Hi,
Welcome back. As part of this blog I am going to cover some of my favourite music be it old, new, recent or yes, even future music. So in this vein I am going to talk about one of my all time favourite bands The Icarus Line. Let’s fill you in on some history here. The Icarus line are from the city of angels and came together after a few of the members other bands broke up, one of these bands to note would be Kanker Sores. Kanker Sores featured Alvin DeGuzman and Joe Cardamone and then later on Aaron North and Lance Arnao, all of whom would be in the ‘Mono’ line up of The Icarus Line. They released one 7” called the Pivot EP it comprised of 5 songs Born Free, Small Town Blues, Fuck Your Yearbook, JR and Mirror Image. It’s a pretty straight forward affair with Born Free being the track that shows just a flicker of what was to come. The rest are pretty standard hardcore, pop punk type songs none of which really grab you but it is good to get an idea where it all started. You can pick up the 7” on eBay if you hunt around, it wont cost much either and it comes on clear vinyl which is always cool. Kanker Sores disbanded due to the fact that their drummer, Tim Childs, died in a car crash.
‘highlypuncturingnoisetestingyourabilitytohate’
Out of these ashes, along with a few that got mixed up in the cremation process, The Icarus Line was born. After touring with Ink and Dagger, who had a huge influence on The Icarus Line which really starts to become apparent on the first record, they released a few 7”s before releasing their debut ‘Mono’. First of which would be a release on the Hellcat imprint ‘highlypuncturingnoisetestingyourabilitytohate’, yes spell check its all one word. This line up featured Aaron Austin on drums, Aaron North and Alvin DeGuzman on guitar, Lance Arnao on bass and Joe Cardamone on vocals. This is the first real Icarus Line and already we can see flashes of how the song writing would progress. The songs are now more focused with a fury and anger which was only vaguely hinted at in Kanker Sores. Although all these tracks were written at the tail end of Kanker Sores it seems that the addition of Aaron and Lance along with new drummer Aaron Austin was the fuel for the fire. The opening track, ‘Fuck The Scene’ (which is a sentiment I can stand behind), is a clear favourite baiting the listener with a clean intro and then straight into the ferociousness and anger. ‘Highlypuncturing’ was released in 1998 and would be limited to 1000, all on black. Since the band thought that they should put more on the record than just their 4 short songs they included a cover of The Stooges ‘L.A. Blues’. Another run then began to circulate which does not have The Stooges cover on the B-Side but rather has a ‘highlypuncturingnoisetestingyourabilitytohate’. This is the version I own and I have yet to come across one of the original pressings, the quality on the 7” I own is fine and you can’t tell it might be a pirate or bootleg copy.
‘Red and Black Attack’
Not long after this the band then entered the studio and began to record ‘Red and Black Attack’ which was also released in 1998. Anyone who has seen early pictures of The Icarus Line will already know this is a reference to their black shirts, trousers and red tie attire they wore on stage as a statement of anti-fashion more in the vein of Kraftwork rather than playing up to some image or gimmick or being a more fashion friendly band. ‘Red and Black Attack’ expanded upon the sound The Icarus Line were starting to create on ‘Highlypuncturing’ it retains the obvious hardcore influence and doesn’t move too far away from it however its a lot slicker now, more refined. First song up is ‘Suicide Pact’ its angry, its aggressive, its abrasive but it does show an evident progression from the early work and hints at the style of song writing which would come to characterise ‘Mono’. In between tracks are excerpts of Tim Childs playing drums at home with feedback or a simple riff cut in over them, these were spliced in at the mastering stage by Blag Dhalia of Dwarves fame. From these brief snippets it is obvious that Tim would have been able to slot into the direction the Icarus Line was taking. ‘Separate The Sounds’ is next, it is an intense ride with Joe channelling all sorts of dark demons and spouting them out as a hellish scream. With a refrain of ‘I want ‘em back’ trailing out at the end it could easily be taken as a tribute to Tim Childs. The more mid-paced and amazingly titled ‘Last Night All My Teeth Fell Out’ is track number 3 and by now the style that will follow on from ‘Red and Black Attack’ becomes apparent. Songs that constantly mutate and change all the way through often repeating the first two parts and then after that part after part after part. Some might say this is too many ideas in one song I say I would rather have too many ideas then hearing this one dumb idea repeated by every band over and over and over again. This track actually contains my favourite part of the EP it comes after the middle 8 and just has this riff that just grabs you and feels like its strangling you, throwing you round the room while Joe screams ‘I END YOU’. Amazing. ‘..Sad Thing Is’ closes this beast of an EP, a blistering opening assault gives way to a flood of angry riffage and from here again you can easily make the jump to ‘Mono’. The final two lines ‘I can test you, I can tell you’re lying’ are a promise and a threat and one best not ignored from The Icarus Line. ‘Red and Black Attack’ was released on 7”, on clear ‘wine’ coloured vinyl, and also on CD. The vinyl version I have is on heavy grey vinyl, I’m not sure if this is a bootleg release or if there was a repress, it sounds fine compared to the CD. One last point to make on ‘Red and Black Attack’ Aaron Austin plays drums on this but on the cover which features The Icarus Line in their anti-fashion uniforms there is no drummer present. They went on to have another two drummers after Aaron Austin’s departure first was John Guerra (F-Minus) and the other was Mike Felix (Toys That Kill) these proved short lived and soon Jeff ‘The Captain’ Watson entered. He would leave and return again and again throughout the following years.
