Once in a blue moon a movement kicks up on the scene that makes a big fuss over the way an artist’s music finds its way to the listener’s eardrums. Remember the 4-track hullabaloo in the 90s? Didn’t matter if the music was the most god awful shit ever produced–if it was churned out on one of those cheap Aiwa 4-track recorders, then it deserved a listen. Now finally the twenty-first century has its own trend: cassette rock! Fashions of this sort can be fairly hit-or-miss. If the bands’ style of delivery doesn’t mesh with the style of production, the whole approach can come off as a misfire. Do you really want to hear Dark Side of the Moon redone on four tracks? Or how about Leadbelly in a twenty million dollar studio? If the shoe doesn’t fit, you can’t wear it. Luckily for Girlfriends the shoe fits just right. There is something about the cheeky, cheapo fun of tapes that captures their approach perfectly. There is a cream to every crop, and cassette rock may have found its very first keeper in Girlfriends.

The band out of Boston wastes no time on stylistic curlicues in their compositions. Fuzzed-out, stomp-boxed 60s power pop melodies grab you in the first few seconds and don’t let go. The songs are short, direct, noisy- and that’s exactly how the trio of Ben Potrykus (guitar), Jen Dowty (bass) and Andy Sadoway (drums) like it. Their first EP Our Very First Cassette, released late 2009, was a quick and dirty romp that got solid reviews from critics and tastemakers. Though the band’s approach sounds simple, there’s a complexity bubbling beneath the surface that holds your attention. The jagged guitar lines and off-the-cuff vocals are tossed off like the mad strokes of an action painter in full frenzy, while remaining confined within pop art superstructures. Imagine Jackson Pollack, drunk on corn whiskey, trying to copy Warhol’s soup cans: a superlative mess that nonetheless attains a certain iterative fascination. Girlfriends took a similar tack on the EP, trading on the listener’s familiarity with certain pop forms to introduce a decidedly unfamiliar savagery into the proceedings. The song “suckin rare meat off the bone white china” mixes whammied guitar, megaphone vocals, and some rough Beach Boys’ harmonies into a beastly surf safari. “bites + scratches” captures Girlfriends in a more reflective, Pogues-mode, attempting to muster up a mood of good old-fashioned heartbreak. It’s a great song, but the heartbreak isn’t entirely persuasive. The riffs are just too damn fun to frown over.

The ease with which Girlfriends traverses the pop register is a testament to their origins out of the roiling, moiling cauldron that is the Boston music scene. Discount booze and college kids aplenty keep the clubs filled while the insane 1am closing time of the subway preserves a niche for late night DIY house parties. The give and take between public and private forums sustains an occasionally inspired dialectic within the scene. “2004 was a formative year for me,” as Potrykus recalls, “cos I started living in the city in late 2003 and I saw and met Clickers and Night Rally and the Faux and the Mules and Dreamhouse and Neptune, and now Denial and, I think, Wildildlife (they were just ‘Wildlife’ then) and everyone was being really loud and noisy and splitting their time between basements and clubs, which I thought made things a lot more interesting.” That’s quite a list of bands; but what artist can resist the louche allure of down-and-out of bohemian Boston, of Jamaica Plains, of Allston “Rock City,” of Cambridge and Somerville? Breeding grounds, one and all, for raunchy rawk and fine purveyors (according to Potrykus) of “authentic south American food,” “organic fair trade markets,” “thrift stores” and “all that crap.” When Potrykus, Dowty and Sadoway aren’t shopping for ethically-reared beef to mix into their picadinho de milho, the band members find time for other projects including Christians & Lions and Magma Divers- that’s a pretty full plate.

