#piscisclangor

[genericrecordreviews]

The Piranhas, Piscis Clangor (In The Red, 2004)

There’s this strange phenomenon where some music that was made during the 00s doesn’t almost seem to exist on the internet. And the funny thing is, between 2000 and 2005 I was a teenager and, as you do, I was going through the most intense phase of my obsession with a certain kind of music. So some stuff just really connects with me—and, apparently, with almost nobody else who has an internet connection.

Instagram won’t allow any long-winded nostalgia writing about the good old days of weird-punk, so trust me when I say this: a lot of really left-of-center stuff was coming up in the punk rock ranks during that time. It may be the fact that all the normal-sounding shit was being piped off to MTV and car commercials, so the underground was a hotbed for noisy, unhinged, dirty, corrosive, self-distructive, loud, reckless, nonsensical, primal, foaming-at-the-mouth… I lost my train of thought.

Around the time their first album ‘Erotic Grit Movies’ came out, Detroit's Piranhas had the reputation of being one of America's wildest live bands, aggressive and chaotic. ‘EGM’ was one of my favorite records at the time, but its savagery was pretty straightforward: they were great, but they could still fit in a playlist with the Clone Defects, early Lost Sounds, Coachwhips or the Final Solutions. Part of the “wave”. But not on their second album. ‘Piscis Clangor’ was utter fucking madness.

I’m not talking ‘Twin Infinitives’-type madness, the Piranhas stayed a punk band. But it’s stream-of-consciousness punk. It’s acid-fried (I know it’s cliché, but will you take a look at the lyrics please? “Noises distinctly animal / Stenciled traced / Held in soft mold prisons”) gunk jazz. Screeching noise surf. Dusty amphetamine-addled organ music. Leaving their contemporaries puzzled, the Piranhas made a record for the ages and then, obviously, disappeared.

Click here to buy Piscis Clangor from the In The Red website.

Follow GRRAWR on Instagram to get a weekly record review every Wednesday in your IG feed.

#grrawr #recordreviews #thepiranhas #piscisclangor #intheredrecords