It was almost a couple of months back during the break over the holiday season that after a rather eventful weekend it was a quiet night on my own I had an impulse to listen to a certain type of record — something fun with some razor-sharp, discordant guitar work. There were a few records that instantly jumped to mind from “back in the day” that were poised in the record shelf, ready to go. The album Let Them Eat by The Monorchid came to mind — a band whom I’ve written about before. Or perhaps The Pigeon Is the Most Popular Bird by Six Finger Satellite — a band whom I’m yet to cover on these pages. I then pulled out an LP copy of a record that I had owned since around the time I moved to Vancouver in 1997, and that being the first album by the New Jersey post-hardcore band Rye Coalition which seemed to be poised to scratch that particular itch at that point in time.
The record, oddly titled Hee Saw Dhuh Kaet (an inflected spelling of “He saw the cat”), was released in 1997 on Gern Blandsten, a New Jersey label started in the early 90s by Charles Maggio from the hardcore band Rorschach — a band that also had tenure from Nick Forte who later played in Beautiful Skin who have been covered here. Gern Blandsten in its first decade already had laid down the line in terms of its experimentations with different genres, from the noisy hardcore and post-punk of bands such as 1.6 Band, Garden Variety and Radio 4, then over to left-field hip hop such as Dälek all the way to the theatrical cabaret of The World/Inferno Friendship Society.
This first album by Rye Coalition was a touchstone from the earlier days of that label, when it was still more focused on documenting all of the young hardcore bands playing basements and dingy venues in NYC and the surrounding areas. The band itself comprised of a group of young friends — mostly of Italian-American decent — who were thriving off of the energy of DIY and house shows happening in New Jersey at the time and funneling that into what became a few explosive first releases by the band in the form of 7″ singles such as Teen-Age Dance Session (with a nod to the influential Nation Of Ulysses) and split LPs with bands such as a the likes of Maximillian Colby (1) and Karp.
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I seem to remember Rye Coalition playing some basement show in Vancouver in the late 90s that friends I knew would reflect on for the months (years?) to come. I don’t remember when or where this was (maybe it didn’t happen as memories get washed out over the passing of time?) it all happened before a time when the internet was used to document such things.
Putting this record on the turnable after what seemed like ages instantly brought forward the pummeling drum intro to the opening track “The Higher The Hair, The Closer To God” — the drum sound here having a massive, booming and cavernous quality. There’s nods to the drum production of someone like Steve Albini here albeit with more of a curious sound due to the fact that the reverb on those drums always sounded like it likely was augmented by studio effects in a way that always intrigued me.
The stinging and choppy sound of guitarist Jon Gonelli and the rumbling bass of Justin Morey come into the mix eventual coming to a breakdown later in the song where vocalist Ralph Cuseglio leads a sermon-like shout:
Strength is in the hair
Samson’s in the house
H – A – I – R
That spells ‘hair’
You know what I’m talking about
I think you know what I’m saying
If there’s one main thing I got after this recent listen is the colourful imagery and observations of the fringes of urban life from the lyrics of Cuseglio, of which there’s other gems as such throughout the record like the opener of side B, “The Buzzard”, and it’s wirey/boozy feel played out in a 3/4 time signature with its shoutable chorus “You’re disgusting! You’re disgusting!” It also contains one of my favourite lyrical lines on the record:
You dress up every day of the year as a clown except on Halloween
And I said, “Hеy man, that’s a nice costume”
There’s something about this era of post-hardcore — and likely much more in the bands that followed in its wake — where this use of a 3/4 time signature is deployed. Shotmaker worked a lot of its tracks into a pummeling 3/4 rhythm and there’s countless others that are on the periphery of my brain at the moment. As I’ve found out in my own musical experiments with Soft Riot that never made it past the finish line, this type of drumming pattern in 3/4 doesn’t really translate well to electronic music at all — well, at least broad swathes of it. In fact, I can’t even think of an instance at this point in time where I’ve heard such patterns punched out into sequencer of a drum machine. I’m thinking it works in the context of the playing style of whatever live drummer might try it out.
Getting back to Hee Saw Dhuh Kaet, I’m thinking my favourite track off this record — and the one that lingered in my head the longest — is the closing track on side A with the odd title of “White Jesus of 114th Street” which for the most part is — at least to me — perhaps the most “straight forward” and “catchy” track off this album. Starting off with an almost military snare drum, the cutting guitar pattern — as well as the rest of the best — jumps in, working in a number of discordant, perhaps near unison notes, it breaks out in the chorus with the following lyrics:
I got that something you can’t see behind the goldmine
Kitty cat, where’s the money at?