Also released this year was a 7” split with The Icarus Lines touring partners Ink&Dagger, it features one song from each band with Ink&Dagger turning in ‘The Solo Mission’ and The Icarus Line giving us ‘Never Gonna Make It’. The Ink&Dagger influence on The Icarus Lines track is obvious with the Icarus Line dabbling with an electronic passage, something that characterised a lot of Ink&Daggers music, the rest of the track is very similar in style to the songs on ‘Red and Black Attack.’ The 7” was released as a picture disc and has a suitably strange and unsettling image of two detached mannequins legs posed in the middle of the street, some how the image seems perfect. I have yet to get this on 7” but you can download the tracks from iTunes.
‘Mono’
There was a gap of 3 years between the release of ‘Red and Black Attack’ and ‘Mono’ with the only output during this time being a 7” for ‘Kill Cupid With A Nail File’ which was released by Buddyhead, Aaron North’s record label. 214 copies would be given away at a show put on by Buddyhead on Valentines Day, get it 2/14-214 copies. This would be a limited run on clear pink vinyl with one side being silk screened to include a picture of a fallen Icarus, so only one side of the record was playable. ‘Kill Cupid With A Nail File’ could easily have been included on ‘Mono’ and in fact it was included on the Japanese version. It is an essential Icarus Line song.
‘Mono’ was engineered initially by Mark Trombino, who played drums in Drive Like Jehu, but the band ran into problems with Trombino which culminated in the band firing him and bringing in Alex Newport, who played in Nailbomb and Theory Of Ruin. The drums, bass, all of Alvin’s guitar tracks and half of Aaron’s guitar tracks were all taken from the Trombino sessions. The Icarus Line had made the decision to record to tape rather than using pro tools so a lot of the record was completed in first takes which is a testament to The Icarus Line and how prepared they must have been for this record.
‘Love Is Happiness’ opens the record and it catches you like a blind side right hook, its like you’ve went to shake hands but end up getting sucker punched instead and it leaves you feeling dazed for the next 3 and a half minutes. It is a beast of a song and an angry beast at that. ‘Love Is Happiness’ was the first Icarus Line song I ever heard and it still remains to be one of my favourites. It has it all; pummelling drums, guitars that chop and change from riffs to lead breaks all the while sounding like the instrument and the player are wrestling the music from each other. The lyrics are dark and clearly fuelled by what seems like a bottomless pit of anger and rage ‘your breath smells like Nyquil, where the hell were you all night?’, ‘I still feel like I’m paying for our fucking sins’ and ‘This is for every fucking thing I don’t know!’. I love this song, at 1.11 in when its all feedback and Joe Cardamone screams ‘She bleeds when she gets drunk’ it floors me every time. The song cycles round with a different verse the 2nd time, it has part after part then it drops down and creates tension using Cardamones’ scream to help bust it out ending on ‘It’s the best, it’s the best, it’s the best, Yeah!’ Top 5 favourite track one, side ones? It is in mine for sure.
Track 2 is ‘You Make Me Nervous’ its slow build through some tension and release verses all the while dripping of twitchy, tweaking drug induced paranoia. A change of pace in the middle of the song and we don’t hear the first part again. This is one of the reasons I love The Icarus Line the way they seem to let the song mutate, change and take its own course. They don’t seem to be concerned with conventional A,B,A,B,C,A,B,B song structuring, it is a style that surely has been influenced by Ink&Dagger which is probably best illustrated in their song Philapsycosis, one of my favourite Ink&Dagger songs for the same reason.
