TALES OF LOHR: WE WEREN'T INVITED'S "KILLJOY"
On "books," covers, and judgment; plus, "Factory Roll Call" bows to Marian Zazeela
Whenever I hear an ostensible arts consumer lament that “there’s no good new music” or that “nobody makes decent movies anymore,” my first, and necessarily only, assumption is that the individual making this statement is simply a victim of their own aesthetic short-sightedness. If one is beholden entirely to the whims of multiplex theater offerings, or to the programming supervisors of terrestrial or streaming radio services, naturally, one will assume that these films and songs are the only such artistic objects on offer, and it is inevitable that stagnation and boredom will set in. As someone who consumes a far larger amount of creative material than the average person, I understand how necessary it becomes, in order to avoid the onset of this ennui, to cast a wider net, to roll a more frequent die, to take a gamble on films, books, and bands that are entirely outside one’s usual frame of reference. “The shock of the new” is only possible if one is willing to venture out from under the often too familiar umbrella of the old.
For this reason, I have adopted a practice regarding my listening cycle on Tidal, my personal streaming service of choice (and not just because I’ve written for them in the past), that many of these “no good music” bellyachers might regard as too great of a risk for them to take. Every Friday, the site updates with a selection of the week’s new releases, major label and indie, illustrious and obscure, and presents them in a selection grid with nothing but the cover, album title, and artist name. So, at least once per week, in the interest of promoting the cause of deathless artistic surprise, I scroll the Tidal list and select one album to listen to based on nothing but the immediate, arresting impact of its cover artwork. Oftentimes, these will be artists with whom I am wholly unfamiliar. I may not even know, before I hit “play,” exactly what type of music I’m about to hear. But that cover hits, whether for reasons of beauty, amusement, or nauseating frisson, and I give it a whirl, ears democratically open for new horizons to chart. After all, fellow travelers, you simply never know, do you?
Which is how, this past weekend, I encountered this visceral little nugget:
The disturbing interpolation of bleached surveillance-camera monotones with the disjunctive accent of the rainbow-striped party hat was undeniably compelling. Combined with a distorted face that recalls the haunted howling avatars of David Lynch’s artwork, and I had found my going-in-blind listen of the week. This album, which turned out to be a five-track EP, was indeed so unfamiliar to me that I perhaps logically assumed that Killjoy, the doomstruck word scrawled upon this demonic partier’s pullover, was likewise the name of the band. But Killjoy (Version III) is in fact the title of the latest release from We Weren’t Invited, a hardcore five-piece Chicago-based band launched in 2021. Killjoy, which clocks in, in stalwart old-school punk fashion, at just under fourteen minutes, is an intriguing listen, combining a searing post-rock-adjacent guitar attack with gut-deep basslines, punishing percussion, screeching-scream vocals, and a starkly arrested emotional posture, all threaded through with an unexpectedly melodic sensibility that, with a toned-down attitude, could almost pass for radio-ready rock.
This curiously compelling sonic concept is apparent from the EP-launching title track, an anthemic brawler of a tune driven by pinpoint knife-stabs and crunching undercurrents courtesy of guitarists Isaac Rodriquez and Michael Locascio. Clinton Coronado’s bass churns away under the wanna-fight dual guitar attack, and Walker Wilson drives the fury inexorably onward from behind his drum kit. Johnny Wynne’s vocals are unexpectedly nuanced, sliding from a sneering, almost petulant whine on the main verses to a hurlyburly shriek at the chorus, bellowing “I BET YOU WON’T” as Rodriquez and Locascio punch him and you in the kidneys on the frets. The vibe recalls a slowed-down take on the classic SST Records sound, or a more suburbanized slant on the kind of adolescent disaffection snarlingly harnessed by classic Suicidal Tendencies. All the affronted irritation and barely suppressed rage vibrating in the band’s forsaken name rips through the eardrums on this track, and with just enough sheer songwriting craft to make “Killjoy” absolutely stick in the mind. It’s a potent statement, one that makes it plain that this band is ready to mess your good time the fuck up.
This bratty yet genuinely threatening tone persists on the overwhelming “NBS” (an abbreviation for, unsurprisingly, “Nothing But Shit”), where Wilson loses his mind on the cymbals while Wynne desperately screams to be heard above the monolithic down-tuned guitars. Here, Wynne is less the aggrieved than a purely berserk aggressor, assuring the song’s imperiled target that “You did it to yourself” before the instruments totally drop out to allow the vocalist to hit you with his ultimate solution: “Eat shit!” The sorta-eponymous “Not Invited” is a grand showcase for the sheer walloping force of Rodriquez and Locascio, their combined volume and velocity surging over the listener while Wynne cuts loose with some tonsil-shredding howls of alienated mania (the grapes-are-sour-anyway pissiness of the supposedly uninvited narrator’s “This party fucking sucks!” is especially arresting). “Expired Plastic” finds the band looking somewhat beyond their navels, with an equally nihilistic perspective on the culture at large. "You see,” Wynne opines under anxious descending guitar phrases, “in this word, we’re all expendable / So why don’t we kill the elephant in the room?” From here, the band launches ahead, riding Wilson’s sucker-punch bass drum and Coronado’s undulating bedrock until the entire affair disintegrates into squalling feedback as blistering and horrified as Wynne’s own mind-obliterated roars. It may not be sophisticated commentary, but it’s no less accurate in its volcanic anger.