I got what you can’t reach, it’s burning inside me
Kitty cat, where’s the money at?
However, for me this track’s magic trick might be what we call here in the UK the middle eight — known to most other anglophile speakers as the bridge. The verse-chorus pattern that the listener gets familiar with in this song suddenly drops out to just Gonelli’s lone guitar in a shrieking rhythmic pattern, again in a 3/4 time signature. As a listener you’re sort of taken off guard with the sudden shift in tack and mood as the momentum drops out into a massive exercise in foreshadowing, which opens up to a big reveal when finally the rest of the band drops in hard on this, making for a rather epic new chapter in the song. The intertwining guitars are full-on and in fully tense yet machine-like cacophony with the bass line rumbling and moving through a procession of notes and fret slides. Then everything drops out again to that initial guitar riff that started the bridge — and then back into the familiar verse-chorus structure that kicked this track off in the first place.
It makes for a rather dramatic track in the end, and an approach to songwriting that I appreciate — especially after moving around in the circles of the underground post-punk/scene for quite a while now where unexpected changes in arrangements and tone within any given song are far more rare, especially given that an increasing number of acts in that scene tend to opt for more techno-based arrangements, which don’t really move around between different parts that much.
There’s also a clip below of a performance of this track, “White Jesus of 114th Street”, from a later period — or even a one-off performance after the band broke up initially — from 2011 in New Jersey featuring two drummers which is rather high energy.
After Hee Saw Dhuh Kaet, two years later the band released their 1999 album The Lipstick Game, which continues to refine the sound of this first album yet perhaps with slightly more classic rock embellishments. This second album I know is a strong favourite of old friends of mine who discovered the band around the same time I did, and remains a favourite of theirs to this day. It is indeed a good album but I definitely feel more connected to the slightly more distressed and high octane feel of this first album.
From there moving on into the new millenium, the band would release two more albums — On Top (2002) and Curses (2006) — that saw the band shift more out of their noisy hardcore roots and more taking up cues from garage and classic rock, shifting their genre grouping towards what more broadly populat garage/indie bands were doing at the time. Admittedly I lost interest here — less so about the music of the two aforementioned albums but my own stylistic shifts that dove more into things like post-punk, synth, EBM and that sort of thing.
It is of interest to note here that with the lead-up to the band’s 2006 album Curses, the band became entangled in the world of major labels and at the same time had connected up with Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters as a producer for this record. Apparently Grohl at this point was a massive fan of the band, so much so that Foo Fighters took Rye Coalition as openers for a tour around this time. And with all the action Rye were having around this time and their trials and tribulations with the world of major labels, a documentary would be produced called The Hard Luck Five which you can “rent” (depending which country you’re in) from YouTube here. There’s also a trailer for this below.
Further details regarding this era of the band, as well as the origins of the band, its members and the DIY house show scene in New Jersey were they got started is covered in a somewhat recent podcast interview with singer Ralph Cuseglio by This Was The Scene — a podcast interviewing musicians from the late 90s/early 20s indie/hardcore scene — that you can listen to in the clip below. Cuseglio comes across as warm, articulate and overall humbled and grateful that the band got to do what they did, going far beyond the band’s initial goals of just playing a show!
Despite breaking up at the end of the naughties, it would seem the band is back at it again in some form or another, having self-released a 7″ single last year called Paid In Full last year contains two songs which are covers of two bands they love — Drive Like Jehu (“Bullet Train To Vegas”) and Shellac (“Wingwalker”) — bands whose frontmen (Rick Froberg and Steve Albini) had passed away in recent years and covered to say “thanks for the music”. It would seem the band’s legacy has been cemented with their fans even to this day, as all copies of that recent 7″ are now completely sold out!
1 It’s only in the last couple of years that it’s dawned on me that this band took their name from actor Maxwell Caulfield‘s character in the show The Colbys, which was a short-lived American soap opera that ran from 1985-1987 and was ultimately an ill-fated spin-off of the popular 80s soap opera Dynasty. My partner lately has gone down a bit of a rabbit hole watching Dynasty so thus that’s how I made that connection.
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