by Matty McPherson (@ghostplanetmatt)
It was a spartan sound that held it all together: that kick drum and funk bass mostly. Although, the guitar was wiry and sly, known to provide the occasional quarter note melody or provocative slash; the crucial crux to the whole thing. That this truly functioned as a dance sound at the height of downtown no wave and mutant funk doesn't go without a question. It sounds resoundingly fresh and evocative--well that's been my primal reaction I've had from visiting Wharf Cat’s spectacular Rhythm and Paranoia: The Best of Bush Tetras.
Now, the band's been collected before, over thirty years back by their old label ROIR on the soft-acknowledgement Better Late than Never in '89 and Boom in the Night on CD in '95 (amongst the pretty much same Tetrafied CD comp in '96). Yet that was just their 1980-1983 output--even that fifteen track tape/CD only has twelve of those cuts featured here. Meanwhile, essential live document Wild Things is MIA outside of a brief name drop in an essay. Even if its not encyclopedic, Rhythm and Paranoia's 3xLPs or 2xCDs still provide Bush Tetras with the deserved decades-spanning time travel odyssey that's been missing, and yeah, the remaster hits like a sledgehammer, beefing up the low end for the hi-fi. Oh and those images, concert reviews, liner notes, and lyrics are flush with the kind of ephemera that made Pylon's box set, BOX, an automatic grip. Any burgeoning punk historian needs to know these tracks or have access to the 47 pages of the booklet in whatever form possible.
We should still start with those first mind-expanding recordings (tracks 1-13). Even if the band could not have kept it together long enough to record an album in that era, Bush Tetras had already set themselves in a pantheon next to ESG and Pylon. The band's crucial origins out of the Contortions, straight back into the fray of New York City clubs quickly racked themselves an audience. Amongst a gaggle of singles throughout the early 80s, they soundtracked that era of mutant funk clubbing and cultural osmosis. Audiences found themselves exposed to a radical kind of act: three women center stage and one man chomping on the drums. Again, the aforementioned Pylon and ESG (as well as Delta 5) come to mind here and they're on a similar plane of danceable, wicked tight guitar music. Yet, the crucial difference comes into lyricism and ethos. Vanessa Briscoe Hay of Pylon had taken that act's spartan sound and communicated in evocative situationist banter; ESG had taken theirs and communicated in chilled funk-dub codas rife to be crate dug. Cynthia Sley channels the spartan rhythm into cutting clap-backs and rife dada wit. Sley's lyrics could be the middle point between the two--itself evocative sloganeering and turns of phrase that sketch grounded, if not abstract ideas. All the while, the songs are bloody revelrous.
There are only a handful of punk era singles as legitimately evocative and sharp as “Too Many Creeps”. No band channeled no wave noise into a fever dream of “Cowboys in Africa”. Only ESG could kiss off with as much gusto when considering the claps and bass of the “You Can't Be Funky” chorus. No one mended the dub sonics with icy pop austerity like the Tetras did on “Das Ah Riot”. Their songs are all truly THAT mind expanding. The failure to have properly advocated and presented these songs over the last several decades is a tragedy unto itself, yet it wasn't for a lack of superfans that carried the torch. The litany of interviews, including Thurston Moore, Lucy Sante and Hugo Burnham, emphasize just how potent this moment was and the songs of this first disc could be the soundtracks to downtown NYC writ large. Bands like this didn't just sell 30,000 copies of a single; they also were thrown into a nascent MTV rotation and given a chance to record an EP with Topper Headon of the Clash. It's THAT kind of moment that still feels too insane to imagine any punk band of sorts achieving now.
