The Monorchid: Who Put Out The Fire?
Touch & Go (1998)
There are spiders in the left channel! Flying spiders! With teeth and bristled legs. They’re wearing Muddy Waters t-shirts (with eight sleeves, of course) torn and held together with Richard Hell-brand safety pins that Tom Verlaine left for the spiders on the steps of their East Village walk-up. They’re joined after a second by vampire rats in the right channel and the song they’re wringing from their single-coils pings and pongs until 20 seconds later, the right channel rats veer off into a skidding ditch and the left channel spiders climb Phil Glass’s ladder into the window of a Catholic Home for Boys and the singer cries out, “too much static!” before surveying the landscape and observing that “X Marks the Spot: Something Dull Happened Here.”
It was 1998. I was laid up in a hospital bed with fractured third and fourth cervical vertebrae (pictured, rear). The doctors were not sure I’d make it, but they didn’t tell me that. So I was just trying to get through the three days of quadriplegia and the two weeks of slowly-returning mobility. I had fifteen pounds attached to my skull with a c-clamp, the weight dangling off the head of the bed in what seemed a 19th century attempt to decompress my spine by gradually pulling my head away from my body. Reading was out. I couldn’t hold a book. Nor could I watch the tv affixed to the ceiling. The angle from my bed was all wrong. So I asked my family to bring me a discman, a bunch of CDs, to place the headphones, halo-like, on my besotted head and to let me dance my bestilled dance to the rhythms of the morphine and the music. Two of the CDs became indispensable and heavily-rotated during those dark, semi-conscious days. The first was PJ Harvey’s Is This Desire? I may return to write about this magnificent record at a later date. It’s the best of her long career. The second, and the topic of this philippic, was Who Put Out The Fire? by Washington D.C.’s The Monorchid.
Since the earliest days of punk, arguments have raged about the intent and meaning of the movement. Overthrow, sure. But which parts? and to what end? Case in point, Mark Perry, who produced one of the first punk zines, Sniffin’ Glue, always argued for punk’s expansiveness. While those of the “purist” camp, contended that punk was about a return to rock’s rudiments: fast, basic, loud, obnoxious. Sides were picked. Betrayals were called out. Yet another internecine punch-up in an ideological phone booth. The most successful negotiations of this thrilla in vanilla, this simpering symposium, are those that managed to internalize the rationales of both the fast and fundamental-camp and the experimental expansionists. Then, without manifesto, to blast, tempest-bull-in-teapot-shop-style, through the police tape and stage sets until you slam into a bonafide wall and bust your head open on something truly intractable. Immovable object, unstoppable force, etc. So long as – and this is the bit in the horse’s teeth, the pig in the blanket, the camel in the needle eye – you don’t come to rest at the X where something dull happened or is happening.
Thus those flying spiders in the Muddy Waters t-shirts. That’s how Who Put Out The Fire? starts, like one of those ninja movies when eight daggers are thrown at once, dispersing into an inescapable high velocity array. And it’s coming right at YOU! Says the camera. Say the speakers. Don’t worry you’re safe here with me. When I listen to either of the two Monorchid LPs – Who Put Out The Fire? or the earlier Let Them Eat The Monorchid – I’m struck by the nonchalance of their chalance, if you catch my drift. Nonchalance deriving from the Old French word chaloir, meaning “concern,” but in the negative, obv. Monorchid are seriously concerned, about their music, about themselves, about the world. But they perform their concern fast and loose, like cats on ice, at the casino; damned, damning, demanding. Hellbent for leather and all that. Weasels caught in garden weasels. (How’d I get on this apparent animal analogy jag?) Chris Hamley and Andy Cone conjoin their guitars like Siamese twins only to yank them apart like an eighteenth century surgeon with a barber pole for a shingle. Their two guitars are a pair of asps with bees in their bonnet, wasps in their sonnet, dogs in their gonnit. They spar and prod, nipping at each others’ achilles, slashing their counterpart’s tires, until they’re riding rims on cobblestones. There’s a bit of all your favorite back-and-forth guitar teams from Tom and Richard, to Thurston and Lee, to Robert and Ivan. It’s a treble party, and the punch is spiked.
Singer Chris Thomson has done his time in a large handful of bands: Circus Lupus, Skull Kontrol, Coffin Pricks, Red Eyed Legends, none of which are unworthy of a listen. But Monorchid is – probably not coincidentally – the best band he’s played with and the site of his best performances. He slurs and splatters with the best of ‘em, landing somewhere between a swagger and a disillusioned fuck-it-all drawl. Half the lyrics are beautifully unintelligible. But they’re peppered with turns-of-the-knife turns of phrase. For example,
Opening the song “New Tricks,” with the line, “I want my records back…” as good an indication of state of mind and heart as a song might be hoped to intimate.
The decisive “was” of the song “A Was For Anarchy” is followed by “B was for the babies, C was for the cancer that killed entire everybody,” and then the spoken confession, “and I miss my friends they’ll be dead in the head or dead in the ground and they can’t be with me right now.”
In “Alias Directory,” amidst a clutch of stalactite guitars: “Could the methods be clearer or the finger pointing nearer?” followed by the rushed, arrhythmic “it’s hard to admit that nobody’s gonna rescue you.”
Who Put Out The Fire? settles the punk debates by not giving a damn about all the whys and what fors. The rhythm section is deep and definitive, anchoring all the chaos above with heavy ropes, doused in brackishness and brine. Even as the hurricane hits, this ship ain’t going nowhere. Meanwhile, scratched into the glass through which this magic appears, the tangled-bramble guitars insinuate a desperate math rock or a manic-amphetamine prog. Listening between the layers of drum/bass and vocals, one discovers fantastical arabesques that rightfully have no place in music this angry, this fast, this ready to fight. While it might not be easy to assign structural identifiers like “verse” and ”chorus” to these songs, they are constructed with the same concern described above. This is music rigorously constructed to sound accidental, as if the truck that ran through the window of the furniture store laid out a beautiful mid-century living room complete with conversation pit and fireplace. Tension builds to pinnacles and occasionally, just to keep us honest, ravines.
As the album reaches its conclusion, the Monorchid throw a final curveball, closing with “Abyss,” a 1978 song by the Danish band, Sort Sol. It’s an anthemic rave-up, about picking flowers, “meant for you,” and declaring earnestly that “I want to let you in on some secrets / there is one that I keep deep inside.” It’s a kind of key to what we’ve just been through. It says, "we meant it. That shit was real." Sometimes life comes across messy and out of control, but there can be reason to the rhymes, methods to the madness, a hand inside the ragged puppet, and a concern that can only be expressed through abandon (from the Old French abandoner. The original sense: “bring under control,” later “give in to the control of, surrender to.”)
