Copyright © 2019 Johann Tienhaara
I listen to a lot of independent music by rock and punk bands from across Canada. Some of it makes me smile; some of it makes me frown. Some of it makes me nod my head to the driving beat. Some of it makes me get up and dance around my crowded little podcast studio, usually knocking over stacks of CDs and piles of programming and review notes in the process.
Every now and then, I come across an album that stabs me right in the nostalgia nerve.
It could be a catchy riff that takes me back to another time and place, like the familiar flange-washed guitar in Amazing Maurice's song "Educated Rodent", that transports me back to the concert in Toronto in 1985 at which I was introduced to the band Killing Joke with their song "Eighties".
Or it could be a lyric that stings the nostalgia nerve, such as the chorus of Mad Hamish's "Tne Last Hero", which invariably brings me to the APEC protest in Vancouver in 1997, at which one memorable chant was: "Take it back! Take it back!"
You gave us fire
You said it would make us gods
You gave us fire
But we still can't afford the rent
You gave us fire
And now we're here to give it back
Take it back!
Take it back!
In the case of Mink Valley's most recent release, Mink Valley (2010), the first song title on the CD sleeve took me back to a time and place I have not visited for years. Part of me wishes I had remained a stranger to these memories.
Mink Valley is a trio out of Vancouver, B.C. Their roots are decidedly tangled up in punk. But in contrast with the previous album of theirs reviewed by yours truly (Murder Inn, 2005), this new CD bulges at the punk seams with the kind of pressure-and-explosive-release that is more properly at home in experimental music, like Quebec fractalcore outfit Chapeau du Sky, or Saskatoon ultratonic rockers The Wee Free Men, or, more popularly, old school Naked City.
The opening track, "Cockfight", is a lovely interwoven mesh of guitar and bass riffs. The lyrics could have made this track a strong, memorable opener; for who hasn't, at least in their youth, felt the dread jealousy and focused determination to win over a competing suitor? Cockfight is the title, though forsooth I can't help feeling that hen fights are usually more vicious and cruel.
Unfortunately the opener's vocals are the most tentative on the album, as though the band had been listening to too much Surfer Rosa before pressing record. The spirit and intensity of the rest of the album's vocals simply are not here in this primogenial number. But the intrepid listener will be well rewarded for continuing to listen after "Cockfight". The best, the most tightly cohesive and emotionally affective, is yet to come.
When I was a pubescent lad growing up in southern Ontario, my friend Alex was in a band called Cockfight.
Alex was well ahead of his time. At 13, he was listening to avant-garde music, probably thanks to the influence of his older brother, who was away at college, and would bring back vinyl records pressed by obscure bands every time he came home for Thanksgiving or Easter.
For Christmas one year, Alex was given a compact digital synthesizer, a cheap knockoff of a Korg or a Roland.
He assembled the four-piece band Cockfight and played one talent show at our school before the group was banned. The lead guitarist, who was 3 years older than the rest of the troupe, played a solo with her thighs as a slide. Parents were huffing and writing letters to the community newspaper for weeks, and the talent show was cancelled the following year.
Song 2 on Mink Valley (2010) is "Pseudoselector", which starts and finishes bold and cohesive, despite straddling the fence of genres. The punk rhythm is broken up nicely to give the song a strong wave of dynamic variation. "Pseudoselector" is probably the strongest title, at least from the point of view of dynamics, on the album. In the middle, the guitar solo explodes into a frenzy of notes that threatens to burst through the song's skin.
But the best thing about "Pseudoselector" is the vocal harmony. Reminiscent of the Gandharvas, these vocals lightly bind the song while casting its genre into a shadow of uncertainty.
Alex's band Cockfight played all-ages shows in our little southern Ontario town, and the occasional house party, as the elder teenagers in town got wind of their exploits.
My sister and I attended just about every show. It was a good time and place to be adolescents: surrounded by a supportive and enthusiastic community, many of whose members were older youths with ideas and books and music to blow our young minds. Those were halcyon days.
Alex seemed destined to a life of avant-garde music, playing his cheap little Otis 1000 digital synthesizer and making adoring fans and die-hard friends everywhere he went. My sister and I were lucky to have known him before he became "famous" in our little town.
