Various Artists - Shiftless Decay: New Sounds of Detroit LP (X!)
Detroit’s particular brands of urban decay, economic disintegration, political corruption, science fiction-worthy crime have individually, or as a whole, made for magazine-filling, CNN headline-grabbing content for some time now. For a statement like Shiftless Decay to really work, the element of surprise is a necessity, and regardless of the shrinking population or prevalent watch-your-back/bootknife-required environments, it is not surprising that these twelve bands came from an urban area of 900,000+ people, especially a known producer of underground rock that’s been the subject of several high-profile surveys within the past decade (remember SPIN Magazine’s White Stripes/Dirtbombs-fueled feature?). If Newark, Cincinnati, or Indianapolis generated a similar comp, it’d be a different story. Furthermore, 85% of Shiftless Decay could have emerged from any midsized city boasting a healthy Terminal Boredom/Horizontal Action support network, which is just about any one town in 2009. The socio-economic trappings of Shiftless Decay will no doubt distance it from the glut of comps choking the sub-genre at hand here, but the Let Them Eat Jellybeans or Bands that Could be God of deregulated garage-punk it’s not.
Unsurprisingly, Shiftless Decay is worth a look for the underdogs and more challenging fare. Human Eye pulled the post-punk instruction manual out of the garbage and illogically bled forth the legally-insane “Fix Me First, Universe Nurse,” a scarily cathartic break-shit/throw-chairs exercise that sends a loud and clear message of negation to any and all future bands considering Chrome as a possible influence. The much-touted Frustrations disappoint, as does the early Tyvek contribution, but Terrible Twos’ “Negative Drip” burns circles around the rest of the comp with what sounds like garage rocking a power-violence obsession. Little Claw’s “Feeding You Your New Home” is another amazing and unbelievably noisy spazz-out that poor THTX are made to follow with an underwhelming Echo and the Bunnymen/Television by way of a Ponys rip titled “Monorails to Nowhere”. The same can be said for Heroes and Villains’ “SDWC”. The Mahonies and Fontana burn decently somewhere between the forgettable and unforgettable displayed elsewhere. Tentacle Lizardo and Johnny Ill Band show a tendency towards serviceable post-punk garage that didn’t get the Human Eye memo in time, and spacey closers Odd Clouds put a painful strain on the powers of recall. Remember, what looks bad on paper for a proper album (three killers and two strong contenders out of twelve) is a fine score for a compilation. (www.x-recs.com
(Andrew Earles)