For their A-side, Girlfriends chose “Good To Be True” from their first EP Our Very First Cassette. It’s a straightforward Ramones-style ballad that has lived a few lives since the band recorded it late in 2009. On the first edition of the cassette, “Good To Be True” starred an as-yet-unidentified “space alien laser” solo and might have been recorded in a shoebox. In the words of Sadoway, “Tapes sound like shit usually, am I right?” For the Ampeater 7-inch, Girlfriends gave the song a quick spitshine: bulking up the vocals, balancing the mix, and generally bringing the track up to the strenuous standards of a self-proclaimed “garbage power trio.” While the “space alien laser” solo gets more or less dropped (you’ll have to see the live show for that, or dig up a first edition cassette somewhere) the crisper mix targets two elements that makes Girlfriends great: sing along lyrics and simple song structures. The lyrics of “Good To Be True” describe a downer narrative of teenage emotional insecurity, but the words are set to a bouncy, jangly riff that is so catchy it’s impossible to brood.

The good vibes continue on the B-side with a cover of the Vaselines’ “The Day I Was a Horse.” Clocking in at a trim 1:39, the cover satisfies the band’s appetite and predilection for the short form. In fact, their longest song appears to be “I Was Here But I Disappear” (3:22) from the EP. Commenting on the short form, Potrykus remarks, “…so many good bands and people are into writing shorter songs again too- which I really like. Good two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half minute songs are hard to beat sometimes.” One notable master of the short form, the recently-passed Jay Reatard, appeared to be on the verge of reintroducing the mainstream to the unique possibilities of the short, sweet and simple. Whether brevity makes a comeback will depend on bands like Girlfriends reaching back to a time before bloated Bjorkestras became the apple of every indie musician’s eye. Seriously, how much time is required to relate the absurdity of “the day I was a horse”? Even the Metamorphosis was a short story.

With the release of the second edition of their debut EP, Girlfriends has shown the beaten-up, old cassette format still holds some intrigue. Whether this heralds a triumphant return to the cassette in general (don’t hold your breath) remains to be seen. The irony is, of course, that the Ampeater Review is releasing “Good To Be True” and “The Day I Was a Horse” as digital pantomimes of a vinyl 7-inch. The world is topsy turvy with different ways to listen to music. The appeal of one specific format appears to be the same appeal of music subgenres: a sense of community, a sense of belonging, a sense of whatever-let’s-party.

There’s a slew of bands that have recently released work in the cassette format, like Quilt and Truman Peyote, and a ton more that are percolating within the same scene, including Kid Romance, Thick Shakes, Earthquake Party!, Young Adults, Maine Coons, and more. These are bands that play all different types of music- garage, electronic, folk, psychedelia- so there doesn’t seem to be any coherent movement afoot. But one trait they do share is that they’re all putting together exciting new music that merits attention: really, what more could you ask for?

Mike Gutierrez

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Susu is an aggressive artcore machine out of Brooklyn with one setting (loud) and no off switch. Their full-throttle sound is a welcome holdover from their beginnings as a larger hardcore/postpunk outift called Surgery Sunday. The rock-n-roll laws of attrition whittled down this original group to Andrea Havis (guitar, vocals), Mike Gabry (bass, vocals), and former-drummer Justin Bilicki, prompting a namechange to the shorter Susu. The leaner, meaner unit hooked up with engineer Martin Bisi to record their self-titled debut in 2006. Bisi, whose credits include John Zorn, Sonic Youth, and Bootsy Collins, helped Susu find their signature hard-driving, paint-peeling sound. “I think his influence was mostly present in the actual mixing and capturing of the song and sound,” as Havis recalls, “His drum sound is amazing. He really brings the instruments to life.”

One lineup shuffle later (Bilicki out, Oliver Riviera-Drew in) Susu found the loud and proud trio that has made a name for itself with three subsequent releases of pure sonic onslaught: Win, S/T, and their latest full-length R and R and R. The common denominator on all three releases has been a taste for defying conventional song structure. Experimentation, as Havis describes, “…is about going over the line of what would be traditionally done in a “song”, or doing it in a way that is outside the normal expectation. It’s not necessarily reliant on how it will be received/perceived, but chosen because collectively we (Susu) all enjoy it, or it moves us to build upon it.”