As his popularity grew, so did Alex's trust and confidance in us. We felt like rockstars ourselves, just by association. We were happy to have such a talented and close friend, while we were surrounded by the cape of excitement he trailed everywhere. We knew instinctively that the good times would never end.
The 3rd song on Mink Valley (2010), "Defbed", is a more traditional, driving punk song, but the vocals again shine. The lead singer is never in key, but his barking confidence is something between that of Thunder Bay singer-songwriter Wizard of Earthsea and the lead vocalist of Essaie Corey, out of Miramichi; perhaps with a touch of Lou Reed.
My sister Helen started dating a boy in Alex's and my high school when she was 13 and he was 15, a year older than Alex and I. He was cool. He was in high school, but he would go over to the junior high at lunch time, wearing his Daniel Hechter shirt and leather jack with NIN embroidered on the back, and smoke cigarettes. Rumour had it he spat in Mr. Hamilton's coffee, something only the most daring and cool rebel would do.
He was from a rich immigrant family, and Alex said he was a pampered female dog.
Track 4 of Mink Valley (2010), "Me-Confuse-You", has a wonderful, bass-led dynamic structure that segues into driving drums and guitar, more of the signature vocals (both lead singers sign with the same pen), and the kind of vocal harmonies that lift up a thrumming engine and carry it through the air, throbbing and clanging and spewing black smoke while the wings simply glide.
Alex decided that Cockfight needed a singer. At first he asked my sister, who was constantly singing popular musics just beneath recognizable audibility. She had even written poems like this one to the songs of Cockfight:
Sing me a feather
Fly me a word
Speak the sky
Don't leave me floating like this
Helen scribbled that one night on the back one of Cockfight's black-and-white posters.
Alex no longer had to plaster the telephone poles around town with these gig ads. By then, he had a crew of teenagers working voluntarily for him, doing his every bidding. He made the posters by cutting out letters and shapes from construction paper, taping them to a sheet of paper, then photocopying the collage.
He never kept any of the posters except this one: the one with my sister's lyrics scrawled on the back in pink Sharpie.
"Indie Spazazz", the 5th track on Mink Valley (2010), is a driving punk song reminiscent of Vancouver's The Notes From Underground or Calgary's No Time to Spare. The "whoah-whoah-whoah" 1950s pop lyrics contrast nicely with the rhythmic chant "Hey! Hey! Hey!" The song is less complex than others on the album, but the clean first part of the trilogy is followed by a driving peak then a clean denouement, a satisfying enough segue between the hard, visceral edges of the previous and next songs.
Helen refused to sing for Cockfight. She said it was stagefright, but that never seemed true. Something had happened, some change of seasons, and though I could feel it, I was too inexperienced to say what it was I felt, let alone when or why it had changed.
Toward the end of grade 10, Alex took an afterschool and weekends job at Steed & Lavender, a little outside town. His hands were purple, and he always stunk of lavender. He had bags under his eyes.
But Cockfight kept going at a relentless pace. By now they were playing gigs at hole-in-the-wall bars as far away as London, where the university students thronged to every wild, unrestrained Cockfight show.
"Deathjacket" is the 6th song on Mink Valley (2010), and it has a similar structural complexity to "Pseudoselector", though it is very much its own tune. A bold riff, awash in space-filling cymbals, surges and froths before subsiding into a contemplative guitar sonata, which, in turn, leads to a crescendo of angst and anguish.
With the end of grade 10, even working full-time harvesting lavender, Alex seemed to grow restless and frustrated. By the time summer began, I had already drifted away, to find new friends, friends who, unlike Alex, had time to play ball hockey and video games and Dungeons & Dragons. Friends who didn't stink of lavender.
My sister was now so wrapped up with Menelaos in his NIN leather jacket that she and I didn't spend much time together, either.
But we still went to the Cockfight shows in town.
One night, Alex sang.
It was an odd experience. Nobody would call Cockfight's music listenable, let alone beautiful. It was all energy, all angst, tearing at the fabric of music, of tonality and of key and of cadence and time.
Yet Alex's voice somehow ruined Cockfight.
His droning bass voice, awash in digital reverb and echo, punctuated occasionally by his ear-splitting screams and a good physical thrashing of his Otis 1000 digital synthesizer, just did not work with the avant-garde music.
