Thinking about this now I wonder if your greatest talent was extending to us a means of making our longings visceral things. Songs are portals into places of experience and your songs are nearly always experiences of desire.
Sci-fi and horror and punk being double edged swords of escape / confrontation, the vehicle of your songs were always taking us somewhere safe to do our most dangerous battles. A sonic labyrinth to face our spiritual Minotaurs.
I've been pretty blown away in revisiting these songs to find SO MUCH subtext. Monsters and Jesus are on the surface. There's a whole lot more roiling beneath.
Man, Jimmy, you are one of the most solid readers of this material. Thank you for that. You and a few others (e.g. Hugh) keep making me see new things here. I'm glad you feel longing and the visceral in this stuff. I do too. That's so insightful about the songs being portals of simultaneous escape and confrontation.
It's got me also wondering to what degree these sonic labyrinths express experiences of desire *as* the monster, the Minotaur, the thing born of hybridity just following its unique appetites, surviving its use-value as sport and punishment, trying to outwit some thread-crafty Theseus. Or am I just always trying to kill these beautiful monsters in my songs?🤪 (Of course, battling our monsters is definitely a necessity in many cases. There are monsters and there are monsters.)
1) Probably for the best that you didn't know about horror punk or align the band with it. So much of that genre is 99% copying Misfits songs and style. The various Misfits' members themselves weren't doing a particularly compelling version of copying the Misfits' style by that point; I certainly didn't need to see bands with lesser chops try it.
2) There is a freeware game called Clone Hero on PC that is, essentially, a Guitar Hero or Rock Band game that, if someone has the skills to program the button presses that correspond to a particular song, anyone can upload any song for play in the game. That is not my particular skill set of programming, but don't think I haven't searched to see if someone else has uploaded any Blaster. Alas, they have not. But, in theory, the possibility exists!
3) I really like Creature Feature musically a lot. There's a lot of variety throughout your catalog, but there's a lot of variety just WITHIN this one song, if that makes sense.
4) These are some of your more compelling lyrics on Disasteroid, because they trust the audience to understand the intention. There is no "Get it, all that stuff before was about Jesus/sin/flesh!" turn.
4a) I am a sucker for an internal rhyme. I love how the rhythm of the words shake up the flow of a song (or poem). Our brain is conditioned to expect a rhyming couplet and instead two words within a single line rhyme and it's like a dopamine rush because it happened faster than expected. Or maybe that's just me? Anyway: "It's scary and I'm wary" and ESPECIALLY "My ears are beady, hers are 3D"...YES. LOVE THESE.
5) Since you linked a clip, let's talk about Cornerstone. What were those shows like as a smaller band? I don't recall what year it was, but at some point around that era, I saw Havalina at Cornerstone playing to, I don't know, a thousand people? 2000? It was a lot. One week later, I went to see them again back home, and there were 8 people in attendance. When you're a band who plays mostly small venues and suddenly once a year the crowd has swelled by 100x, is it scary? Exhilirating? Do you tend to play better? Is the next show after that always a letdown or depressing?
3) Cool, I honestly hadn't noticed that very strongly until I was combing through it for this post. It's especially that bridge or breakdown that does it for me.
4) I completely forgot to mention this was another mercifully Jesus-less track haha! (Along with King of the Beach, for example.)
4a) I've been blown away by some folks actually enjoying some of the lyrical play from these old songs. I was just riffing, no plan to use one rhyme scheme or another, and often didn't really think of that as a skill or talent. As with so many things I say about all this I fear, it sounds like a humble brag. But it just happens to be the case. I was focused more on content and imagery. Rhyme seemed like a workman-like requirement for the thing being built (a song) and I found it the easiest part to do—and fun! But your comments and others are helping me appreciate some of this stuff that way. I really like it!
5) Yes! To all of that. We loved it. There was a nervous thrill to it. We came to expect it after a few years, but never really took it for granted. That's why we'd sometimes say, even from the stage, that C-stone was our home town crowd. We had a LOT of awesome shows outside Cornerstone and a few here and there that nearly rivalled it in size of attendance. But occasionally a show not long after it that was particularly uneventful felt like a pale comparison if not an all out letdown. But *size* of crowd had almost nothing to do with it. It was about atmosphere and response, what both the band and audience were giving off on a particular night. Some of our smallest shows (say, a dozen people) were some of the most electric. That happened multiple times! I remember both a basement show and a garage show that were like this. Couldn't have been more than 20 people at each, in an extremely tight space in one case and an emptier seeming space in another. They were each magic. Hard to say why that is exactly.
The one time I had the opportunity to see Blaster outside of Cornerstone or Evansville, I missed 95% of it. You guys were touring with the Huntingtons. I went to college in North Carolina and the tour had a show in Myrtle Beach, SC. In those pre-internet/pre-GPS days, the extent of my preparation was to glance at a (paper!) road atlas and be like, okay, cool, Myrtle Beach is maybe an hour away. Turned out it was closer to 3 hours. I walked in halfway through your last song. My recollection was there were only a handful of people, but the ones that were there were kind of into it. Still regret my poor planning on that one! I would have been one of the electric ones! I was (and still am) a pretty reserved show-goer, but your band was one of the few that brought out the primal edge hidden inside me.
