Saturday December 4 * 2pm * outside at Rhizome * TICKETS
Live Skull Sirens wail, then a bass crashes through. “In A Perfect World,” which opens Live Skull’s new album Dangerous Visions, is fraught with the tension of our times. Cooped up in his apartment during “the darkest moment of the [COVID-19] shutdown in NYC,“ singer and guitarist Mark C wrote lyrics and recorded vocals while ambulances sped past outside. “I sat in the dark...and dreamed of a more perfect world to replace the damaged one we lived in,” he recalls. “But, as gritty guitar sounds and the incessant beat of the drum and bass line charged forward, I knew we belonged to this world of struggle and chaos.”
Struggle and chaos is nothing new for Live Skull. Emerging in the early 80s at the end of New York’s legendary No Wave scene, the group reshaped the aggression of burned-out post-punk into heavy, guitar-driven rock. Mark C and his fellow founder, guitarist Tom Paine, were inspired by the nihilistic sounds of No New York and the dissonant walls of Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham. Like their Manhattan comrades Sonic Youth and Swans, Live Skull funneled those influences into hard-edged music that valued melody as much as anarchy. “We loved the noise and the chaos that was happening in the No Wave bands,” says Mark. “But we really tried to fit it into a song.”
Over the next decade, Live Skull released five albums and three EPs with a rotating cast of 11 members, all of whom added new ideas to the group’s evolving sound. Their constant progression inspired New York Times critic Robert Palmer to call them “as challenging, as spiritually corrosive, and ultimately as transcendent as Albert Ayler’s mid-’60s free-jazz or the implacable drone-dance of the early Velvet Underground. It’s one of the essential sounds of our time.”
Live Skull stopped playing in 1990–but for Mark C, there was still more to be said. So he reformed the group in 2016 with bassist Marnie Jaffe and drummer Richard Hutchins. Last year, an updated line-up with C, Hutchins and bassist Kent Heine recorded the first Live Skull album in nearly three decades, the urgent, forceful Saturday Night Massacre. Now, just a year later and joined by guitarist Dave Hollinghurst, they return with Dangerous Visions, and this time everyone from the entire Live Skull history is involved.
Side one nods to that history via a fiery update on “Debbie’s Headache” (originally found on the 1987 album Dusted). It also includes three new studio tracks from the current quartet, along with a live recording of “Day One Of The Experiment” from a 2019 European tour. Though performed with joyful energy, these songs also confront our current darkness. As Mark C puts it, the marching “Dispatches “plays out in a dystopian landscape and is a cry for help or at least understanding when things start to go wrong”, while the pounding double bass line on “Twin Towers” forms “an ode to living through disasters that could have taken you down, be it anarchist bomb making in the West Village or planes crashing into the World Trade Towers.”
Side two of Dangerous Visions reaches back to the late 80s, offering a slew of previously-unreleased material. The first four tracks come from a 1989 appearance on John Peel’s BBC radio show. Recorded during a tour for the album Positraction and featuring Thalia Zedek on vocals, the session includes two songs written after that final release. “We hear where Live Skull might have gone next if the band hadn’t been destined to breakup within the year,” explains Tom Paine. “The emotionally raw and somewhat unfinished-sounding “Someone Else’s Sweat”, and “Adema”, a jacked-up smash-n-grab that still makes a pretty fine impression.” Also included are “Alive Again”, a free-form outtake from the Dusted sessions, and an alternate mix of “TriPower”–with Mark on vocals and, for the first time, Zedek on guitar–from the 1989 compilation Like a Girl, I Want You to Keep Coming.
Such a wide range of sources could make for a scattered album, but Live Skull’s singular approach to music making unites everything on Dangerous Visions. The band’s new tunes tear into the air with the same ferocity of their early material, while the unearthed tracks are still vitally relevant today. Four decades since they began, the world still needs music from this band that never stops evolving and pushing itself–because there’s still no one who sounds like Live Skull. https://www.facebook.com/liveskullofficial
Thalia Zedek Band Thalia Zedek is an artist of immutable stature and unceasing vitality. The legendary songwriter’s fiery voice and frank lyricism give her songs both their emotional potency and their stark beauty. Zedek is able to distill complex events into simple, clear, and at times monumentally weighty moments with a singular grace. Through ballads or bluster, Zedek imbues her music with unguarded honesty. New album Perfect Vision examines the anxiety and pain of rising divisions between people both physical and ideological. On Perfect Vision, Zedek transmutes fervor and resilience into sobering laments, while her lush arrangements wrap the listener in an often complex emotional message.
Perfect Vision follows Thalia Zedek Band’s 2018 album Fighting Season, created in the midst of growing tensions across the U.S. On Fighting Season Zedek sought resistance, where on Perfect Vision Zedek searches for clarity during a time of exponential isolation and doubt. On “Binoculars,” she explores the difficulty of staying afloat, while overwhelmed by uncertainty of conflict and fear. Zedek’s simple and repetitive guitar line marches forward while longtime collaborator David Michael Curry’s viola swirls intensely around her. The pounding “Queasy” thunders and thrashes in the face of ignorance and intolerance while “Overblown” examines the strain of communicating across cavernous schisms. Every challenge and sadness Zedek forces us to see is met in equal measure by her defiant guitar and dissenting voice, a torch illuminating a path for the listener to navigate through the darkness.
Zedek composed the bulk of Perfect Vision remotely from her band. Lockdowns allowed Zedek to take more time working on arrangements as well as to collaborate remotely with artists from across the country. Zedek recorded the core of the album with the veritable rhythm section of bassist Winston Braman and drummer Gavin McCarthy (also of Zedek’s E and Karate) who brought a propulsive punch to the album. As the trio recorded at Machines With Magnets with engineer Seth Manchester, friends old and new remotely recorded their parts fleshing out Zedek vision and arrangements. Pedal steel guitarist Karan Zarkisian buoys the steady swagger of “Cranes” with sublime melodic lines seemingly in conversation with Zedek, in an intimate conversation between friends. Brian Carpenter’s trumpet harmonies punctuate the incendiary “From the Fire” with flares of Eastern European brio. On the waltzing “Smoked” and climactic album closer “Tolls,” Alison Chesley’s (Helen Money) cello bolsters David Michael Curry’s elegantly restrained lines. Mel Lederman added final touches of piano and back up harmonies in the final days at the studio.
Zedek and Manchester completed work on the album on January 6th, 2021, as the U.S. Capitol was under insurrection. Perfect Vision is an album fully willing to see, acknowledge and address the insidious forces of the modern world. Zedek brings considerable skills as a musician and as a groundbreaking advocate for both women in music and LGBTQ+ rights to face emotional and political obstacles with unblinking, steadfast determination. The sharp and diverse songs across Perfect Vision stand as profoundly reflective, moving anthems to purging malevolence. https://www.facebook.com/ThaliaZedekBand
Bed Maker Jeff Barsky, Amanda MacKaye, Arthur Noll and Vin Novara. Formed in 2019, they are from around Washington, D.C.
