The world of social media has been a part of the modern world now for over two decades — sort of weird when one thinks about it, especially for someone like myself who as a young adult was networked within a world before social media really existed. Sure, the internet was active and in its infancy and I could then go onto really basic websites done in HTML tables and look at tiny JPEGs of bands with very little options for audio, or I could write emails to people with very hard to remember email addresses (ones that usually contained the tilde character:~) but most interactions were still done over a landline phone, or in person. One had to go to live music shows to figure out actually find out what was currently happening in the world of underground music.
The first “social media” site I remember frequenting was a simple and crude site called Makeout Club, back in 1999, which was run by one (if not both) of the folks that now run the popular Dais Records. The name of the site was a slight misnomer, as the function of the site was less about “hooking up” but more about indie, punk and hardcore kids connecting online. Profiles were as simple as one profile photo, a brief bio, what bands you were into and then listing a person’s AOL or MSN Messenger handle.
From there came Friendster, and then the explosion of MySpace (which only lasted for about five years, which seems like a short time), then Facebook, and so on.
Instagram caught on a bit later in the 2010s and with its focus more on images and photos, and with that over time it started bringing out photographers from the shadows that would use the platform to post fantastic photos they had in their archives. In my early years I would be fascinated by photos I came across of live bands I was into, that captured an unreal energy — almost like a painting, or some classic, timeless documentary photo. These photos were hard to come across at this time but started showing up decades later in a far more accessible way as these photographers documenting the underground punk/hardcore scenes since the 80s started posting their archives online. Just to rattle off a few names: photographers like Cynthia Connelly, Shawn Scallen, Jim Saah, Cindy Hicks, Jeff Winterberg and more.
I started “following” some of these photographers and it opened up a world to some images of the bands I grew up with that I’d never scene before. One renowned Washington DC photographer, Pat Graham, recently had been posting photos of a short-lived band from the same city called The Monorchid, whom I got really into around the time I moved to Vancouver (1997) that had a very short tenure (a few years?) but with members of that band coming from a long list and lineage of bands since the 80s, with their roots coming from the now well-known and very well-documented Washington DC punk scene.
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The band’s lead singer, Chris Thomson, has been in what is a long resumé of bands including the following that come off the top of my head in some rough chronological order: Ignition, Fury, Circus Lupus, Las Morditas, Skull Control, The Red Eyed Legends and Coffin Pricks — just to name a few. I sort of jacked myself into this timeline when I was a young teenager, probably around when Circus Lupus was active. At that time I was beginning a phase of heavily collecting releases from Dischord Records and the album cover for the band’s second LP, Solid Brass, standing out to me with its almost iconic cover of the band’s name and album title being etched into the metal of a non-descript Zippo-style lighter.
It’s hard to describe their music without context. First off, I always loved Chris Thomson‘s snotty, bratty and pissed off delivery of-off-the cuff and satirical lyrics that definitely is an identifiable feature of all of the bands he’s been in. Place that on top of a musical backdrop that’s a random mix of punk, math rock, prog and guitar virtuosity with an attitude that lines up with Mark E. Smith from The Fall. That isn’t really doing them justice though. All of the players in Circus Lupus were incredible, and their output caught the eye of some more well-known musicians, including iconic rocker Joan Jett who ended up producing one of the band’s singles.
With a short lived run from 1990 until 1993, eventually guitarist Chris Hamley, Bassist Seth Lorenczi and extremely underrated drummer Arika Casebolt went on to form Antimony (I have that LP and it oddly still stands up 30 years later), with Chris Thomson involved in a few short-lived projects before resurfacing with Chris Hamley in The Monorchid a few years later. Whereas there’s many similarities and style to Circus Lupus to this new project, it’s almost like the musicians of the band cleverly dug through the past annals of classic rock, surf, weirdo Americana and even perhaps bluegrass (!) — almost a no-no area for many punk and hardcore purists — and picked out elements that worked well into the strange, buzzing sound that The Monorchid cooked up for themselves. These are influences that distant band such as The Birthday Party would have tapped into, and I’m sure that members of The Monorchid were probably at least aware of that band, it not even owning some of their records.
A good number of my friends at that time were into that record with a sound that elements of it sort of ended up in the musical DNA of a band called The Measure I was starting to get involved with at the time.
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Ok — enough rambling… I pulled out the The Monorchid‘s LP Let Them Eat recently after the photographic reminder and gave it a listen and for some reason the track “Dead Signal” on side B resonated with me. The introduction to the song where the guitars and bass guitar come in over top of each other one at a time to me is a very good example of the many instances where the instruments weave together in an unexpected and interesting way. The first guitar enters with a wire-y almost arpeggiating phrase that seems like it’s in one key. Then the second guitar, on a far less active pick-up, chops in on the quarter notes underneath using notes that frame the first guitar in a somewhat different key. Then finally, Andy Coronado’s slightly distorted, rumbling bass line drops in underneath playing a run of notes in yet what seems to be another different key but the instruments all work together like well-oiled machinery in a way that seems like only a band like The Monorchid could pull off.
This passage eventually switches to a more uniform, classic punk inspired riff which brings everything into more simpler clarity, with Coronado’s bass line from the previous part continuing on, making more “sense” with the guitars in this part.
If anything, whenever I listen to their tracks, even years later, I’m always picking up cool little details in the arrangements I never clocked before. There’s a lot of really clever guitar passages throughout this release and the tracks definitely stand out as unique to one another.
After this album the band released 1998’s Who Put Out The Fire? on the reknowned Chicago label Touch And Go and then sort of imploded, with Thomson moving onto Skull Control and various members continuing on in their endless chain of short lived bands. In 2001 or 2002 the band Glass Candy (who may have still been called Glass Candy And The Shattered Theatre at that point) played a small pub show in Vancouver and I seem to remember clocking that Andy Coronado was filling in the bass guitar duties on that tour.
I think Let Them Eat is one of those “out of print” numbers these days, perhaps lurking around still on Discogs or the back room of a mail order record distro somewhere, but the follow-up Who Put Out The Fire? is still out there, even on BandCamp.