We pick up the pace again with ‘L.O.S.T.’ and ‘Enemies In High Places’ both are full of riffs and adopt the mutating style that I’m sure you realise by now is a signature of The Icarus Line. I love Joe Cardamones lyrics and these two songs are prime examples of what he is able to come up with, I’m not going to reprint the whole songs here so just go and read them. There is a line in ‘L.O.S.T’ that is ‘Paint a picture of it all perfect and blue’ and I think its more the delivery and how its placed in the context of the song but I love it. There are a few brilliant lines in ‘Enemies In High Places’; ‘Kiss them slowly like pro, this kiss erases everything they know’ and ‘My enemies hate me so much it becomes a subliminal love affair’ I would kill to write lines like that.
‘In Lieu’ slows the whole thing down showing that The Icarus Line are not a one trick pony. It starts off with a guitar feeding back then breaks into it with the feedback building, building, building and then when the verse kicks in it all drops down. At 8 minutes 15 seconds this track takes you everywhere and it easily could have closed the record although having it as the fifth track ensures the listener isn’t just unrelentingly assaulted until the end and it also allows the next track ‘Feed A Cat To Your Cobra’ to have maximum impact when it kicks in.
‘Feed A Cat To Your Cobra’ was the first single of ‘Mono’ and the track, if any, that people will be familiar with. The video for the song is a collage of live footage taken of The Icarus Line including footage of the infamous liberation of the Stevie Ray Vaughan guitar by Aaron North. The video showcases what the band are like live and it looks to be an explosive affair; passion, energy, wreck less abandon, lost in the music. You can tell this is not an act, this real, they MEAN it, just watch Aaron North going off while he’s playing. You couldn’t put yourself through that night after night if this wasn’t something that was coming from the heart, something you had to do. This is what a live show should be like not standing there strumming your guitar too scared to move in case you mess up that £100 hairstyle of yours or in case you maybe miss that note. If you don’t come out sweating and bleeding you haven’t tried hard enough.
Next we have ‘Oh Faithless’ which is, from what I can tell, an attack on religion conveyed lyrically as only Joe Cardamone can, ‘I might be late for my own funeral’. This song is an exercise in tension and release and is as close to the quiet loud quiet loud formula that The Icarus Line ever gets.
Without time to even take a breath ‘Please Fire Me’ comes screaming out of the speakers at you with a savage beginning then quickly giving way to the repeated phrase ‘That tattoo ruined you’ this is repeated from 0.23 until 1.41, your constantly waiting for it to break and when it does it is all heavy crashes and screams, ‘This is the last fucking thing!’, it feels like the world is crashing down around you. The song ends with Cardamone whispering ‘it gets better than this, I swear.’
This gives way to ‘Keep Your Eyes Peeled’ a slow, brooding song that brings to mind all those horrible mornings, all those mind bending come downs and blackout hangovers that leave you twisted up in some kind of psychosis. ‘When your waking up and you don’t feel right in your own skin, reflections that haunt you, let the darkness in.’ The slightly off kilter rhythm of the drums only add to the disjointed and disorientated feel of the song. As the pace starts to quicken half way through the song it feels like the quickening of the pulse, the beginning of a rising anger, a sudden mood swing into rage then there is the brief calm before the storm with the song ending in a frantic release.
‘Best Two Out Of Three’ has one of the dirtiest bass sounds, ever.
‘Rape Of The Holy Mother’ comes at you like a starved, rabies ridden dog, the start of the song is reminiscent of the earlier Icarus Line songs but then it goes straight into a spoken word tirade against the press and poseurs. It is a blistering track ending in guitar stabs and cymbal crashes which lead us into the final track ‘SPMC’
‘SPMC’ clocks in at 10.57 and is a more sombre affair than the rest of the record for the most part. This comes as no surprise as the song is a tribute to their lost friend Sean Patrick McCabe, the singer from Ink&Dagger, who died in 2000 at aged 27. The song plays out the record ending in squalls of feedback and reverb and oscillating pedals and delay and squeals and screams and beeps and howls and other worldly nightmare noises. Recently Aaron North said “In tribute, SPMC was always a long, drawn out, emotional rollercoaster ride when performed live. It was always one of my favourite Icarus Line songs. I’ll never forget creating that very long, drawn out ending of it on the album, by adding layer after layer of guitar feedback, and then running it all through a massive reverb chamber in the studio we were in. (It’s actually one of the largest of it’s kind in the world) One of my favourite things about this vinyl version of the album, are the “locked grooves” which end each side. So, for example… If you aren’t paying attention to your record player by the time it gets to the end of SPMC, you’d think we recorded the longest feedback drone known to man. When all that droning, echoed, feedback, finally hits that locked groove, the sound and song become ENDLESS. ETERNAL, if you will. That was the concept I remember having in mind while mastering that effect for the LP version… To make SPMC endless. To relate Sean Patrick McCabe’s soul with that effect… Endless. Eternal.”