Thinking about this now I wonder if your greatest talent was extending to us a means of making our longings visceral things. Songs are portals into places of experience and your songs are nearly always experiences of desire.
Sci-fi and horror and punk being double edged swords of escape / confrontation, the vehicle of your songs were always taking us somewhere safe to do our most dangerous battles. A sonic labyrinth to face our spiritual Minotaurs.
I've been pretty blown away in revisiting these songs to find SO MUCH subtext. Monsters and Jesus are on the surface. There's a whole lot more roiling beneath.
Man, Jimmy, you are one of the most solid readers of this material. Thank you for that. You and a few others (e.g. Hugh) keep making me see new things here. I'm glad you feel longing and the visceral in this stuff. I do too. That's so insightful about the songs being portals of simultaneous escape and confrontation.
It's got me also wondering to what degree these sonic labyrinths express experiences of desire *as* the monster, the Minotaur, the thing born of hybridity just following its unique appetites, surviving its use-value as sport and punishment, trying to outwit some thread-crafty Theseus. Or am I just always trying to kill these beautiful monsters in my songs?🤪 (Of course, battling our monsters is definitely a necessity in many cases. There are monsters and there are monsters.)
1) Probably for the best that you didn't know about horror punk or align the band with it. So much of that genre is 99% copying Misfits songs and style. The various Misfits' members themselves weren't doing a particularly compelling version of copying the Misfits' style by that point; I certainly didn't need to see bands with lesser chops try it.
2) There is a freeware game called Clone Hero on PC that is, essentially, a Guitar Hero or Rock Band game that, if someone has the skills to program the button presses that correspond to a particular song, anyone can upload any song for play in the game. That is not my particular skill set of programming, but don't think I haven't searched to see if someone else has uploaded any Blaster. Alas, they have not. But, in theory, the possibility exists!
3) I really like Creature Feature musically a lot. There's a lot of variety throughout your catalog, but there's a lot of variety just WITHIN this one song, if that makes sense.
4) These are some of your more compelling lyrics on Disasteroid, because they trust the audience to understand the intention. There is no "Get it, all that stuff before was about Jesus/sin/flesh!" turn.
4a) I am a sucker for an internal rhyme. I love how the rhythm of the words shake up the flow of a song (or poem). Our brain is conditioned to expect a rhyming couplet and instead two words within a single line rhyme and it's like a dopamine rush because it happened faster than expected. Or maybe that's just me? Anyway: "It's scary and I'm wary" and ESPECIALLY "My ears are beady, hers are 3D"...YES. LOVE THESE.
5) Since you linked a clip, let's talk about Cornerstone. What were those shows like as a smaller band? I don't recall what year it was, but at some point around that era, I saw Havalina at Cornerstone playing to, I don't know, a thousand people? 2000? It was a lot. One week later, I went to see them again back home, and there were 8 people in attendance. When you're a band who plays mostly small venues and suddenly once a year the crowd has swelled by 100x, is it scary? Exhilirating? Do you tend to play better? Is the next show after that always a letdown or depressing?
1) Agreed.
2) Haha, wow!
3) Cool, I honestly hadn't noticed that very strongly until I was combing through it for this post. It's especially that bridge or breakdown that does it for me.
4) I completely forgot to mention this was another mercifully Jesus-less track haha! (Along with King of the Beach, for example.)
4a) I've been blown away by some folks actually enjoying some of the lyrical play from these old songs. I was just riffing, no plan to use one rhyme scheme or another, and often didn't really think of that as a skill or talent. As with so many things I say about all this I fear, it sounds like a humble brag. But it just happens to be the case. I was focused more on content and imagery. Rhyme seemed like a workman-like requirement for the thing being built (a song) and I found it the easiest part to do—and fun! But your comments and others are helping me appreciate some of this stuff that way. I really like it!
5) Yes! To all of that. We loved it. There was a nervous thrill to it. We came to expect it after a few years, but never really took it for granted. That's why we'd sometimes say, even from the stage, that C-stone was our home town crowd. We had a LOT of awesome shows outside Cornerstone and a few here and there that nearly rivalled it in size of attendance. But occasionally a show not long after it that was particularly uneventful felt like a pale comparison if not an all out letdown. But *size* of crowd had almost nothing to do with it. It was about atmosphere and response, what both the band and audience were giving off on a particular night. Some of our smallest shows (say, a dozen people) were some of the most electric. That happened multiple times! I remember both a basement show and a garage show that were like this. Couldn't have been more than 20 people at each, in an extremely tight space in one case and an emptier seeming space in another. They were each magic. Hard to say why that is exactly.
The one time I had the opportunity to see Blaster outside of Cornerstone or Evansville, I missed 95% of it. You guys were touring with the Huntingtons. I went to college in North Carolina and the tour had a show in Myrtle Beach, SC. In those pre-internet/pre-GPS days, the extent of my preparation was to glance at a (paper!) road atlas and be like, okay, cool, Myrtle Beach is maybe an hour away. Turned out it was closer to 3 hours. I walked in halfway through your last song. My recollection was there were only a handful of people, but the ones that were there were kind of into it. Still regret my poor planning on that one! I would have been one of the electric ones! I was (and still am) a pretty reserved show-goer, but your band was one of the few that brought out the primal edge hidden inside me.