KILLED BY
9V BATTERIES / JOLLY GOODS – split 7”
(7”,
Siluh/Louisville)
Two young bands, one from Austria and the other from Germany, that have all that it
takes to go far combined on one little disc. Unfortunately, the seven inch
single is really going out of style, there are some people who claim that
they don’t even have a record player anymore, while others are proud of
the fact that they carry ohgodsomany gigabytes of music everywhere they go.
(I wonder how much they listen to? As if the amount of music would make them
better listeners…) I melancholically remember the days when a band tried
to get a seven inch single out because that was the first step to real
stardom, (Around here somewhere I have one of the first singles released by
Oasis, get my drift?), a calling card for touring, record deals and
interviews. Nowadays, the seven inch single is a lover’s task undertaken
by bands that like guitars and dancefloors and scourge record bins at
fleamarkets. Ah, well, let’s get on with this, there is no use dwelling in
the past and childhood photographs, is there?
Killed by 9V batteries have gained some fame around the
country with features in all major alternative media outlets, and have
probably been downloaded from the internet quite a few times. Theirs is a
kind of melodic noiserock that is at the same time crunchy and mellow,
trashy and refined. We used to call that indie-rock back then, when there
were labels that wrote noise in big letters behind their logo. It has enough
parts of Dinosaur Jr in it to be nice. I missed them the first time around
somehow, when they released their debut album, and I don’t want to fall
into the usual music journalist trap of praising the follow up when the
genius first album was missed, never minding how the second step really
sounds. But “how to mute ourselves” is a cool song and being followed by
over minute of guitar feedback and amplifier humming is really a nice
juxtaposition: first a nice noise rock song, then a nice noise drone track.
Probably both too short, but so is life. If you liked Everton, you’re
gonna love them as well. Local bands always have the upside of the
possibility that they might play in the pub in your town as well.
The Jolly Goods on the other side (pun intended) I have
never heard of before but their two songs really grip my spine and I spittle
with glee a mumbled “me likey.” The duo has two songs on here called
“too dumb to love” and “the boredom song”. They play that great,
trashy and distorted rock vision that made the Royal Trux big and then
destroyed them (along with the stock broking and heroin addictions). With
the same mix of lo-fi attitude and refined production ideas. The same trashy
appeal of unedited emotions. “too dumb to love” works itself into a
beautiful frenzy that starts with the observation that “people are too
dumb to love” and ends with the scream that she broke his and he broke her
heart and whatnot. It is hard to work out who did what and whose fault is
where, but that probably portraits the dilemma of intimate, inter-personal
relationships better than a lot of words. The two don’t care much about
traditional song structures or dynamics, but that adds to their style. I
like female singers that really scream into the mike, that’s cool. And
“the boredom song” is not boring at all. It slaps you around the ears,
more like.
Back in the day somebody would have opened or closed a
review like this with the remark that split singles are a nice way to be
introduced to new bands. That is still true, but it doesn’t work that
anymore. I bet both bands have their own websites and myspace-sites, too, so
just shmoogle them. They are worth it.
