Sometimes a record excites you so much that you lose your critical and verbal faculties, and all you can do is jump up and down and shout "Woooooo-hooooo!" - or perhaps control your muscles just enough to write "Wooooooo-hooooo!" on a little sticker and slap it on said record. Executive Slacks' Nausea seems to have had just this effect on pretty much every DJ at KCMU in 1985 - if I weren't listening to it on Rhapsody right now I would have no idea what it sounded like, beyond "GREAT." But it is great! Thrusting, driving madness from the bleeding edge of proto-industrial music. I guess I was a couple years late to catch these guys, but they would have fit right in my record collection in high school, along with Big Black, Scraping Foetus off the Wheel, Ministry, and the like. And now I'll hand it off to our friends from 30 years ago to continue the gushing.
"This is great.""Yup."
"Good God! Hit me!"
"Wot thumping intense muscle-bound music this is!"
"How the hell am I supposed to decide which cut to play? They're all so fucking good! Shit! Etc.!"
"Good stuff, but will someone let them out."
"Mickey even likes it . . ."
"Don't call me Mickey!"
"How 'bout Mikey?"
"BOOM!!"
"Really now, this is something else."
"This cover is like Poltergeist II."
"Woooooo-----------------hoooo! My pick hit is 'The Park.' In-fucking-tense!"
I guess they can't all be as crowd-pleasing as Executive Slacks (that might be the first time that phrase has been uttered). Which is good for me, because honestly this blog series is a little more interesting when there's some dissent, a frisson of debate, even the occasional "I HATE THIS." This U…
You might not know the name Barry Adamson, but if you're a KEXP listener you've likely heard him - if not any of his excellent solo work, then as a member of bands such as Magazine and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. (Those are, in fact, the two things that anybody knows about Adamson, as one of the D…
