Over the past few years my reading habits have shifted somewhat. For one, my periods of reading are generally patchy, meaning that I’ll go weeks without sitting down with a book and then have a frenzied few days where I’m powering through numerous chapters of any given book I’m reading at the time. This is all informed by the schedule of my personal and creative life, especially when co-habiting with a partner and opting to engage in that relationship at home to be social and make the best of our free time together. Other times I’ve just got so much going on that reading doesn’t clock on my radar so to speak as days tend to get filled up with any given number of things to do.
Another shift in this habit is that many of my recent reads have shifted to more non-fiction — biographies in general — that come from authors who have had some connection to the punk/hardcore scene that I was immersed in as a young ‘un, with notable reads over the past years including the wildly entertaining Mutations: The Many Strange Faces Of Hardcore Punk by the always colourful Sam McPheeters (of bands Born Against, Men’s Recovery Project, Wrangler Brutes, etc.) and a rather insightful book called From Obscurity To Oblivion: An Oral History looking into the history of legendary “prog punks” Nomeansno — from just down south where I grew up on Vancouver Island — penned by Jason Lamb with a sizeable input from the band’s founding members (and brothers), John and Rob Wright.
Another book that recently came onto my radar was Death Trip: A Post-Holocaust Psychedelic Memoir by Seth Lorinczi, who in his output as a musician included playing bass guitar the cult post-hardcore (post-punk?) band Circus Lupus from Washington DC, who were active in the early 1990s and released two — or three (see more below) — albums in their short tenure including 1992’s Super Genius and 1993’s Solid Brass, both on the renowned Dischord Records label. I got introduced to the band at a very young age shortly after Solid Brass came out, picking up the album on the only format available in the small town I lived in which was compact disc and it left an impression on me, as it did many others, so much so that there’s a newer record label using the Solid Brass name that I’ve covered in numerous entries in this Track Of The Day thingy. I found Super Genius as a vinyl LP copy a short number of years later right after I moved to Vancouver.
After that band called it quits three of the members when to form the short lived Antimony — whose sole album Phantom Itch I also somehow managed to pick up on vinyl in the 90s (the track “Red Herring” from this album included further down) — and the singer Chris Thomson went onto form The Monorchid, also covered here. Lorinczi continued on with other projects such as The Corin Tucker Band, The Quails and The Golden Bears and — as I’ve recently discovered — was in a band with Tim Green of Nation Of Ulysses back in the 80s and fresh out of the garage called Vile Cherubs, which has been a nice discovery in more recent years. It’s a cool fusion of what was going on in DC at the time musically, as well as the band’s collective love of 60s garage rock.
Now — where to start here… the book? Or a track by Circus Lupus? Let’s start with the book.
Without going into the details too much, and to give an overall summary as a teaser, Death Trip: A Post-Holocaust Psychedelic Memoir starts off with the author’s life in Portland, Oregon where Lorenczi is juggling his life being a father, being married and playing with his wife in a band and his day-to-day work working on television and advertisment soundtracks. In this part of the book it covers his issues with his state of mind, difficulties with his marriage and generally feeling “stuck” until he and his wife decide to take counselling sessions that involve using MDMA, and then from there going to ayahuasca sessions in the suburbs of Portland where essentially Lorenczi makes some headway in breaking down some of the issues he’s been dealing with. As this therapy unfolds, he starts to more and more uncover the mysteries of his family background — who were of Hungarian Jewish descent — ultimately leading to a visit to Budapest where he uncovers the dark history of his family’s survival in Budapest during the peak of World War II.
That’s a bit of a patchy summary and likely many other writers have probably summarised it better. In the last third of the book where Lorenczi heads off to Hungary, this was the part I read while flying back to Canada earlier this month to visit family and friends at home, and in a far less dramatic way I was returning to my roots as well. going back to re-connect with people I had spent far more time with in the past before I moved to the UK around twenty years ago. Whatever the vast difference is between my own visit home and Lorenczi’s journey to uncover his past in Budapest, the book resonated with me and if anything the flow of the book is very well done, making for some engaging reading.
And this comes back to this track I’ve chosen, and was the first one that popped into my head when thinking of Circus Lupus when reading the book, and that track is the second track from Solid Brass called “7x4x1”. This one will always stick in my head as upon first hearing it when the opening staccato bass guitar notes open the track, it took me a while to figure out the time signature, which is thirteen quarter note counts — otherwise three bars of 4/4 and an extra quarter note count.
Chris Hamley’s guitar work seems to work in a different key from the bass guitar in these verses and interesting to listen to, especially around the 1m10s mark where he pulls off a segment of fretboard hammer-ons that perhaps hint at a bit of the heavy metal guitar virtuosity of the 80s.
I suppose overall Circus Lupus could be lazily grouped into the whole math rock genre, but the band’s use of such off-kilter timings is far more sparsely used and subtle. If anything it’s a band comprised by musicians who started out in the punk and hardcore genres of the 1980s and moving into the next decade naturally opted to expand their musical horizons and try new things, like the majority of bands usually do.
There’s a quality to a lot of underground punk/rock recordings from this time — that being the late 90s and early 90s — that have a slight cold and brittle quality about them. This might be due to the fact that it was an era where a lot of underground studios used digital tape (DAT) and other digital processing. I might be totally off the mark here but recordings from other DC stalwarts from this time, such as Fugazi and the second album by Jawbox, Novelty, seem to share these same traits.
This isn’t a biased comment, just an observation. If anything Novelty — with it’s “colder” production — is an album where I think this trait compliments the music in a strange way, although Jawbox‘s next offering, the major label debut For Your Own Special Sweetheart, would be for most listeners a far higher watermark in recorded output for the band.
There’s one further interesting quality of “7x4x1” and with the album Solid Brass in general — which I even picked up when I was a young ‘un listening to this record in the mid-1990 — is the sound of drummer Arika Casebolt‘s kit, and in that most notably being the sound of toms. They have a full, tonal quality that ring out with sustain a bit more than the sound most drummers got out of their drumkits on recordings of this general genre at the time. It sort of brings to mind the sound of a timpani, or even a connection I’ve made more recently in that the tonal quality of those toms seems very similar to the sound a drummer like Budgie from Siouxsie And The Banshees got out of his toms, especially on albums like 1981’s Juju. A track from that album such as “Into The Light” can shed some light on this comparison I’m making. Perhaps the members of the band had this in mind when setting up the mics for recording the album.
Another track off Solid Brass, “Pop Man”, is also notable, if anything due to it’s more straight forward catchiness (relatively) and the fact that the original version of this track (see below) that appeared on the band’s self-titled 7″ single in 1992 was produced by the legendary Joan Jett, who seemed to take an interest to the band around this time, as well as other bands at the time from the Washington DC scene, even going as far to do a cover of Lungfish, a band who has been covered here before.
And one final note — as I’ve alluded to earlier in this article — Circus Lupus released two albums when they were active but last year the label L.G. Records — which I believe is run by musician Andy Coronado (The Monorchid, Skull Kontrol, Glass Candy, etc.) — released a self-titled record by Circus Lupus which compiles a number of tracks by the band recorded before their Dischord releases and from when the band was originally based in Madison WI, before they re-located back to Washington DC. I haven’t listened to this release yet, but I suppose despite it being released decades after the band broke up compiles a full extra album’s worth of material. One to add to my list I suppose!