For the past 20 years, Sam Coomes and Janet Weiss have made passionate, raucous music in Quasi. In the beginning, their partnership was marital as well as musical, but it continued past their divorce and concurrent with their work in other bands: Coomes in Heatmiser with Elliott Smith when Quasi began, and later as a guest with Built To Spill; Weiss as a member of Sleater-Kinney, Stephen Malkmus And The Jicks and Wild Flag. Mole City (Kill Rock Stars) is a culmination of Quasi’s many strengths: its oversaturated and distorted sound, its singsong and shouted melodies, its controlled abandon. Coomes will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Quasi feature.
Coomes: Maybe the ultimate art-damage rock band, or at least very near the top of the list. Mars LP: The Complete Studio Recordings is pretty fascinating. It has everything the band recorded (’77-’78) in chronological order, from their first single, which almost sounds like a halfway normal avant-rock band, to the No New York comp tracks, which are about half near normal and half veering into no-man’s land, to their EP, which sounds like psychotic street people jamming on abandoned instruments in some nasty back alley in the middle of the night. By the time they get to the final song, it is just total psychosis – there is nowhere left for this band to go, so they call it quits. Later this was all released on a record called 78+, which was remixed by Jim Thirlwell—when I say remixed, I mean he sort of dubbed it all out with reverb and delay … probably better off sticking with the original mixes. 78+ has a couple of live tracks thrown in as well, but they don’t really add anything to the oeuvre. But Mars LP plays out like a soundtrack to a total breakdown—pretty unique.
Video after the jump.