It's then equally as noteworthy, that the band's proceeding seventeen tracks are equally as diverse and offer a true endowment of the Bush Tetras story. What happens when regional sounds progress and become swallowed whole by the major label machine? Bush Tetras' 90s revival and flirtation with grunge aesthetics was a sudden shock in the CD pacing--casually sneaking up at the end of disc 1; a reinvention of an act now caught between Babes in Toyland and Badmotorfinger, with the signature fuzz and atmosphere of their later early 80s work echoing through. The tracks have a greater sense of personality and humor than your stock major label grunge--which is what makes the whole involvement with Polygram that inadvertently ends with Happy being shelved a travesty. The run from “Page 18” up to “Nails” are a miraculous, misunderstood reinvention that slows the pace and lets Sley spread out her gruff yet dynamic voice. In particular is “Motörhead” and “Pretty Thing,” sludgy, melodic lullabies that stayed shelved until 2012. It would've sounded out of time in '98 as much as it did in 2012, and I mean that in the best of ways.
It all brings us to this final handful of tracks; the "Wharf Cat Victory Lap" era, if you will. I can remember in 2019, stepping into my college MD office where sitting plump on the left wall was a piece of promotional paper from their 2018 EP, Take the Fall. "Just who were these downtown New York legends and why had no one talked about them?" I wondered. The name always stuck with me. Yet, in spite of raging familiarity I had with the label during my tenure as a college music MD, it evaded proper listening until this last month. While I find it near-impossible to separate the act from their tenure on ROIR, the Bush Tetras on Wharf Cat, in this moment, lined up immaculately.
Here they found themselves like the Feelies: in the unlikely yet deserved role of an elder statesman. Their sound's faint echoes are within Bambara's own blackened gothic marauding, Palberta's whimsical guitar scowls and squeaks, amongst even Gong Gong Gong's tenacious free-form experiments; still, none can match Sley's triumphant, dead-eyed croon. To trace a line from “Too Many Creeps” to the present day alongside these acts is truly a fool's errand. I place this connection more so as a spiritual one, of a label's curation recognizing the parallels in their current day ethos and that of the Tetras' downtown of their primordial days.
The three tracks that appear from the EP are a fusion of their previous incarnations and sonic experiments, lined up perfectly with Wharf Cat's late 10s pro-guitar MO. The no-wave guitar fuzz, along with a rip-roaring level of sludge picked up in the 90s, became Bush Tetras 3.0. THIS sound had a potent bite to it that hadn't been locked into before, and especially hearing its chronological order demonstrates that the Tetras could never err towards staleness or anything close to being out-of-vogue. The one-two of “True Blue” and “Red Heavy” impart a particular joy, as the former rekindles their spartan sound towards its noisiest edges while the latter redefines the gospel inklings of the classic Talking Heads rendition of "Take Me to the River" towards raw unvarnished state. Further refinements for the “There is a Hum” 7" on Third Man Records demonstrated that Bush Tetras had a newfound playfulness, an inkling of a heavy, yet immensely pleasurable sound to follow.
However, it is a statement that feels too tragic to consider. Rhythm and Paranoia was supposed to be a rectification of the Tetras story, one that practically foreshadows an unlikely fifth decade. Whether or not that decade is to happen is still in limbo. Dee Pop, who's drumming carried the entire weight and history of the Tetras sound, suddenly passed away last year, shortly before the box set's release. He was being interviewed and discussing Bush Tetras literally up to the day before. Even with the rave coverage and outpouring of support, the box set (like Pylon's own, BOX), has not warranted a sudden shock appreciation of Bush Tetras. If anything, it's a testament to the time, place, and ethos of one of the best to do it.
Still, I contend that Rhythm and Paranoia deserves more than being regulated to "hipster homework" or a mere curio. Even if the 3xLP is perhaps too opulent for any day but Easter, the 2xCD truly does lay out a convincing framework and is well worth the read in book or PDF form; and the digital stream now presents a real chronological guide. Hell, even a ROIR compilation--CD or tape, it really doesn't matter, as you'll walk out with a bonafide essay as well--are still second hand delights. Although I must admit, if you're going to play Tetras' music all night, expect to find yourself bumping until dawn. That's truly the only way to do it.