Children Of the Night, Fight! Fight!

Two Saturdays ago, I was DJing, and my friend Suzette brought in a CD for me. She claims that long ago she promised she would burn this for me, but I don't recall. It was probably on a Wednesday when I was DJing in Hamtramck and fallin' off my barstool from all the Powers Irish Whiskey. I think, I don't know. So, anyway, the CD starts off with an odd track that starts out sounding like something from Crime, but then it goes into a vamp with a spoken word voice-over glorifying San Francisco. Close, Crime was from San Diego. The vocal sounds like it's from an educational film from the '50s. After the spoken word thing, it turns into a folky thing with a harpsichord still rambling about SF. I like it. Artist unknown. The CD ends with nine tracks titled as "Melting Moments - Cough mixes 6/2005." The songs are all sort of electro with a drum machine and occasional keyboards. Otherwise, I don't know what to call it. Definitely lo-fi. I kinda like that, too, but I haven't fully digested it yet. At times I'm reminded of Nico's solo work.

Anyhoo, that's not what's important here. The tracks in the middle, 2-12 are what matters for me right now. The artist is Piedmonster who are from somewhere in North Carolina. I can't find much of anything about them online besides a couple of show reviews, and their MySpace page, which you can find here. They list their influences as Bonnie Tyler, Pat Benetar, Crass, Chumbawamba, Joy Division, Jawbreaker, Black Flag, and Led Zeppelin. I guess those make sense, but I'm not sure. Have you ever heard the Selby Tigers from Minneapolis? Kinda new wave-y with male and female vocals. That's what Piedmonster reminds me of except the Selby Tigers have that shiny happy production sheen courtesy of Dave Gardner (aka Sammy G).

One song, "Powertrip" successfully rips off the chorus from Elton John's "Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting" and the rest of it's good, without ripping off John further! The first song on the album, "Bloodsucking Developers," definitely has a Joy Division feel to it, musically at least. It's also where the title of this post comes from. Most of the vocals on the album are male and female at the same time. A handful of songs are just male or just female. "Good Ole Boy" is just a girl singing about a man she obviously thinks very little of: "good ole boy, you are the biggest dirtbag that I know..." It's just drums and vocal. Some other tracks have a little bit of synth, but not so much that you would call any of this electro. There's a good variety of music styles going on within these ten songs. With the drums, I'm definitely hearing a Joy Division influence, the Crass influence comes through in the vocals. Actually, I guess the Chumbawumba reference succeeds with the vocal and drum styles. But I'm not talking about that big soccer anthem hit from them. I mean everything else. The anarchist punk/pop stuff. Which reminds me, there's a track on here called "Hey, Chomsky!" where the chorus is "we'll talk about the good ole days when anarchy was just a class war away!" So, yeah, there's some politics going on here. Directly after the ode to Noam Chomsky is "Where Do You Draw the Line," which is a dirty all-out hardcore-ish punk rocker. I think the next song, "Snip Snip" is all about knitting, or sewing, or something like that. I think, it's hard to tell. It's catchy as hell, though. All the songs on here are catchy. Close to the end is "Skafee," which is a dub reggae song! It evolves into an upbeat ska thing that manages to not sound cheesy. In fact, it almost sounds like they're mocking Sublime a little bit but using their own vocal style. Like I said, it's hard to tell because there is so little info available about this band. The CD is a burned copy, and it was given to me by someone who also only has a burned copy. The closing track, "Another Day" is an a cappella sing-along with a little bit of drums. Then there's a hidden track called "Magic and Weather," which seems to be something recorded backwards, but I can't tell if it's an album track or not.

If you can find it, check this out. Piedmonster is where it's at. I think I might try to get them to play for my birthday in January. We'll see.