Disasteroid (1995): Overview

A cartoonish underground melee of monstrous fun, spiritual hunger, and self-pummelling.

I probably have some things to say more generally about Blaster, but perhaps the best way to get it all going is just to start to dig into each album, as overviews and track by track. This will bring up a lot of larger themes, memories, and so on. So let’s bang in.

Thanks to Joey Jensen and Jordan Dyment for sending me photos of the tape.

Disasteroid (1995)

Overview:

As I listen to this little debut album thirty years after we recorded it, I hear a naive, joyful burst of spiritual yearning, conflict, and trauma expressed through a celebration of movie monsters, comics, and more. The album is equal parts visceral and silly, a sort of spiritual sincerity expressed through satirical gallows-humor. There’s blood and flesh (and there’ll be much more to come in subsequent releases) and longing and laughter. The album’s vigorous call to faith is bright-eyed and confident on the one hand and self-pummelling and defensive on the other. It’s a hungry record (often explicitly so), creatively and spiritually. And it’s a good time. It holds a lot of tensions.

As I recall, we recorded this over one weekend at Josh Plemon’s Room 12 home studio in Dongola, Illinois. Dave and I lived in Indianapolis, Indiana, not too far away by US driving standards. We’d been friends with the guys in Josh’s band Clay (not yet SS Bountyhunter) for a year or so. We loved Clay, both playing with them live and listening to their demos. That was the kind of creative and imaginative “new school” hardcore that we could get into. So we were more than happy to have Josh at the helm.

We’d been playing these songs live for a while, but I think the rushed weekend recording effort adds to this humble debut’s underground feel sonically and a weird sense of connection to Saturday morning cartoons of the era (or really, of the 80s), a tone that fits with the album cover art by our good friend Steve Cefalo (from Evansville,Indiana, the hometown of Mike—bass—and Chris—guitar—and where Dave and I each lived on several occasions) and the interior collage of gigs and friends by my then partner, Andrea.

The vibe of underground and unhinged cartoons is also, of course, evoked by the array of lyrical themes (sci-fi, horror, comic books, etc.). Yet blended with this is a current almost akin to cable access religious broadcasts. “Christ” and “Jesus” are mentioned a handful of times on the record but usually in a speedy shouted way indistinguishable from the rest of the vocal melee (with the notable exception of “Wolverine”, which we’ll come to later). The Jesus material is somewhat blended in, though songs like “I Killed the Checkout Girl” and “Flesheaters” are already heading toward what the Your Music Saved Us podcast aptly called the “Blaster shift”: a third act in a song that veers somewhat abruptly to overt Christian allegory or messaging.

There’s another current in there as well. Raw spiritual hunger and longing—with, alas, a corresponding spiritual (self-)pummelling. I’ve been really struck by this as I listen again. Some of the more obvious tracks in this regard are “Vac-u-Suck”, “Lucky Dog”, and “100 Mph Tape”. And, yeah, I suppose “I’m Only Humanoid” kicks off the whole record with that dualistic theme.

Musically, most songs seem to modulate between parts and paces, already featuring Dave’s restless creativity in tempo changes, riff variations, beat variations, and clean and distorted guitar. Mike keeps his prog-level bass-playing capabilities right in the pocket of the punk style and Chris—as much a Pixies fan as a punk enthusiast—plays along gamely with his fuzzy guitar tones and feedback (which the rest of us encouraged: we loved the Pixies too, and Nirvana, Mudhoney, etc.). The styles range between standard punk inspirations like the Ramones, Sex Pistols, Misfits, Cramps, and Minor Threat to Christian underground acts like Breakfast with Amy, LSU, and Scaterd Few. We were trying our hand at our cobbled versions of surf, cowpunk, hardcore, and noise rock, with dashes of pop punk (as we understood it). There’s such a persistent car crash of screaming and screeching of instruments (not least the vocals) with constant melodic hooks and occasional darker or experimental moments (the latter either sparse or wall of noise). And we were clearly having a very good time with all this. Fun is a key aspect here.

Which, in a way, makes the spiritual themes rather unsettling or jarring, not necessarily in an altogether bad way. Monsters and antagonists such as androids, beach bullies, super (anti-)heroes, murderers, hounds of hell, kaiju, man-eating plants, and flesh-eating ghouls are all summoned (whether off-handedly or more centrally) as intuitive emblems of spiritual themes. Among those explored are struggles between “spirit” and “flesh”, between “faith” and “imagination”, between “heaven” (or “the kingdom of God”) and the “world”; spiritual pride; longing for cleansing and fixing; fraught relationships with media and pop culture; death to “self” or the “old man”; spiritual life/living/aliveness; religious experience or a sense of the divine. The portrait of the figure of Jesus is wide-ranging and disparate: he is teacher, example, the one crucified for “sinners”, the one crucified with sinners, spiritual food and drink; the one the believer is united with (in implied resurrection) as the source of life/living. These things can be listed out and itemised like this, but the scruffy and scrappy lyrical and sonic landscape of the album paints a patchier and nervier picture.

I look forward to seeing what we see song by song. What’s your impression of the album musically, lyrically, and so on? Please comment!