Two tracks out of three played by Peel on this show from Pyloric Waves*, a compilation album featuring bands from North Carolina, distributed on D-Tox. Shiny Beast and Picasso Trigger represented some of the sounds of Raleigh. Current Peel obsession, Polvo, from Chapel Hill, also featured, but I passed on including their track, Wild Turkey.
Of the two of them, Texasatan is the more musically accomplished. In 99 seconds, it packs in orthodox rock, thrash and funk, all while working to the ethos that your lyrics can be as disturbing as you want them to be, providing that you make the music around it catchy and surprising. The blank voiced vocal, pondering aloud the likelihood of surviving a self-administered operation, takes on the quality of an exhausted Jesus, labouring in the wilderness - the inaudible, shredded vocal between 0:40 and 0:49 sounds like the Devil encouraging him to an act of self harm. The funk rock break over the last 30 seconds sounds like someone trying to clear a distracted mind, while the ripping sound effects either adds a further layer of metaphor to stripping away un-necessary thoughts or, more disturbingly, tries to convey the start of the self-operation.
Or perhaps Jesus just ripped his trousers.
Picasso Trigger’s track, Queenie, may lack musical savvy, but it’s probably the one I’ll remember most when looking back over these tracks in a year’s time. It appears to be a great example of what I call Heathers-rock, in that it takes female conflict/envy as its theme, in particular the importance given to popularity and homage paid to girls at the top of the social pecking order. I’m guessing on this a bit, given that, again, the vocal isn’t always clear enough to make out what is being sung**. My supposition is that singer, Kathy Poindexter is addressing the song to a popular girl that she helped to make:
When your name is in lights.
Will you remember me.
I’ll cross your stomping ground.
And touch your royalty.
What really comes across in this song is how poisonous these positions of social eminence are. Queenie drips with paranoia (Don’t hate me), threat (Try to tie my hair and I will trip you), mockery - in these types of songs, the word “pretty” always comes across as an insult. Most of all, Queenie emphasises the essential transient loneliness which comes with being a venerated figure, especially if you’re a girl:
When you sit on the throne.
You must feel very high.
You must feel like a queen.
Alone and left to dry.
*Sounds very grand but just another example of American rock label scatology, given that it’s taken from the word, pylorus, which is a small muscle/valve connecting the lower intestine to the duodenum. I suppose calling the album something like, Shitgate, would have put people off.
**The vocals didn’t get any easier to decipher when Picasso Trigger performed the song as part of their final gig on 16 June 1995 (starts at 4:10).
All lyrics are copyright of their authors.
Videos courtesy of Mars Sigler (Shiny Beast) and Dream of the 90s (Picasso Trigger).
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