We’re now coming to the end of that nether region of time that happens between Christmas and New Years — arguably two of the most monumental holidays of the year in the western world — a short six days when routines seem to be thrown out the window somewhat. Some of my Glaswegian friends jokingly refer to this period crudely as The Taint, whereas I’ve noted some friends of mine in Europe referring to this more elegantly as “the period in between years”. Many people I know for the most part are off work over this period, or away from home, or returning to their place of origin to spend time with friends and family.
A couple of days ago the underground cult club night So Low occurred here in Glasgow, which was previously several times a year before the times of Covid but now a singular annual event that happens within this strange period. It brought out many old friends and acquaintances I hadn’t seen for long periods of time for a night of darker synth, EBM and electronic punk sounds in a dark, ominously lit basement club that saw many of those in attendance filling out the dance floor until the dim hours of the morning.
At one point I was slightly surprised to hear the track “I Will Refuse” by the group Pailhead pumping through the club’s PA, whipping the dancefloor into an uptempo fury. It’s a track that I’ve never really heard live on a dancefloor, perhaps due to it being in such a speedy tempo that it would better suit a punk/hardcore gig than one of a more of a stomping, 110-120 BPM number that most EBM (electronic body music) seems to most commonly sit in.
It’s also a track that comes from a group that has had some influence in my life for a very long time, especially in my teenage years in the 1990s. Being a massive Fugazi fan during this time, and having a sponge for a brain during a massive period of development during that occurs in one’s “coming of age”, I was at this point feverishly seeking out this band’s “family tree” of related projects during this time: Embrace, Rites Of Spring, Egghunt and pretty much anything related to Washington DC’s Dischord Records as my thirst for anything related to punk, hardcore and post-hardcore.
Oddly enough I first came across Pailhead by way of a far more obscure band that was somewhat local to where I lived at the time called Ninth Hour. They were an anarcho-crust hardcore punk band from a city on Vancouver Island called Nanaimo and were mainly active in the early 1990s. There’s very little information about them online, let alone any music, with exception of one track I’ve posted below called “Police State” with a rather entertaining Mister Rogers sample that precedes the track. On one of their early 90s demo tapes they did a straight up cover of Pailhead‘s “I Will Refuse” and for a short time in my early teens I thought this track was one of that band’s original songs.
Soon thereafter while ingesting most things Fugazi and DC-related I came across Pailhead through an older friend of mine and their EP Trait — released in 1988 which compiles all of their singles — which I latched onto really quickly. Around this time many of my teenage friends were also into Ministry’s A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste and ΚΕΦΑΛΗΞΘ (also known more simply as Psalm 69) that had came out in the few years that proceeded that time. At this point it would still be a few years until I discovered Ministry’s earlier works, including their synthpop début With Sympathy.
Being aware of both the backgrounds of Fugazi‘s Ian Mackaye and Ministry‘s Al Jourgensen I was also fascinated at the pairing of these two iconoclastic musicians and their very different backgrounds — especially that MacKaye was pegged as the figurehead of the straight edge and DIY movements in North America and Jourgensen in the murky, hedonistic underworld that was the heyday of Wax Trax. This was all pre-internet so unless any backstory was buried in some print publication somewhere, one wasn’t really going to find out answers to this strange pairing immediately. These answers sort of came to me later as the internet became more of a day-to-day tool for information.
The track “I Will Refuse” itself works on “loud/quiet” dynamics that would be taken up by countless post-hardcore bands in the decade to follow, building up tension to finally blow out in the “choruses” of the song — full out power chord thrash but with an industrial spin by way of drum machines and sampled metal sounds in the quiet parts, which to me almost sound like a field recording from a sheet metal manufacturing plant.
Despite there being no actual synths on this track, and indeed the rest of this project’s output, Pailhead for me at the time represented a more electronic end of the spectum — at least as far as more “rock/punk” music at the time with its use of programmed drums and samples. Other bands I was aware of at this time adding these elements into their mainly guitar-oriented sound would be Godflesh, Green Magnet School and a few Wax Trax bands I was familiar with at the time.
Although “I Will Refuse” is the track that Pailhead was most known for, my favourite from that EP was “Ballad” — a more melodic and longing sounding piece with some guitar work that might be more reminiscent of early U2. There was also “Anthem”, with a plodding, rumbling baseline over a syncopated drum pattern, resulting in what sounds like a march of the cyborgs in a labyrinthine 5/4 time signature.
As I was totally emersed in guitar-driven post-hardcore for these years, there was still some interest from myself in electronic sounds which stemmed from synth pop and film soundtracks from the 1980s I was interested in as a kid. During my time making a racket in some of the first bands I was in, I would experiment with some “industrial” sounds on an old family Tandy computer at the time which had an AdLib soundcard that offered a variety of paper-thin sounding FM-synthesis based sounds at a very low bit rate. Some of these recordings made it onto a cassette tape I would bounce down to by plugging in earbud headphones into the back of the computer and then tape the headphones over the built-in microphone of a Sony portable stereo (ghetto blaster) that was laying around the family home. Needless to say those recordings sounded terrible as a result and that master tape eventually got lost into the ether somewhere — likely in the “all things must go” period before moving over to the UK in the late 2000s.
A few years after those experiments my interests started to slide into synth oriented sounds, mainly due to underground bands at the time like Six Finger Satellite, The VSS and The Audience which would then in turn open the floodgates for me going into my final teen years and getting emersed in first wave post-punk and synth sounds.
Overall “I Will Refuse” and Trait still have holding power, and even 30+ years later it’s one I love to listen to here and there and bust it out on the dancefloor on the occasions I DJ to add something folks may have not heard before into the mix.