HUMAN ADULT BAND “T. Penn Collections” C92 (Saga House)

The first thing you’ll notice about this tape is that the A-side is backward. Like, literally, it’s a mirror image of side B in all ways. The tape plays backward, like you’re perma-stuck in the Black Lodge, but the backward-recorded sounds aren’t played forward again to mess with your head. It’s a weird, nightmarish side, only suggesting the lo-fi chaos that appears on side B (and plays the right way). Well, maybe not “suggesting.” It does play everything on side you’re about to hear, just … differently.

The second thing you’ll notice is that head Human Adult T. Penn is a friggin’ weirdo. The Jersey lifer begins side B with the seventeen-minute “Music Is Not My Religion but This Is My Prayer,” a guttural meditation on the low end of the EQ spectrum, dense and noisy and intense. From there he slips into anti–rock music shaman mode, drawing from different iterations of bands he was in (Th’ Summer Dresses, Th’ Horrorday Rounders; Human Adult Band gets credit for tracks B2, B3, and B6) and playing a couple tunes written by people who aren’t him (R. Stevie Moore, Marc Bolan). These are wandering no wave ideas filtered through bedroom DIY, beat ingenuity tethered to necessity as the mother of ramshackle invention.

T. Penn may be a friggin’ weirdo, but he’s an interesting one nonetheless.

Keep an eye out for Philly’s own Saga House cassette label – they bill themselves as “a curatorial project to recycle a load of 1,700 blank cassette tapes and a duplicator found in a church basement in 2014. Saga House is a not for profit endeavor, selling the tapes directly for $3 apiece.” Sounds like they’ve got a lot of good things planned for those 1,700 tapes.


Saga House



--Ryan

HUMAN ADULT BAND "Creepy Classics" CS (D.I.H.D.)

Here is a nice DIY crafted four song EP. It contains 3 originals and a Neil Young cover from his Ditch trilogy era classic album "On the Beach" - "Vampire Blues". The songs seem authentically bummed, exhausted and frustrated but also pleasantly revealing in the bliss which is making poor life decisions late at night. An anything goes noise philosophy is apparent in the band which leaves the originals sounding like the Birthday Party played by Velvet Underground loving Brooklyn NYC burnouts.

The players sound as if they suffer from insomnia. The singer doesn't have young Nick Cave's peppy, crooning wolf howl or the intensity of Australia, 1981. This being said, the character he portrays in song is captivating nonetheless. While strained and bleak, the singer can get into some hardcore territory. He has the cathartic and forceful bark of the guy in Pissed Jeans. On their "Vampire Blues" cover, he does not have Neil Young's signature Alto range, but his voice is distinctively passive aggressive which gives the song's blues structure a nice punk rock charm.

The guitars are distorted and frantic but at their least meandering and helpless. They never give up however; the band has the energy of rock and roll and even when they play on only fifteen minutes of sleep the music is still more fierce than the bleeps of robots. They are playing some harsh noise here with rock song structure, but it is still music that is warm from tube hum.

I bet this band would be interesting to see live, a mixture of Lou Reed cool with Nick Cave mean and a heartfelt impersonation of Harry Pussy guitar playing at half speed. Pretty good tape, it's like 15-20 minutes, check it out.

http://dihd.net/

-Jack Turnbull
www.jackturnbull.com

COW / HUMAN ADULT BAND split tape (Phase! Records)

This short split tape between COW (Change Of Women) and Human Adult Band is a really great match up of approaches. I had seen Human Adult Band a long time ago (5 years) and was totally perplexed by them and immediately fell in love. I've kept up with some releases on DIHD and Bonetoothhorn and through a few of their lineup changes; they now incorporate King Darves on drums, Trevor Pennsylvania on Bass and Mike on guitar. I hadn't gathered much from them recently so when i saw this split i was real excited to hear what they've been up. The tape (probably 8 minutes a side) starts with really clean guitar, an almost out of tune bass and the drums mixed to the back of the sounds. A bit of a departure from the new brunswick basement sounds i remember from these guys- formerly sounding like they were covered in new jersey's finest grime and grit, this has a lot more an of an airy feel. But it's not a departure, they haven't gone nu metal, formed a jam band or started introducing dance routines. What was at the core of this group is still there, and we're all the better for it. They're exploring the fundamentals of music, they're operating in a 'band format' with drums, guitar, bass and vocals, there are semi-distinct parts and they stay in time with each other. For the most part. And there in lies the beauty. The bass sometimes misses notes, the vocals sound like the singer was catapulted over the rehearsal space, the mix is a little off sometimes (like during the guitar solo the guitar gets quieter- beautiful!!!) But in the end the guitar cleanly strums away the detritus like a broom does a broken lamp and instead of cleaning up after the house party, they tear down the shades, throw out the couch, scoop up the puke and sleep it off to start all over again, maybe next time covered in algae and earthworms.

Side Two is COW and they have a decidedly different atmosphere, it's not the glue huffing euphoria of Human Adult Band so much as blown out tire on a rumble strip. I don't know much about these guys and don't know if it's my journalistic duty to Google them before i write about them but i didn't want to color my review of them with internet rumor. Anyhow, they definitely share a love of questionable mixing choices (a good thing in my book!) leaving the vocals on some track almost inaudible where on others it's all you can hear. Definite nods to the classic groups of thrash/grindcore like Napalm Death and Carcass, especially in the vocals, while leaving enough room for their own sound to shine. While approaching blast beat speeds COW never loses their musicality, always staying within the parameters set up for the song, a welcome approach to a situation where it's so easy (and can sound so good) to just totally lose it and battle it out with your bandmates. There are some choice moments of heavy tempo changes from thrash beats slowly trudging down the steps into a total tar pit of unconsciousness, like you're being slowly clubbed into the darkness by each and every beat. Another favorite, and something i wish there was a little more of was the double vocals, the sounds of two guys losing molars screaming into a shitty mic is the best. There are 7 songs in this short outing all with a different enough flavor to keep you happily chewing the fat and when it's over, wanting more, even if it's giving you heart failure and you're losing vision in one eye.

Full color cover artwork doesn't really match up with the way either side made me feel, but not a bad looking tape.

www.phaseweb.tk

HUMAN ADULT BAND “Impotent & Filthy” (Abandon Ship Records)

You know those bands with band names where it sounds like they got so tired of trying to think of good names that they ended up picking something bizarrely literal and boring? Like Average White Band and American Music Club and The Music? Well it’s cool that the underground sludge-noise community has a representative of that school of thought with Human Adult Band. I heard a previous tape by them on Bone Tooth Horn a long time ago and it didn’t stick out in my mind at all and I can’t say that this does much either. It’s basically a mild-sounding live set of theirs recorded at a place in Philadelphia called “Th’ Big Pink” that treads from plodding sleepy murk-marches to noisier chant rock exercises. The audio gives the impression the show was basically empty (there’s not much applause between songs, though they do inexplicably bother announcing the title of every song they play) and things never seem to rev up to a higher intensity level, nor do they zone-out into repetitive trance territory. It’s kinda just a mid-energy road to nowhere. I dunno. Live shows are a headache to document properly, maybe that’s the culprit here. Either way I doubt this is the place to start if you want to get into these dudes’ discography.