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Harry Pussy, "You'll Never Play This Town Again"
Miami's Harry Pussy combined the raw, undisciplined approach of old school punk rock, the atonal harshness of noise, and the micro-track lengths of classic grindcore into a muddy mess of distortion and chaos. An early precursor to the noise/rock vibe Wolf Eyes has been pushing, HP stayed more in the realms of dirty punk rock rather than the more electronic inspired work of the Michigan Boys, with the exception of the dirty analog synth of "MS20", which apes any noise band at their own game.
Most of the tracks here follow the same formula of sloppy rapid-fire drumming, improbably disjointed but somehow consistent guitar playing and shrieking vocals, all of which is slapped together in an overdriving, clippy mess of music. While bearing little direct physical resemblance to the genre's current form, the sound is pure punk, and beats that earlier vaginally named band Pussy Galore at their own game. While most stick to those short grindcore-esque blasts, there is some discernable differences among tracks: "Peace Of My Ass" is a track of pretentious spoken word over top a buried drum track that, thankfully, ends in laughter to indicate that it was not a half-assed Patti Smith attempt. "Mandolin" is one of the few tracks that cross the three-minute mark into high end cymbal racket and guitar attacks that are more noise than punk by far.
The disc is split approximately half and half from studio and live recordings, but the lo-fi recording quality as a whole makes the designation irrelevant. On the live tracks, the retention of the between-track dialogue from the original performances gives a great contrast to hear: Adris Hoyos' calm stage banter and announcements of the upcoming track couldn't be more far removed from the uvula ripping screams that immediately follow. The single tracked performance "Live at Salon Zwerge" in its entirety nicely summarizes the live material here, a clattering mess of feedback, drums and screams that mostly resembles an extended improvisation of "Mandolin" that, for all its length, doesn’t get tedious or dull.
One thing to be considered is that there’s a great deal of redundancy on here. Being mostly live recordings and rehearsal tracks, some songs appear in multiple forms. While it’s great to have such a sprawling collection of all of these tracks, I'm not sure if there really needs to be five different versions of "Smash The Mirror" and four takes of "Chuck!" Hardcore HP fans will be glad to have each and everyone of these takes, but the more casual fan will probably be happy to just skip around and dabble here and there. Listening to in a single sitting might be a bit ennui inducing, but reproducing the tracklists of the original vinyls or playing passages here and there will more than satisfy the need for a scum rock enema.
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