Eschewing standard verse-chorus-verse formats, R and R and R is a provocative musical statement that will command you to attention with all the authority of a drill sergeant on acid. Most of the sonic vocabulary, the raw guitars and the howling vocals, are reminiscent of the textures of the No Wave scene of the 80s. Intense, raw, a little bit dangerous. Much of the avant-garde music that came out of New York during the 80s proved tremendously influential. But when you go back and listen to the recordings of early Sonic Youth, Theoretical Girl, and so forth, you can’t help but feel the dingy audio doesn’t do justice to the music. Even the “high art” symphonies of underground legend Glenn Branca sound pretty shoddy (Wharton Tiers didn’t quite have his “A” game going yet). Susu rescues some of the musical possibilities that are only hinted at in those old recordings and reconfigures the elements in Rauschenbergian, No Wave assemblages. The sonic collages are sometimes punky, sometimes proggy, and don’t balk at trying something new. Drummer Riviera-Drew remarks, “We tend to flutter around a few ideas, then hover over one that seems to be of good quality. Much like honey bees pollinating flowers.”

The A-side of the 7”, “M.B.T.”, comes off the R and R and R album, on which Susu teamed up with producers Keith Souza and Seth Manchester. “M.B.T” takes a few elements, acerbic guitar licks, Kim Gordon-howls, frenetic bass lines, and the spitfire drums of Oliver Riviera-Drew, and weaves the minimalist, iterative designs into a bracing artrock tableau. In a time when independent music seems overrun by synth textures and somewhat foggy composition, the unrelenting precision and musicianship of Susu’s analog sound is genuinely shocking. Susu is tighter than a guido’s abs. The band flexes in a single unified motion, hurtling songs forward at breakneck speed and changing tempos at the drop of a dime. “M.B.T.” is not the sort of song that could be written alone in your bedroom on Garageband. The material on R and R and R was written in a collaborative procedure. As Havis describes it, “…Everything is worked out real time. We get together and improvise, jam, what-have-you, until someone has this part sticking out that everyone is feeling. And then we tuck it away into our memories. And so on. Eventually we have these 5-25 parts that we name arbitrarily (but all understand), and someone will hear something that goes together. [For example] the ‘chicken part’ would sound great with the ‘cheerleader part’. And eventually we put them together and move the pieces around and we have a song.” The result is a level of organic unity and cohesion that holds their music together even as the compositional forms push the structural boundaries of what we expect to hear out of a pop song. The result is, in short, art.

But don’t let the loud noises and artcore machismo fool you. Susu can be goofballs when they want to be. The track “Las Sirenas” off their latest album will have you searching for your Spanish-English dictionary, and they’ve been know to bust out absurdist lyrics like “I’ve got a roof/With a view/For when I wake up/And don’t know where I am” on “Clean vs. Dirty.” Naturally!

For their B-side, Susu brings it all the way back to 1983 with a cover of the Gloved One’s epic single “Billie Jean.” On the selection of the B-side, Havis remarks, “It’s just a killer song. Mike just started whipping out the bass line constantly so we decided to cover it since it was so fun to hear. That whole album is truly incredible (obviously!). And then he died. And we happened to be going into the studio.. It’s sort of a de-stresser song for us so we did it after we had tracked the record.. Just a quick take.” Riviera-Drew and Gabry hold down the rhythm section while Havis floats the dark, brooding melody over the top. The result is haunting yet danceable, as if all those zombies from the Thriller video picked up instruments and started jamming. The King of Pop would have approved.

It’s the combination of artcore firepower and absurdist flair that makes Susu special, and this 7” is a nice little introduction to their musical, Susu-ical vision. For the full experience of the brash trio out of Brooklyn, go check out an album or live show. The faint of heart (and short of humor) need not apply.

Mike Gutierrez

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