This is the kind of music that blogs with borderless parameters for coverage (like mine!) are made for. That is, really weird shit. Ohio's Stella Research Committee released their most recent LP A Proposed Method For Determining Sanding Fitness back in April and it is now getting another push from UK tape label Cruel Nature Records who are issuing it on cassette. Stella Research Committee are one of those punk bands that sounds pre-punk, if that makes any sense. Noise and uninhibited displays of animism that would only retroactively be understood as music in the wake of bands like Suicide and Sonic Youth. A psychedelic exercise in sound wave manipulation and mood amplifying currents, aimed at liberating the thought patterns of the mind, but accomplishing something else entirely in the process.
They sound like a band Don Van Vliet convened to give flight to his fancies, but who came to develop their own sense of autonomy which could not be contained, so he had to wall up in an old steel mill in order to save himself from their madness. A comparison could also be made to a sibling band to The Residents, who came to understand themselves through the same medley of classic literature, drugs, and antagonistic philosophy as Throbbing Gristle. The major difference being that we actually know who the members of Stella Research Committee are... or do we? Put a pin in that, sports fans. On to the music!
"Nails" pins a blues-rock groove beneath its front tires and pumps the accelerator until they can hear it squeal under their tread. "Sauerkraut" is a messy can of soupy grooves and burnt and refried guitars that sound like they're being poured out over a young Mark Mothersbaugh while he recedes into an existential crisis. "Hanging in my Screamer" sounds like a reciprocating saw chewing through a DVD copy of Stop Making Sense as it protests and attempts to play the film out of order on a projector screen. "Monologue" is another track that is highly reminiscent of Devo's early period, where computational sounds are strung together like Christmas lights in a kind of countermelody against which a brazen surf riff bays. What ever weird fetishes for sound you've developed an affinity for while listening to post-punk and no-wave classics over the thirty some odd years, Stella Research Committee are prepared to convert these sonic comfort zones into a bed of nails.
