The Comedy of Errors: Pain Teens - Death Row Eyes (29 May 1992)

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I’m currently in the process of listening to John Peel shows covering October to December 1992 so as to put together lists of selections to soundtrack the rehearsals and production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I performed in as part of a BTEC National Diploma in Performing Arts at Cornwall College.  It will probably be another 12-18 months before I start blogging about that show, but I give advance warning that Dirty-era Sonic Youth are going to be featuring heavily when we get there.  So in that spirit, sit back and enjoy Death Row Eyes by Pain Teens who do a marvellous job of repackaging the Sonic Youth playbook in their own unique style.

Formed in Houston in 1985, Pain Teens were prodigious artists on the hardcore-cassette scene, using the format to effectively release double/triple albums worth of material.  Initially regarded as a metal band with leanings towards punk, at the point where I first met them through Peel - on the true crimes  set to music spookiness of Sacrificial Shack (which should have been blogged about here in its own right rather than as an appendix to an inferior piece of music) - they had moved beyond that hybrid into something more noisily claustrophobic.  Like Sonic Youth, their guitar sound can be described as an angry wasp buzzing inside your ear-drums.  Despite the compressed sound, this is music that attacks the listener while looking to climb inside you  Even the guitar solo eschews virtuosity in favour of the sonic equivalent of a Siren  trying to aurally suck the listener into those Death Row eyes and in Bliss Blood, Pain Teens had a front-woman cut straight out of the Kim Gordon mould of bored, sensual danger.  If they were going to share a split single together, then I would hope Death Row Eyes Would pair up with Pacific Coast Highway.

Pain Teens released most of their music through their own Anomie Records label, but Death Row Eyes caught the wave that was crashing over early 90s US guitar music and was issued via Sub Pop.
After Pain Teens disbanded in the mid-90s, Bliss Blood stepped away from noise rock and moved into ukelele-led retro jazz.  She also composed songs for a 2012 production of The Comedy of Errors by the Independent Shakespeare Company of Los Angeles.

The nearest we got to anything like this in Falmouth Community School’s production was me sneaking my harmonica onstage for the pre-curtain scene.  Even then, I bottled out of playing it too loudly.  Probably because I couldn’t actually play it.



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