Forgive me father, it’s been almost five months since my last blog post.
It’s some of the same shit as before mixed with physical problems (tore my ACL, which is not recommended) and trying to do about 300,000 other things with my life.
Oh, and Imposter Syndrome. Never leave home without it.
But I’m starting to get everything back within arms reach and part of that involves getting this going again. What follows is a review I wrote after stopping at the local record store (If you’re in Portage Park, check out Tone Deaf for a great selection of new and used vinyl and they also book really fantastic shows there too) and grabbing a Violens 10” LP that I didn’t even know existed.
I sat on it because I thought it might be lame. But now I remember that everything on this website is kind of lame, so why discriminate.
Ladies and genglefuns, I present to you: Violens.
Can’t remember the year but gonna guess 2007. I happened to read in the Chicago Reader about a band playing Schubas where they referenced both A Bell is a Cup era Wire and the Zombies, so I had to listen. The song they referenced was a pop banger called Violent Sensation Descends, kind of a more exciting version of that Shins song that was propagating at that time. I remember Tim Midyett posting about it on the EA Forum, saying that he usually hated anything as copy paste as this yet enjoyed it immensely.
So I went to see them. And they were great. I think were on tour with MGMT and got to do their own set that night and I remember being so happy. It really took me back to the 80s, sitting in the back of my mom’s car while we drove to the grocery store or nana’s house.
Dreamy pop music with a lot of echo and synthesizers. But not just that, but the perfect guitar parts. I remember in particular feeling like they were “out U2ing U2 on certain songs when it came to echo blasts from tasty chorus guitars”
I got to talk to the singer after the set, he was outside and I told him about how much I loved the show and how the article had sucked me in and he said “oh wow, yeah, I love Wire man”
From that point on, I was on the lookout for them to return.
They never did.
I have no idea what happened to this band, but they would randomly release “EP” singles on their website, so as far as I knew, they still existed and were recording. That being said, I never saw anything physical in the world that could prove it.
One of these random releases featured the song No Look on Your Face, which I immediately recognized as the song that put the biggest smile on my face during that set, with the Edge Jr. guitars and the smoothest bassline of the mid 2000s.
That was until they released Be Still which I was then convinced was the song that put the biggest smile on my face, with the bell synthesizer straight out of Tears for Fears best work, maybe if they listened to more Sonic Youth.
This band did release about 12 songs over the course of a few years but never returned, to my knowledge. I have no idea what became of any of them. But I still grab those old mp3s every once in a while to relisten and take a trip to a simpler time.
Last week I was taking my weekly trip to Tone Deaf Records and found a 10” that had a lot of their best songs and snatched it up excitedly for $7.
Then I dug up the old thread on the EA forum that ends up being mostly a conversation between me and Tim (and I will send this to him now) – and he is right the song Violent Sensation Descends is absolutely diabolical.
Good god, go listen to Violens.
FIVE STARS
