Coachwhips, I barely knew ye

If only I were cooler 5 years ago, when the Coachwhips were shooting things up with their hissing and growling kamikaze garage rock. I undoubtedly would have played them so loud and repeatedly that any set of speakers I owned at the time would have been ripped to shreds in a matter of weeks. What was I listening to back in 2004 anyway? I was listening to a lot of Black Sabbath, Interpol, Flaming Lips, YYYs, Ratatat, Ziggy Stardust, and Television. Quite the cheese plate, but clearly I wasn't a total lost cause.

Alas, it was only last month that I really started to bang my head and move this old pair of hips to the Whips' 2003 album Get Yer Body Next Ta Mine. The long-player spits out the Whips' when-it-rains-it-pours feedback punk stomp in approximately 27 minutes, making John Dwyer's scratchy screen door blues wail and his electric guitar's adrenochrome yelps seem like even more of a swaggering masterpiece. The velocity of John Harlow's drums make me feel out of breath just thinking about them; they sound as if a magically-tamed rabid dog grew opposable thumbs and got behind a drumset, crashing, clanging, and foaming at the mouth.

Slightly less conceptually chaotic than other releases like Peanut Butter and Jelly Live at the Ginger Minge, Get Yer Body is a rollicking, cohesive set of incomprehensibly-sung tunes where occasionally the words of song titles bubble up from the visceral murk (innuendo-laden numbers like "I Put it in Way Down South" and "Hey Stiffie" cast an intriguing umbrage, indeed), punctuated by avalanches of two- or three-note staccato Dwyer guitarisms. The mad "UFO, Please Take Her Home" is a careening porch holler that reduced me to pinwheeling around my bedroom, casting punches in several directions and kicking things.

The glorious scuzz that defines the Coachwhips' repertoire makes me upset that I hadn't made this my senior-year-in-high-school soundtrack, when it would have been the perfect excuse, neé the REASON for dabbling in mischief while I could still get away with it. John Dwyer lives on Haight Street--maybe I'll drop by with some beers and beg him to get back on the wagon, even though he's busy churning guts with his new band, Thee Oh Sees. For now, I'll have to be content dwelling on the past.