Legendary Lost

Round about, oh, say twenty-five years ago, there was a hole-in-the-wall record shop in Fairmount, Indiana called "Most Music." I'm going to assume it's long gone, although I couldn't say for certain.

It was owned by a smallish, bearded gnome of a man named Mark, who was the Most that made Most Music... the most. You dig me? Anyway, back long before the days when the internet finally rendered record shops (as well as video stores and shopping malls) a dinosaur-like obscurity of the rapidly forgotten recent past, me, myself, and my surly friends would often venture in for t-shirts, tapes, stickers, patches, other suchlike cultural detritus.

The walls were festooned, as might be imagined, with the de rigeur images of Jim Morrison and Jimmie Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Creedence; reprinted cardboard broadsides announcing rock festival concerts that had peaked their mind-tripping crescendo sometime around the year 1971. The place had that regulation mold, incense and unwashed ass odor that always seemed to mark out those little old fashioned shops that perched on the cusp between misspent youth and bourgeois capitalism. In the back, Mark sold a few bins of rapidly moldering vinyl (and I assume plastic also) records.

Those, by the way, were round platters of black, but could also come in various collectible colors. They had grooves etched into each side, so that you could put said platter onto a device called a "turntable" (or, more commonly, a "record player") and the popping, hissing, often scratchy sounding thing would begin to emit... music.

It may not have been clear, crisp, digitized sound, but, as Norman Bates once observed, "The kitchen is mighty homey."

It was here you could find what, in 1995, seemed like a treasure trove of forgotten obscurities from America's New Wave past: little, virtually unknown groups such as The Star Jets, Velvet Elvis, and even weirder stuff. (For instance, electronic composer Mort Garson's Black Mass/Lucifer album, which I still love to this very day.)

It was here that I, (who still, in those halcyon days, had a turntable), purchased a thick collection of vinyl that is all gone now. And perhaps that is for the best, as too much nostalgia is never good for anyone. But, said refuse, such as it was, served to be a real education in pop musical castoffs.

It was here I bought a mysterious, weird little compilation album called The Disparate Cogscienti. I had no idea what the hell a "cogscienti" was supposed to be, but I got the idea that this was weird, psuedo-punky alternate universe music from some planet where this stuff was considered "pop," in every sense of the word. It came out on the now-defunct Cog Sinister label (Catalog Number 002), which was ran by a punk group called The Fall, whom I have never before heard of, heard, or know anything about. But, online, they are mentioned somewhere with Joy Division and The Buzzcocks, and everyone, and The Smiths included, is from Manchester in the UK, so...

Unlike the aforementioned names dropped, however, you've never heard of any of these damn groups, and they're all gone now. Just, trust me on this one, okay?

But this compilation still exists to document that these groups ever existed. And it is, remarkably, an enjoyable, if conspicuously dated experience to listen to it. After all, I remember 1988 as if it were just yesterday, plus or minus all the friends and family members who have passed on since then; all the cultural and technological changes, all the changes to SELF and WORLDVIEW that come with bitter, ugly age.

Putative "Indie Rock", and "Alternative Rock," and "Punk Rock," the album actually starts off with a song that could have been belched up out of the acid reflux nightmares of John Cougar Mellencamp, as one of his castoffs right before he takes the limo down to the bank to cash his multi-million dollar check, while cutting lines of cocaine with a credit card. (Note: That was all hyperbole and satire, and I don't actually know if he takes his limo to the bank or not.)

It's a catchy tune, though, called "Her Address," with a refrain wherein the singer implores the listener to "Come on, come on! Give me her address!" The band is called The Obi Men. Never heard of 'em, obviously. There's absolutely nothing if you Google that name, by the way.

I'd try and describe the music, but I can't really say there is anything radical or experimental about it, except it sounds like typical dad rock.

Moving right along, The Hamsters have a song called "Ole Spain" which I can remember nothing about. They have another song right after called "Stupid Songs," though, which is sort of like a crusty but semi-acoustic punk thing. It is, at least, a little catchy, more memorable.

The Lowthers sound like The Smiths; no surprise, everybody is from Manchester, right? "Sylvia" (whom the singer is "saving himself" for) is a nice, inoffensive and rather pleasant English post-punk love song. If the singer had a slightly more baritone voice, he might be able to pull off a halfway decent imitation of the Moz; as it is, he sounds like an even bigger emasculated little girl.

Out of all these damn acts, John the Postman is probably the most well known—he's also dead, having been discovered three days after his demise in his home. There's a Wikipedia on him, believe it or not; he apparently opened for Joy Division (who were then called "Warsaw").

(Note: His "opening" often consisted of grabbing a mic drunkenly and belting out acapella renditions of old Sixties songs like "Louie, Louie." Amazingly, he put out two albums and a popular bootleg cassette. With a backup band, though.)