I guess he sums it up better than I did but he wrote the song so he has an edge on me on this one. ‘Mono’ is one of my all time favourite records I listen to it constantly and I am consistently still blown away how good it is, I will never get bored of this record. It has had such a huge influence on me, my song writing and how I play guitar. Aaron North is a phenomenal guitarist, there is not another guitarist out there who plays the way he does, he attacks his guitar and live it seems as if he is wrestling his guitar, and it is fighting back, wringing every note from its neck. There is no point trying to imitate his style but if I had to say who my favourite guitarist would be it would be him.
‘Mono’ spawned two singles the first was ‘Feed A Cat To Your Cobra’ with 3 other tracks ‘1970’, ‘Kill Cupid With A Nail File’ and ‘SPMC’. ‘Kill Cupid With A Nail File’ I also went over earlier on and it’s the same version that was on the Valentines Day 7”. ‘1970’ and ‘SPMC’ were both taken from one of the Peel Sessions that The Icarus Line, John Peel was one of the first to champion The Icarus Line in the UK.
I want to say here and now that I love The Stooges so The Icarus Line covering The Stooges is a wet dream and they do not disappoint in fact, dare I say it, they better The Stooges version of ‘1970’. I know there are some Stooges fans out there who would say this is sacrilege and would ex-communicate me for even thinking such a thing but listen to it and I think you will agree. Any time I listen to it I always think it would be great to hear The Icarus Line do this Stooges song or that Stooges song (TV Eye and Dirt if I had to pick). As in the Aaron North quote ‘SPMC’ live is no less emotional or sprawling live, it is actually even more so than on the record, your ears will be ringing after this one.
The second single was ‘Love Is Happiness’ which included ‘Love Is Happiness’, ‘You Make Me Nervous’, ‘Miss Bliss’ and ‘Losing Touch With My Mind’. The version of ‘Love Is Happiness’ on the single is a re-recorded version of the song sometimes called the UK version as this single was a UK only release. The UK version is slower than the original and has a longer intro of feedback and dissonant noise. I personally prefer the original due to the fact that it is played with so much venom but the second version is good and each has their own merits. ‘You Make Me Nervous’ and ‘Losing Touch With My Mind’ are both part of another peel session, it is also worth noting that the peel session these came from mark the first recordings with the new Icarus Line drummer Troy Petrey. Troy would play drums for the majority of the tour in support of ‘Mono’ and also played drums on some of the newer songs The Icarus Line were debuting on tour that would show up on the next record ‘Penance Soiree’. This time The Icarus Line include a cover of a Spacemen 3 song ‘Losing Touch With My Mind’ and again I love Spacemen 3 and again I am sure some Spacemen 3 fans will want to string me up for this but The Icarus Lines version is better. It could be because it has a more conventional rock feel to it in that there is solid drum beat behind it rather than a kick drum, a tambourine and a cymbal for added effect. Both versions work but I think that The Icarus Lines has more impact even though it is a pretty true cover. This song also shows up on a Buddyhead sampler. ‘Miss Bliss’ is a new track that defiantly has a ‘Mono’ feel to it but never quite delivers as well as the album tracks, it’s not necessarily a bad song but it lacks that bite and vitriol that is such a staple of the record.
After ‘Mono’ The Icarus Line released ‘Penance Soiree’ and ‘Black Lives On The Golden Coast’ along with some singles and EP’s, I am not going to cover those now due to the fact that this is already six pages long and if anyone has made it this far then you are either already an Icarus Line fan or hopefully I have converted you. So go check them out, there are a few links below that will give you even more information on The Icarus Line.
Briefly I do want to mention that The Icarus Line have a new single out ‘We Sick’ b/w ‘Holy Man’. This is the first we have heard from them since ‘Black Lives..’ and it is good to have them back. You can get the single from the Buddyhead link for free or you can download them via iTunes. I will leave it up to Joe Cardamone to tell you about the songs.
“We Sick is our newest attempt at communicating to the rest of the world in a language that hope fully lands as universal and the guitars are really harsh too. The title comes from a quote in a movie about Watts. Holy Man is an appropriate partner because it is the unofficial anthem of the east side pusher. The corner quack or ghetto entrepreneur. Both of these tunes are a perfect gateway into the new full length.” - Joe Cardamone, The Icarus Line
As usual this is set so anyone, even people with a posterous account, can comment so fire away.
Http://www.icarusline.net
