LYSSA - amoral

(CD, silver rocket)

Party like its 1986. Chicago. A dhingy club filled with people in flannel shirts and work boots, the smell of beer and sweat. Cigarette smoke to the ceiling and sawdust on the floor. Dave Sardy from Barkmarket just left the stage waving ominous handsigns to the audience, making room for local heroes Vertigo and then on for the blast of the mighty Helmet. No one is talking about major label contracts in these days. But instead of the line up, there is a change and surprisingly a band from the Czech Republic gets on stage to give everyone a taste of what is to come 20 years ahead in the future. People in the audience instantly plan to form bands on the influence of what they hear, and will call them Hammerhead, Guzzard or Party Diktator. Sardy and Page hectically start to conference on how to incorporate this new thing into their music, and while one decides to try to find the perfect psychotic guitar riff, the other goes for minimalism in heaviness. An hour later, the dust settles to the floor, people look around in bewilderment, not knowing what has happened. A young dude with the nickname “Haze” decides to start a record label called Invertebrate Speed (but he will change that soon enough). The surprise band leaves the room never to be heard of again. Time travellers? Space cadets? Noise rock prophets?

Seriously now, when I first heard “amoral” I was amazed at the power and crispness of this otherwise quite old fashioned kind of noise rock. Remember, old fashioned is a good thing when it comes to noise rock. Otherwise we would be talking sissy shit like Electrosix or Ladytron. No, Lyssa hit hard and straight and target the centrepoints. And it is this kind of heavy punch that I have been missing for so long. All out blasts of guitar noise aplenty in these months, but almost all of them miss the control that makes the power so much more concentrated and, ahm, powerful. If that reminds me of one of the best times I have head, back then when Noise Rock was my way of life, that is all my own fault. (And boring you people to death with stories of that time as well, I know that too.)

Lyssa also possess a friendly down to earth-ness, that ranges from the simple but effective guitar riffs to the inclusion of football speaker recordings (around the song “Armando”), and even though I have no clue at all what they sing about, because the lyrics are all in Czech, I would guess at the trifles and tribulations of everyday life in a society turning cold and heartless while capitalism rises. I could be completely wrong, though, but the way the singer screams and spouts with energy and intensity over the big and heavy arrangement, I just can’t imagine him singing about flowers, rainy afternoons or lost friendship. Oh, maybe I should include lost friendship again, if the reason for the loss was a violent death, a fistfight over an unworthy woman or something with a truck.

After all they aren’t as backwards oriented as I made them out to be. Their vision of noise rock is a quite traditional one, but I can name you half a dozen bands from the last years (most of them from Germany – oh wherever did you go wrong Blackmail?) that tried something similar and weren’t half as successful or interesting. My guess, that is because Lyssa have really cleaned up their act, caring for every little sound but also let things blow they way they come at times. Too much control isn’t any good either, especially when there are so many nifty things available in the studio, that you might want to try out. That usually makes for bad records. Lyssa have reduced themselves to their simple drums / bass / guitar / vocals / lots of amps and effects approach and see what they can get from there.

My brother was looking for a design to be spraypainted on the tank of his motorcycle (a Ducati! I don’t know what that means, but he is rather proud of it…) and I suggested the inlay totem you see when you fold out the cover. It includes the eye of god, an angel with a sexdoll mouth, a crown on a boars head, tits, a fish, a virgin heart, triple dick, a fish, a sack, football shoes and a disfigured head. He declined without looking at me too much.