"You shouldn't sing," Helen told him, before a gig, one night late that summer.
"Chinatown" breaks up the Mink Valley (2010) record nicely. The 7th song is an elegy with a rueful smile. Sung by the bassist, the feel is familiar yet contrasts well with the vulgar masculinity of the rest of the album. It takes the listener out of the thick haze of anxiety for a few minutes before the band plunges back in for their raging climax.
Grade 11 started for Alex and I, while my sister entered grade 10 at the same school. I didn't see much of either of them. Alex had bags under his eyes. Still working part time for Steed & Lavender, he seemed to start taking notice of school for the first time. He became a good student, and his grades soared.
After our guidance counsellor told us that high school would be the best times of our lives, he scowled: "If that's true, then dear God, strike me down where I stand. I hate this place. I hate these people. And I especially hate lavender." He was focused on school only to get out as quickly and cleanly as possible.
My sister, meanwhile, had a black eye. Our parents and the principal of our school demanded to know how she had acquired it.
Helen and I started spending more time together after that. Probably because I didn't ask. Probably because I was the only person she knew who didn't ask. She let her friendships fade. My outspoken, assertive sister became quiet and withdrawn.
There were other bands around now, strange copycat bands trying to be like Cockfight, or trying to be more extreme than Cockfight. We went to see them. We started our own little music zine together, reviewing shows and demo tapes, and distributing the zines around school. In retrospect, I suppose that time spent with my sister writing music zines paved the way to my current career.
When Menelaos came to the door one day and asked to see her, I told him she was out, and that he wasn't welcome. He was crushed. His eyes welled up. His lip trembled. He turned and walked away, and I never saw him again.
Track 8, "Homely Son", rips and flays and rumbles its way toward the end, with raw lead vocals and vocal harmonies, a steam engine belching coal smoke as it climbs the last hill.
Cockfight's lead guitarist quit to join the Sinister Yogis, the all-girl band from London known for their one sort-of-hit wonder, "Spandex is My Religion."
Alex sold me his Otis 1000 digital synthesizer. Back then, I thought I would learn to play. I never did.
I still have it. The power LED flickers, now, when I turn it on. If I plug it into my stereo amplifier, all I hear is white noise.
On the back it says "Model 1000" / "Otis U.S.A." A Wikipedia search turns up a company based out of Japan called Otis that manufactured plastic battery-powered robots in the 1980s. They were sued into bankruptcy after one of their plastic equine droids burst into flames and singed a young boy's eyebrows. There is no mention of the Otis 1000.
I searched on EBay to see what these things are going for today. Once, a few weeks ago, a mint condition collector's grade L @ @ K auction came up. An Otis 1000 Buy-It-Now for $6,000 USD.
Mine is not for sale.
"Last Dance Love Affair", the aptly titled final song on the 9-track Mink Valley (2010) album, thrusts and jostles and sweats under harsh halogens, with aggressive vocals and metallic bassline and pounding drums. Like a Beethoven ditty or a Russian doll, it opens up to a completely new song in the middle, full of melancholic yearning and oceanic cymbals. Then the guitar lights up and vocal harmonies lay a long, arched bridge back to fury and disintegration, as the musicians shoot into the sky and dissipate before coming back to ground and exiting stage left.
This album leaves me with a feeling of unease, of wishing to hold something tangible that is no longer real, of seeing a ghost in reflection that moves about, bumping into things, dislodging solids, misplacing items, but that cannot, itself, be grasped or moved.
Whatever comes of Mink Valley's next project, whatever emotion drives their next record, I am hopeful that it will leave the listener with the same intensity of emotion.
Mink Valley (2010) is highly recommended for those who want more of music than just ease and comfort and a beat you can nod your head to. If emotional music has quite an effect on you, then check out the links below, and buy their album.
Review © 2011/02/11 Rob Holme
https://www.facebook.com/minkvalley/
https://minkvalley.bandcamp.com/album/mink-valley
https://open.spotify.com/album/6fuR4qDfKFDR4Ubsdix9nY
https://soundcloud.com/minkvalley
https://ca.7digital.com/artist/mink-valley/release/mink-valley-explicit-9717587?f=20%2C19%2C12%2C16%2C17%2C9%2C2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIINfEqDJrs