dusted: With all the relatively recent attention heaped on every shade and color of New York’s famed late 1970s No Wave scene, it’s strange that few saw fit to resurrect the work of Ut.
A trio of women borne out of multi-instrumentalist Nina Canal’s post Dark Days work (a band she shared with DNA member Robin Crutchfield) Ut’s music served as an American analogue to the intoxicatingly discordant clamor that European icons like the Slits, the Au Pairs, and Kleenex/Liliput concocted on the other side of the Atlantic. Faced with indifference at home in Gotham City, Canal and her bandmates Jacqui Ham and Sally Young ditched the states for England, subsequently releasing a couple of great but generally ignored records on the mighty Blast First imprint before calling it a day in the late 1980s.
In Gut’s House first appeared in 1988, at a time when the trade winds had distinctly shifted away from post-punk’s rhythmic dissonance. Swapping instruments with reckless abandon, here the band uses a mix of guitars, bass, violin, and drums to affect a deliriously bent form of aggression. Using percussion as a counterpoint instead of a rhythmic lead, the band lurches and stutters, with members taking turns on each successive instrument.
The sounds here come in crescendo’d spurts, with the strings of tracks like “Evangelist” and “Swallow” alternating between pure evisceration and gentle leads, providing a suitable vehicle for Ham’s harrowing vocal stabs and Canal’s almost intuitive drum work. “Homebled” and “Shut Fog,” on the other hand, find Canal and Ham trading off screeching violin lines against guitars that wouldn’t sound out of place on early Sonny Sharrock or James Blood Ulmer records.
[...]
Theirs was a music that always explored the darker implications of No Wave textures, never once ceding to the hooks or ham-fisted funk that invalidated the later work of many of their contemporaries. Ut never made a real attempt to engage with larger music structures and scenes in which they found themselves, and while this dedication to a decidedly inward aesthetic has subsequently marked their recordings as uniquely original, it has also unfortunately meant that they sound out of place when stacked against many of the bands that existed around the time they did.
Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing – the records these three coughed up during their run sound tied to neither date nor place, evidencing three musicians with a singular vision that could never easily be pinned. At the same time, however, it throws into sharp relief the reasons why they have been largely forgotten.
As a band that couldn’t easily be pigeonholed, Ut suffered the fate of general indifference. A shame, that is – this record sounds even more invigorating today when compared against a sea of No Wave fakes whose only desire so far has been to replicate a long-lost zeitgeist they never fully understood.
Hear
192kbps
In Gut’s House first appeared in 1988, at a time when the trade winds had distinctly shifted away from post-punk’s rhythmic dissonance. Swapping instruments with reckless abandon, here the band uses a mix of guitars, bass, violin, and drums to affect a deliriously bent form of aggression. Using percussion as a counterpoint instead of a rhythmic lead, the band lurches and stutters, with members taking turns on each successive instrument.
The sounds here come in crescendo’d spurts, with the strings of tracks like “Evangelist” and “Swallow” alternating between pure evisceration and gentle leads, providing a suitable vehicle for Ham’s harrowing vocal stabs and Canal’s almost intuitive drum work. “Homebled” and “Shut Fog,” on the other hand, find Canal and Ham trading off screeching violin lines against guitars that wouldn’t sound out of place on early Sonny Sharrock or James Blood Ulmer records.
[...]
Theirs was a music that always explored the darker implications of No Wave textures, never once ceding to the hooks or ham-fisted funk that invalidated the later work of many of their contemporaries. Ut never made a real attempt to engage with larger music structures and scenes in which they found themselves, and while this dedication to a decidedly inward aesthetic has subsequently marked their recordings as uniquely original, it has also unfortunately meant that they sound out of place when stacked against many of the bands that existed around the time they did.
Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing – the records these three coughed up during their run sound tied to neither date nor place, evidencing three musicians with a singular vision that could never easily be pinned. At the same time, however, it throws into sharp relief the reasons why they have been largely forgotten.
As a band that couldn’t easily be pigeonholed, Ut suffered the fate of general indifference. A shame, that is – this record sounds even more invigorating today when compared against a sea of No Wave fakes whose only desire so far has been to replicate a long-lost zeitgeist they never fully understood.
Hear
192kbps
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