After four tracks of what amounts to an act of aggravated musical assault, We Weren’t Invited shifts into a surprising gear, wrapping up Killjoy with the stunningly lyrical “i could give you space.” The guitarists go acoustic here, and the tone is wistful, delicately sparse, with just a hint of dry desolation to recall the emotional tumult of the preceding quartet of tracks. Wynne slips into a jarringly elegant falsetto, drenched in reverb, and as he croons of his romantic desires and expresses his doubts about his deserving of love, the effect is bracingly tender and, one has to say it, beautiful. This band that has spent the last ten minutes evoking Black Flag at its most injurious is now conjuring those out-of-nowhere moments of sublime brilliance found amidst the chaos of early Ween recordings, and it ushers Killjoy’s brief time with you to a powerful and impressive close.
Hardcore music is seldom my first choice when selecting listening material, and without my taking-a-gamble approach to Tidal’s Suggested New Albums roundup, We Weren’t Invited is a band that very likely would have flown entirely under my radar. But I cannot deny that Killjoy was an interesting and entirely engaging EP, the short time I spent with it bolstered by the band’s doubtlessly strong musicianship, clarity of band identity and attitude, and unanticipated moments of versatility and range. I’m glad I made this music’s acquaintance, and I tip my hat to the art director whose cover design seduced me into hitting “play.” It’s a worthwhile reminder that sometimes, judging a book (or album) by its cover can lead you down untraveled but enticing new avenues, and that anyone who thinks there’s nothing good out there anymore simply isn’t looking far enough beyond their own experience.
FACTORY ROLL CALL
MARIAN ZAZEELA (1940 - )
Marian Zazeela, who sat for a Warhol Screen Test at the Factory in 1964, is another example of a creative force whose contributions to the history of art and music have been sometimes overshadowed by the presence of a higher-profile aesthetic and life partner. The longtime spouse and collaborator of seminal avant-garde composer La Monte Young, Zazeela’s light has been on occasion overwhelmed by the dazzling influence of Young’s singular musical conception. But Zazeela is a monumental visual and aural creator in her own right, and her work well worthy of contemplation and appreciation beyond her status as the estimable “Mrs. Young.”
Born and raised in the Bronx, Zazeela graduated from Vermont’s Bennington College with a bachelor of arts in painting in 1960; her work on canvas primarily combined abstraction with calligraphic accents. Returning to New York City after graduation, she quickly waded into the burgeoning arts scene of the city. She designed set pieces for The System of Dante’s Hell, a play by Leroi Jones (soon to rename himself Amiri Baraka), and became an early collaborator of Jack Smith, modeling for his photographic work and appearing in his barrier-smashing avant-garde film Flaming Creatures. By the time Smith completed this film, Zazeela had already met Young, an exploratory composer who had himself come to New York from his hometown in Idaho. The two married in 1963, and they have collaborated, in work and life, ever since.
In partnership with Young, Zazeela co-founded the Theatre of Eternal Music, a collective designed to present and showcase Young’s experimental drone-based compositions. (Other members of the ever-shifting cast of Eternal Music characters included future Factory caretaker Billy Name and founding Velvet Underground members John Cale and Angus MacLise.) Zazeela frequently appeared as a vocalist with Young’s ensemble, and she also framed the performances within a sensory-environment creation she dubbed the Dream House. These spaces combined sculpture and slide projections with accents created entirely with light, blending colors in arresting psychedelic dissolves associated with the then-ascendant Op Art movement. Zazeela became one of the first important artists using light as a principal medium, which would go on to influence fellow light artist Dan Flavin, as well as Warhol himself, when he incorporated Zazeela-style lighting concepts and apparatus into his Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia art-and-music events. The Dream House concept shifted in size and scope based on its presentation venue, achieving its arguable apotheosis in a six-story installation at the New York Mercantile Exchange on New York’s Harrison Street, a commission from the Dia Art Foundation that stood from 1979 to 1985.
Zazeela has branded her body of light-based works the Ornamental Lightyears Tracery, and works from this collection have been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sweden’s Moderna Museet, the Haus der Kunst in Munich, and numerous other major museums and galleries worldwide. Several books of her writing and drawings have been published, both solo and in partnership with Young; the most recent of these, a monograph showcasing her drawings, was published in three different languages in Germany in 2000.
In 1970, Zazeela embarked on intense study of Hindustani classical music, working in the Kirana style under the tutelage of vocalist Pandit Pran Nath. Nath passed away in 1996, but Zazeela has continued her devotion to the Kirana school of performance and sound, and to this day teaches vocals and raga sounds at New York’s Kirana Center for Indian Classical Music. Also still active is a Zazeela Dream House at 275 Church Street in Manhattan, above the Tribeca loft where Zazeela and Young still reside. The display, which has been on view since 1993, is open to the public four days a week for relaxation, meditation, and immersive listening experiences, while sometimes hosting live musical performance. Artforum has called it “a landmark conceptual artwork.”
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