"Kowalski" is a thumping, choppy beat with wild seesawing guitars swinging over something that sounds like stretched rubber. And Jon comes out and says something about Kowalski, who "doesn't like heavy metal shit, man."

Jon further intones, on the next song, that he's going to "bring down the wrath of Ashtaroth" on someone, imploring us all to "Come to the Sabbath! Come, come, come to the Sabbath! Satan't there!" It's incredibly catchy, Satan or no.

Next comes a weird, not credited little interlude that sounds like some feedback and a raspy, badly-recorded voice saying something cyptic about someone "trapped under the car doors."

This leads into the Julianna Hatfield-like "A Girl Like You," by Beatrice, which has a kind of easygoing strangeness that is charming, hearkening back to the era when alternative girls dyed their hair pink and shopped for bug-infested dustbin clothing at the local Goodwill. (Or maybe that came a few years later, and they were still dressing like even more feminine versions of a young, caterwauling and perpetually depressed Robert Smith, while trapped at the mall, no doubt.)

The song makes a reference to "Why's a girl like me, seething like an open wound?" making some sort of feminist statement, I guess, but gets even stranger, having a chorus that sounds like "gichy-gichy gena, gichy-gichy gena," and something unintelligible; and then asks how a "girl like me keeps from going," something that sounds like "bana," or maybe it's "bananas." I can't tell.

Slightly less heavy-than-hell pioneer sludge rockers God deliver "Sounds Like Thunder Love," which is pretty memorable, yet still, amazingly, not great; it does give a more hard rock pedigree to an album which, otherwise, could be classified as a bunch of low-t art rock bollocks.

The next cut, by Mr. A. Valler, is called... "Mr. A. Valler," and, amazingly, it has NOTHING to do with rock, but is a Wurlitzer organ piece that brings to mind film noir detectives, gunzels and hoods, and "dames is no damn good." Reminiscent of Fats WALLER, it might have done Anton LaVey proud. It's great stuff, and I'm not sure why it's here or who it really is (or was), but I'm glad it is mysteriously present and accounted for.

Andrew Berry gives us an indie pop tune called "Unsatisfied," a number that reminds me of that "Obsolete" song on the Dangerhouse compilation, which was by Howard Werth. The chorus is memorable, but the song is mostly just, meh. It laves a generic taste in the mouth.

Following this is the industrial ticking click and screamed vocals over a pounding beat that is "Psuedo Drama Time," by The Next Step. The background automated clockwork beat machine gets annoying, but, overall, it has a little of the feel of early Wax Trax industrial rock, with a heavier bass line and less heavy guitars. I'm not sure what the lyrics are referencing, but they sound angry and meaningful as hell.

I should note that many of the bass lines here are prominent, while guitars on many of the tracks seem thin and rather worse-for-wear. This is, most likely, due to those who mixed these particular tracks not being experts in their field. C'est la vie.

A musique concrete or "noise" guy named Philip Johnson takes us out with a bonus track made up of several slowed down loops of the B-side of The Fall's first single. It sounds like the world's oldest, grungiest audio cassette tape after being left in a hot car and then slammed into the portable tape deck.

Finally, we must mention that John the Postman, who is all over this damn album, makes one final stab at greatness with "Work," a tense and anxiety- filled punk rock cum psuedo-noise rock thing with more wild if sloppy instrumentation, and plodding mid-tempo drumming, over John (who was renowned for his many jobs, such as being the literal postman) describing how, "People hate me... at work! I hate people... at work!" The anguished protestation and despair against mindless obedience to servile capitalist necessity (or, put it another way, bitching about hating the meaninglessness of your job) is among the best of such sentiments I've ever heard from early punk rock musicians. The stress infused into the song is reflected well in the erratic sound of guitar and synth, which build to a very, very tense straining and mechanical mechanical march. It's a song of steadily-mounting horror.

And that is finito, my friends. It has been a quarter of a century since first I heard this album, and I still find the individual tracks interesting. I am not sure if Mr. Most is even still with us; a buddy of mine, with whom I use to frequent his store, has long since passed. Of course, to me, 1995, and even 1988, when this record was produced, seem just as if they were yesterday.

It was a different world, ruled over by Reagan, perched on the edge of what many thought would be the thermonuclear winter brought about by hostilities with the Soviet Durga. An age of shopping malls, MTV, Madonna, designer jeans, and the Disparate Cogscienti—a weird little vinyl LP from a time warp era when this sort of music was still considered "cutting edge."

Love and napalm.

Note: Many cuts from this album are uploaded onto You Tube. You can search them out. We usually don't like posting more than one or two videos at a time, so have paired down that which we DO feel should be here to three essential songs: "The Lowthers, Beatrice" and John the Postman."

And, well, since he's such a huge part of this album, and since he seems to have been such an ubiquitous character on the Manchester UK music scene, here's the video tribute to John the Postman by The Drones.

See ya!