No band has waved the rainbow flag more proudly than Pansy Division. From its origins and involvement in early-’90s Bay Area punk to becoming de facto leaders of the “homocore” movement, Jon Ginoli, Chris Freeman and a rotating cast of straight and gay drummers (the band is now rounded out by drummer Luis Illades and guitarist Joel Reader) never shied away from graphic depictions of queer, bi and questioning dudes getting sweaty with each other and a variety of apparati. But as acceptance of queer culture and community has grown and the band’s members find themselves in their 40s and 50s, the topics on new album Quite Contrary have also progressed. Pansy Division will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our new feature on them.
Ginoli: In the last three years, I’ve probably spent as much time listening to Tony Molina’s music as anything else. If you define your favorite records as the ones you play over and over again, he’s at the top of my list.
Molina had a band called Ovens that recorded four albums in the mid-2000s and didn’t release any of them. The second, third, and fourth of these were complied onto the 44-song CD Ovens in 2009; three 45s followed. Molina put out a solo cassette Embarrassing Times in 2009 and solo LP Dissed & Dismissed in 2013, plus a 45 on Matador in 2013. Apart from the Ovens CD, all of these were small-run limited editions that were basically impossible to find; Slumberland, thankfully, reissued Dissed in 2014.
At this stage in rock music, a lot of my favorite new music assembles the already-familiar parts of rock past into new configurations. Molina’s music blends hard rock, indie rock, classic rock, punk, and ’60s rock into great miniature songs. I don’t necessarily like all of these categories; he has a knack for ’70s-style twin lead-guitar solos, which I usually dislike, but woven into his songs he makes it work. Molina is an incredible guitarist, both electric and acoustic; he can shred, but practices brevity and restraint. It may help that most of his songs average about a minute in length; his solos are short, and emotional. Though brief, most of his songs are whole songs, and very melodic; I hit the “repeat” button repeatedly. Dissed And Dismissed’s 12 songs total 11 minutes and 22 seconds. I love his voice, too; his lyrics are pretty simple, but fit well with music. He’s from San Mateo County, just south of San Francisco, and Ovens songs refer to unhip suburbs such as Daly City, Millbrae, Pacifica, and others in “the 650” (area code).
Molina is an incredible magpie. He can recreate other band’s sounds whole cloth; his single “Breakin’ Up” is basically a brand new Thin Lizzy song he wrote, albeit more condensed. It’s an intense minute and 28 seconds. There’s a lot of Beatles homage (bordering on theft), Zombies, Teenage Fanclub; he’s released covers of songs by Guided By Voices, Camper Van Beethoven, and Metallica.
His shows are short, too. When I last saw his band play, opening for Royal Headache, they had a four-guitar lineup, and ended their 18-minute set by covering Teenage Fanclub’s “Everything Flows,” and it was absolutely monumental. He has a new EP, Confront The Truth (eight songs on a 45), on Slumberland.
Videos after the jump.
