Monday, September 15, 2014

The Lost Riots: Shorter! Faster!! Louder!!! / Hudson: Manhattan RyeWhiskey / Transmetropolitan: Back on the street

Short is the theme here. Just an entry to prove good things can come in small packages.



Shorter! Faster!! Louder!!!
Die Hipster! Records/Obscure Me Records

From the city of New Haven, not all that far from my own city of New London, there is a punky garage band called The Lost Riots. Four short dudes cranking out short four chord rock tunes at high speed and higher energy. I say a punky garage band rather than garage band or punk band because honestly, they're not quite angry enough to be a full on punk band and they are not quite poppy enough to be garage. They walk a line that in the late 90's and early 00's was a pretty well worn path but nowadays seems like a dividing line. 

Structurally the Lost Riots are using a famous Ramones tactic of throwing verses and choruses at you in rapid succession to keep you on your toes. If you don't pay attention, this record will pass you by. The vocals are a higher register and clock in somewhere between singing and shouting. They are more melodic than screamed but they are done with a certain amount of force and grit. The utilization of a second guitar brings shades of the Dead Kennedy's surf-ish tenancies and The Damned's slide and strum technique into the mix tonally. Shades of "New Rose" can be heard throughout the record. 

As far as content goes this is much more a partying punk rock record than a 'damn-the-man' punk record. Which I for one am glad for. I get enough people preaching at me on FaceBook I don't need it in my record collection too. If you track it from the first track "We're Getting Old" to the end with "Last Night was Fun", where the main lyric in the song is "Last night was fun, let's do it again" then I'd say that it has a pretty optimistic trend. Four songs with less than a 10 minute running time make this any easy record to flip-repeat-digest. As I said earlier though if you don't pay attention you will be sitting in silence before you know it. Short/intense bursts of energy is what punk has always been about and the Lost Riots have it down to a science. 

 


Manhattan Rye
46% ABV / 92 Proof

The next item on the "short list" is Hudson's Manhattan Rye. The bottle is seriously very short... I've called it a "booze hand grenade" before. Even with the bottle's short stature, Hudson jams a ton of flavor and character in there. Rye whiskey is my favorite type of whiskey hands down. It's quintessentially American and though I'm not always big on that sentiment, Rye is akin to American things like jazz or blues, cool American stuff. 

Now this is fairly young whiskey; it's stored for less than 4 years in new oak barrels. My personal bottle was distilled in 2012 and was bottle 2021 from batch 10. None of that means a heck of a lot to me besides the date but at least their keeping good records. For a whiskey that was aged for around 2 years it's quite dark; a deep reddish amber color actually. The smell is a jolt of boozy cinnamon. There is plenty of oak flavor for such young whiskey but it's sharpened by the alcohol bite. The tell-tale spice finishes it off and coats your tongue with hints of black pepper, clove and lemon peel. There's a little burn to go with all that flavor but it's well worth it and let's you know you're alive and keeps your guts warm as the autumn winds start to blow through.




Back on the Street

Three issues, that's it... three. Most trade paperbacks are somewhere between 6 and 8 or so but the first story arc of Transmetropolitan is 3 issues (that is short) packed to bursting with social commentary, comedy, violence and cussing. Spider Jerusalem is basically the comic book version of Hunter S Thompson, thrown into a surrealist future where pretty much everything and everyone is completely fucked. Politicians are even more corrupt and viscous, religion is even more splintered and bizarre and there is no such thing as a social norms. 

Warren Ellis loads his pen with potent poison and writes a character that is equal parts intelligence, anger and disgust for humanity. Called from his mountain home in order to fulfill a book deal deadline, Spider takes a job writing a political column and finds himself in the middle of a race riot. The technology is completely off the wall in Spider's world; machines that reassemble matter in order to create your clothes and your breakfast, surgery to change your species and anti-cancer "traits". This is without mentioning the zillion other bio mechanical plugins that you see in the periphery. Ellis allows you into the world and never really bothers to explain it. Being that it's a comic it's all there for you too see but like in real life you just have to engross yourself in a place to get the best feel for it. Walk around take random streets, get lost a little bit. If you always follow the map you'll never learn anything you didn't intend to. Ellis let's you do this in Transmetropolitan. The truly bizarre and detailed things are explained through conversations between characters but other things are what you make of them and what you choose to observe. 

Darick Robertson does a splendid job making everything pop out at you. Imagine Tokyo and New York went on a weekend bender together The City in Transmetropolitan would be what they were vomiting up on Sunday morning. It goes from technicolor nightmare to mold covered hovel in a matter of pannels and Robertson keeps pace and keeps it all in perspective. There is no "high art" spin in this book; Robertson does a realistic-enough cartoon version of earth in the far distant future. The lines are crisp, the panels all flow and the action is always very visceral. I'm a huge fan of both Ellis and Robertson and Spider Jerusalem is a personal hero of mine. If you enjoy comics that don't have superheros then you'll love this series. Full Stop.