“Hallelujah…”
There’s this portrait, a bit rough around the edges, snapped in the heat of the moment; a montage of modern music buzzing around Detroit.
You can enjoy these Pathetic sounds in two ways – crank the transistor up or snug your headphones close to your ear drums and get lost in the range of fervent rock revelry… ranging buzzy pop ballads for summer swing parties or gnarlier, punk-spat psychedelia for late-night/good-hearted debauchery, spin your head off to a single jam by the HandGrenades or Citizen Smile or White Shag. Or, take a step back, read back the track listing, look at the videos online, read the liner notes, and appreciate the grander statement of this, as a compilation, a revue, a montage of all that’s been happing in the indie/underground pop/rock scene of Detroit.
Pathetic’s a modest sampling, a lo-fi snapshot of contemporaries and a toast to collaboration; it’s no big glossy production (with shows, more so, on some songs than others) but it’s still an endearing portraiture of ostensible Next-Gen / young-lions trying to make their own musical marks in a city ever reverberating with glorious ghosts and legendary recording artists – a lineage of Blues, Jazz, Motown, Punk, Techno and Garage… It was but still something that needed to be said…or sung.
There’s plenty of heart (and palpable character) in each track, taken just one at a time. Get to know Hit Society with their jangly, raucous bar ballad, nicely displaying their proclivity towards taking a melodious indie-pop song and roaring it into self-destructive overdrive. Get to know Patrick Davy & The Ghosts through his yearning, soaring style of electric-rock-rattled Americana that spurs you right out into the hatchback, with its sunray guitars and rampant rhythms, to peel down the pavement towards some idyllic, mind-clearing hideaway…Get to know the Ashleys…they like to lock into a groove and kinda grind it out until their spaceship, bulbous with superfluous amps and stuck all over with decals propping obscure krautrock band-names, launches up straight through the stratosphere, jettisoning various musical modules like tambourines, trumpets and broken banjos as they barrel-roll from space-rock into some unfound-funked-up leftfield blues yowl.
Take it singularly or take it as a whole. Each band comes in and introduces themselves nicely: from the mysterious duo known as The Boy Wonders with their heavy, chugging riff fest exorcising a darker, droney rock style to the Ill Itches, with their nervier, nifty take on post-punk by way of the Dead Boys’ gitty-up grime pop reaching back to the fervent freak-out garage styles of an MC5…But get through it and it’s like a meet-and-greet, a summit, a series of TED Talks, aiming to qualify the unique (and ever-spreading) energy of “the moment,” of the modern scene, of Detroit-rock-2013.
June 8th – Pathetic Sounds of Detroit Release show – P.J.’s Lager House in Detroit: The HandGrenades
The Ashley’s
White Shag
The ILL Itches
Citizen Smile
Patrick Davy & the Ghosts
Nam Kook & the Typhoon
Hit Society
The Bad Mics
Emily Rose
Read more about The Pathetic Sounds of Detroit (and the initial compilation that inspired it) –in this month’s print edition of iSpy Magazine (mispymag.com)
