Category: Blog

CLASSIC REVIEW: CALEB FRAID- The Old Rugged Me

BEST TRACKS: 50/50, Anxious to Live, Vertical Blind

Fine, fine, this isn’t what would regularly be denoted as a “classic”.  But there’s something in this album which I haven’t found within really anything else.  It isn’t clear whether this is a result of a personal absence of knowledge surrounding this genre or simply that I have stumbled upon a long forgotten masterpiece (there’s a good chance it’s the former), but The Old Rugged me contains such a distilled spirit of creativity and self reliance that it manages to make me feel wholly lacking in every creative endeavor I’ve ever attempted.  While Caleb Fraid’s 8-track gem has been, to the extent of my knowledge, widely ignored, I would argue the (in)famous Velvet Underground quote is equally applicable to this album. Every person who listens to The Old Rugged Me is guaranteed to start a band.

Picture this, it’s the mid 90s, cassettes still reign supreme simply in their pragmatism.  Wow, what a time! Of course, I won’t try and make the classic “I was born in the wrong generation :,(“ argument, but the music environment facilitated by mid-90s technology is still really fucking cool.  Though the advent of the internet has virtually eliminated 90% of distribution costs, making everything DIY an actual possibility, the inherent magnitude of the World Wide Web makes this distribution infinitely more diffuse.  With cassette tapes, the distribution wasn’t presupposed. As such, not only was the content itself DIY, but so were the means by which it was sold, advertised, and shipped. So what does all of this actually mean you ask? Super localized tape scenes where labels often simply consisted of a handful of bands recording songs on a boombox and then having their stuff advertised in a mailer and shipped out from some dude’s house.  Labels like Shrimper, Amateur Anarchy, and Asswipe all existed as “companies” which refreshingly removed barriers between artists and consumers, and built an underground (hell yeah) music scene which attracted musicians whose creativity could be fostered on something as simple as something like an 8-track. And that’s where Caleb Fraid, a Houston native, comes in. While perusing BandCamp like a certified cool man, I came across FraidAid: a decent collection of lo-fi songs.  Admittedly, I wasn’t blown away. But then I looked at what else Fraid had released and, to my surprise, found over 100 tapes recorded between the mid 80s and early 2000s. Most of the covers were plastered with doodles Fraid appeared to have drawn on napkins. And so I finally came upon The Old Rugged Me, a collection of tracks whose minimal production quality initially mask the startlingly good songwriting beneath it. But don’t be fooled, this album is genius.

The funniest part about The Old Rugged Me is that it doesn’t really sound that far off from the Beatles’ White Album. No, no, I’m serious.  Fraid obviously isn’t concerned with clever recording techniques; rather, he spends two to three minutes using his limited resources to display his phenomenal songwriting.  And it is phenomenal. 50/50 offers us a horribly thin guitar line coupled with Fraid’s double tracked vocals that occasionally diverge to weave in and out of harmony before returning to the binary drone by the chorus. I swear to God, it sounds just like the Velvet Underground.  And the production here actual begins to work to Fraid’s advantage, turning a pretty standard sounding blues-rock track into a playful build which can only be described as a guy playing singing and playing guitar at himself. Similarly, “Anxious to Live” and “Vertical Blind” find their tenderness significantly boosted by its rawness. Whatever may exist within Fraid’s mind for these songs is probably impossible to decipher, but there is no mistake that it’s genuine.  Honestly, it’s difficult to choose a handful of songs to highlight on this thing; every song is a rotation of impulse which sees Fraid’s sparse, yet intricate songwriting ultimately speak for itself.

This album is the pinnacle of everything classified as DIY.  Devoid of pretension, The Old Rugged me exists as an entirely pure expression of an artist who is clearly fully invested in what he makes.  

 – Cliff Jenkins

CLASSIC REVIEW: ATARI TEENAGE RIOT- Delete Yourself

Atari Teenage Riot’s 1995 Masterpiece “Delete Yourself”  sounds as if a punk modified with a synthetic heart and iron lungs was pumped to the seams with amphetamine.  It’s political, it’s blunt, there’s no camp in its rawness. In a decade which saw punk reinvented as a handsome nihilism,  “Delete Yourself” returned the genre to its roots in political panic and aggression. Every song rotates through a handful of ingredients: thrash guitar, screamed one-liners, maybe a movie samples, and a simple techno drum sample.  But it was through this simplicity that ATR captured the essentials of punk’s vigor without a hint of nostalgia (or punk for punk’s sake). There is no close-reading with “Delete Yourself”. It is a pure, volatile reaction.

ATR, a trio consisting of Alec Empire, MC Carl Crack and Hanin Elias, combined elements of hardcore punk, thrash metal and breakbeat with, often extreme, anti-fascist lyrics. The result was Digital Hardcore; a far-left subculture pioneered by ATR which quickly spread in reaction against rising neo-nazi subcultures in Berlin’s electronic scenes.  The genre’s namesake is derived from Digital Hardcore Recordings, a label set up by Empire which signed similar acts such as EC8OR, Sonic Subjunkies and Christoph de Babalon. For eight years, ATR reigned supreme in the Digital Hardcore scene before the subculture’s eventual decline at the turn of the millennium. In 2000, Crack was found in his apartment, dead at age 30 from a drug overdose.  With that, Atari Teenage Riot disbanded: Empire continues to release experimental electronic compositions and Elias has established a career as a solo artist and created her own label: Fatal Recordings.

When first dissecting Delete Yourself, one should familiarize themselves with ATR’s first single, which happens to also appear on the 1995 LP. “Hetzjagd auf Nazis!” (“Hunt the Nazis!”) can be examined as a microcosm of ATR, exemplifying their urgent simplicity and unadulterated fury.  An overdriven three note synth line layered over a breakbeat with Empire screaming “go” over and over for five minutes, “Hetzjagd auf Nazis” descends further and further into ambient obscurity as it progresses. Undeterminable echoed noises fill the space surrounding the mid-heavy synth line which, along with the repeating beat, grounds the track while its peripheral components drift further into madness.  “Speed” begins with a speed metal guitar sample which stands solitary for a mere moment before being swept up by the beat. From here on it’s only a breakneck barrel towards the finish, Empire sputtering out unintelligible lines like News, Drug abuse to the future and the hypocrites cry: Who dies next? while Elias bellows out the song’s half-melody hook. There’s no room for breath, no room for contemplation; there is only an immediacy of terror which ATR thrashes again in futility.  Even slower cuts like “Sex” embrace a gritty tinge of cyberpunk, as Elias delivers spoken word over a wet-reverbed breakbeat coupled with droning ambience. As if the band were lying face up underwater, occasionally able to grasp a breath before being flooded back down, “Sex” embodies Delete Yourself’s thesis of titanic cyberpunk anxiety.  Atari Teenage Riot knows it’s too late; the powers which will overcome all of us are too large to stop.  And Delete Yourself is trying to, even if just for a second, outrun our doom.  

Delete Yourself does not exist to meticulously explore art as enrichment.  Its lyrics are a simple, grotesque indictment of fascism, technology, and the institutions we have created which now rule us.  It finds relevance today among those who feel alienated and exploited by every facet of their existence through its direct plea for individual uprising. It is a rebellion in its purest form.