You'll Never Play This Town Again

Besides their various albums, Harry Pussy had a slew of singles and one-offs floating around during their tempestuous existence, mostly coming from their crazed-as-heck live performances. You'll Never Play in This Town Again serves as a catch-all for a number of these, mostly from work done in 1997. While it's a slew of songs, they're all drawn from four separate sessions in 1997, two studio dates, one in January and one in May, plus a live show in Florida in May as well as a lengthy improvisation from a show in Chicago in April, "Live at Salon Zwerge." The fact that the band covered "Orphans" by Teenage Jesus & the Jerks as their concluding number at the Florida show is a pretty clear statement of purpose on the one hand -- the songs' short running times, confrontational rage and general rock-as-blunt-explosion approach certainly confirms their admitted debt to no wave. Certainly moments like the dank, chiming guitars from Dan Hosker and Bill Orcutt on the first studio version of "Mandolin" are almost a tribute to early Sonic Youth more than anything else. But there's an even more intense atmosphere on nearly every track, a sheer power that is all its own. Adris Hoyos' vocals, meanwhile, aren't simply trying to clone Lydia Lunch's or any other forerunner's -- there's a strength and spit to her declamatory statements that are hers alone, sometimes most evident in how she cuts through and works with the arrangements, as on "Lost" from the January session. Alternately she can just as easily take it low-key, as the near spoken word "Peace of My Ass" shows, or just find her own voice in the most extreme way -- "Mic Check" is just that, and the sounds she makes are breathtakingly intense (and then complemented by the amusing chat and more at the end). Meanwhile, when the band as a whole turns Kraftwerk's "Showroom Dummies" into a trebly feedback smash, it's reinvention and then some. ~ Ned Raggett