straight out of the Armand Schaubroeck songbook, this is an epic minor-key masterpiece of true devastation. Here, Grady Runyan reveals himself as a real songwriter who could probably stand up in the ‘real’ world, if he could even muster up one iota of respect for that place for long enough. A cover version of this would be a huge C&W hit. In my dreams, baybee.
Side three opens like “Iron Man” meets “TV Eye” meets the Batman theme. It’s called “Molten Goldfinger 965” and it wipes my shitty ass. Hardly any vocals and all of them submerged in the Aluminium Queen’s Own Fug. Again, Mr Runyan has rifled through the Bodleian Library of Rock Riffs, and checked out every one of them AND he ain’t about to take these suckers back NOR pay the fines.
The deeply brilliant and highly melodic title track is a Stacy Sutherland-type sub-aqua ballad straight out of BULL OF THE WOODS. Imagine “Rose & the Thorn” with “Living On” production and you’re somewhere close to the mystery of this track. Again, it’s got that easy melody that makes you think Grady’s been piling ‘em up for this very rainy day. And Ethan Miller musta copped a thang or three for his Comets on Fire vocal technique. Imagine a reverb’d dead-man-walking blues riff with other-sarcophagus vocals and splatter drums. Excellent.
Then we come to the furiously inbred “Chicken Lover”. “This is a song about people making love with animals”, declares Grady. Cue all instruments copping a few barnyard sounds. Abrupt stop. “I shot you in the back when I caught you with my chicken lover,” says Mr. Runyan. And off they stomp into a blues-fuelled space tirade. “I suspect one man's natural tendencies are another man's dementia,” says Mr Runyan.
Side three’s closer, “Sea Monkeys”, is right off side two of THE MODERN DANCE. Think “Chinese Radiation” or even “Laughing”. This is a rhythmless complain-o-thon with a wonderful bass riff and drums that only relieve us halfway through.

And so we come to the final side of this behemoth. And it is here, on the two eight-minute technicolour yawns “International; Hello” and “I Want It All” that Monoshock most nearly approach their sibling band Liquorball. However, I say nearly. And it must be very carefully noted that whilst both of these side four epics are an unrestrained headrush, they in no real way approach the ELECTRONIC MEDITATION-period T. Dream low church Mithraic blood-letting that Liquorball so deeply represents.
“International Hello” fades slowly out of the murk, a slow blues 6/8 thunderstorm of drums, then suddenly accelerates into the kind of relentless caterwauling guitar destruction you need to physically experience. The whole album was recorded at The Insane Cat in San Francisco, except for this one overflowing canister of fresh garbage, which owes its dubious birth to a place called The Practise Pad. Never book this place, they have one broken compressor mike and no toilets. Hey, I could listen to a whole 60 minutes of this stuff and still want more. Scott Derr’s untamed bass rears up and tries to throw him out the saddle, but he ain’t having none of it. These guys may be influenced by Hawkwind but this stuff make Lemmy and Dave Brock look like stuffed owls in an antique boutique. Rubin is close to a heart attack and who the fuck knows what Aluminium Queen is doing here: it all suffuses together in one incandescent glow. Margaret Niffisent, but you can call me Mag. All those Japrock Mainliner Heino snobs should suck at these guys’ Priapic Altar!
“I Want It All” completes the circle with an intro of Pere Ubu atmosphere, “Chinese Radiation” again, more farts, more bubbles until, at 1.55, we’re back in 1975, grooving on both sides of the Atlantic simultaneously with the proto-No Wave of the Cleveland sound meets the Hawkwind-plays-Neu! of “Opa-Loka”. It’s a call-and-answer song with semi-yodelled vocals and yelps:
“I want it all (I want it all),
I want it all (I want it all),
I want it all.”
Again, this could have done with being the whole of an album side, but I’m greedy for Grady’n’Co and sad to see the back of them. What an album, what a sound, what a moment captured. Truth is, Monoshock was gone forever after this one long glimpse of genius, as Grady Runyan returned to his stupor-dooper day job in Liquorball.  
  

              Jacket Grade: NM-, Little to no wear to cover. No splits.

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