East Side Militia
INV157
Invisible Records

Buy it here

Lyrics © Jared Louche
Music: More, Louche, Tucker, Lenardo, DeSalvo

TRACKLIST:

Exile On Mainline | download

Jesus Christ Porno Star | download

Vera Blue | download

Pyromance

Lo-Grade Fever

Electric Molecular

Latex

Pink

 

ALBUM NOTES:

making ESM was a much more arduous procedure than making Burn Out. not because we had more time to work on Burn Out, we didn’t by any stretch of the imagination, but it was much harder for us to stay focused, quite simply. we spent a lot of time out on tour, pushing the envelope on Burn Out and the remixes. instead of writing, we killed a lot more time in the back room getting out of our heads and into other people. we were enjoying the underbelly a lot of the time and really weren’t too stressed about putting a new record together. we were sure, when we thought about it, that it was all going to come together just fine. sure. we were playing around with a lot of different structural ideas and songs, many of them though fell by the wayside long before they could come to life, teeth prematurely falling out of the diseased and rotten jaw bone. we wanted to make a record that would push further than what we’d done before, stretched, deeper, stranger. Dylan wanted to do a markedly less Rock oriented record and I wanted to do one that was more broadly mixed, both Rock and Weird, and we both wanted to make a much more experimental disc over all that would statement us away from a lot of the xerox bands we saw spawning all around. it was daylight-clear that there was no way straight-ahead teen angst’n’anger would be able to cut it for a second time. that simply didn’t speak unforked tongue to us. it would’ve been so easy to just do Burn Out all over again, play the Game and cop out, and maybe that would’ve been the best financial idea for our careers, the best marketing ploy and brand statement, but it certainly wasn’t what we felt. career? shit, we weren’t doing this as a career but because it felt like heaven. as fucked up and perverted and twisted and vital and incomplete and impoverished and frustrating and filled with love and loss and death and success and regret and Rock as it was, it was heaven, it was hell, and it was how we got at the demon beneath the rib. more than that, it was ours. so, we made the album we wanted to, not the album that made “sense.”

Lyrics

exile on mainline

$100 demon in my pocket,
and a scrape in the hole
digging up a bruise that darkens,
calibrated to go
down down down, and your grip is slipping
down down down, and the page is ripping
wasting the world away
at the bite of your touch
the wash of the passing days seeping out
doesn't matter that much
drowning out... no sound, pouring out upon the ground
raining down... the drain...
down down down, morning shakes and you're fadin' away...
down , down, slowly down, metal stress and it's shearing away

round and around and around to the ground, and I'm stumbling, tripping...
down.... jerk around and the record's skipping (x3)
skipping, skipping, skipping...
and the record's skipping....

jesus christ porno star

easily one of my favorite songs on this disc, or any other. its sentiment is as pure as I’ve ever wanted and the lyrics still turn me on. the feel of it is sleazy and lurid and tainted in the way that still draws back a feeling of night, the dark bruise you find inside your thigh and you don’t know how it got there. the more you stare at it the more things start to rise out of the cloying, blackout protected murk at you; the basement club, odd angles, lo-music slo-hammering, a flash of skin and teeth, roomsrooms, bodiesbodies, lights on and off and blue and night and red, yelling strapped, and the more you think the less it comes clear…and there’s the bruise. the second half of the song is epic in a strange way and the solo on it is, sadly, buried. I think it’s one of the coolest solos on any Machine Rock record, and both Dylan and Critter buried its crowning-glory Tucker solo in the mix. Machine Rock bands don’t do solos and that’s why I’ve always wanted them, and Tucker had ripped it out only for it to die at the mixing desk. at the very end of Oxidizer there’s a hidden suture that comes from ‘jcps’, from early demos we were doing. it was late one night and we were playing with the texture of jcps, riffing ideas with it and I told Dylan that I thought that a solo on the end of the song would be devastating if done well and that he was the cat to unleash it. that suture at the end of OXO is Dylan just suddenly letting it come loose from the frame, letting the solo come uncurling out of his fingertips all sweaty and slutty oil-slick across the keyboard. white-hot brilliance and spark and the essence of Cock Rock all rolled into a minute long high-kicking “fuck you” romp over the black-and-whites. once. only once. he never repeated it, and never wanted to no matter how much sugar I poured on him. fortunately I had the tape rolling. so, I put it on OXO as a suture, as a way of showing people a little of another side of him that I saw, and as a tribute to that fucked up wirehead genius: i am nothing, you are nothing, we are nothing. nothing at all.

roulette's spinning, the wheel of distinction
Darwin's selected you, for total extinction
i'm everything you think is wrong with the world
i'm a slutty, dirty little girl.
beaten and scarred and ripped and mangled
came for love and stayed for strangle
crown the serpent, proclaim the king
and now you're worshipping the Wrong Thing
where everything is wrong, and everything is right
and everything is wrong, and everything is right
(and covered up in black light)

the cracks are showing through
well I've got a message for you
there's something changing inside,
but I know it's not right
lick your daughter, fuck your son
inside, I'm the truly Ugly one
everything that you should stay away from
infectious, it's all infected, the disease is liberated
lurking just out of sight... we're gonna make it fit in real tight
a little closer, said the Spider to the Fly.

the cracks are showing through
well I've got a message for you
there's something changing inside, but I know it's not right
i am nothing, you are nothing, we are nothing
i am nothing, you are nothing, we are nothing... nothing at all (x3)
i am nothing, you are nothing, we are nothing, under the steel belted sky (x3)

vera blue

aaahhh, Vera, a composite of three women I knew, two drug dealers and a gun runner and, at some point I’ll tell the whole story, if you haven’t read it somewhere already, a story told about our old neighborhood and some of our creatures. Dylan’s favorite song ever.

it's 3:30am... all the streets are a blur
heading for a wreck at the end of the world
you can tell she's hydraulic
a silver scream in super sonic
you can see the mercury smear in her eye
right out of this world
and she's lost in the swirl... she's right out of this world
she's the Andricon girl
after hours in the valley of downs, tripped-up all over town
after 3 she's down on Avenue C, kicking down with the clowns.
right out of this world
and she's lost in the swirl... right out of this world
she's the Andricon girl.

(breathtaking, wasn't she? A truly beautiful woman)
livin’ in the galaxy, of bombed-out bars, with Jesus Christ Porno Star
hangin’ around, with her favorite crowd, she's the Queen of the Loud
with sultry wire legs and a digi-steel frame,
hooked on the hiss of the butane flame
she's terminal blue (repeat)
taking a ride with the pretty things tonight
you know it's wrong but it feels so very right
taking a ride with the pretty things tonight
you know it's wrong but it feels so fuckin' right
yeah... Vera Blue, what's happened to you?
(yeah...Vera Blue, locked down in Cell Block 2)

pyromance

to my mind this is a really sexy, sleazy song that bares its lipstick smeary teeth at you as it leans in. It’s one that Geno had been working on in Chicago. He sent a couple of trax to me and this one struck me black-eyed right off, hard. The song is so discoloured and ill and I love the fact that it’s written in Waltz time, in 6 (if it were 9), because it takes it away from being just a Rock song, makes it less predictable, more fluid yet lurching. It’s definitely one of my faves on the record and I think that his guitar playing is perfect. The acoustic is a brilliant touch and utterly left-fielded, like so much of the record. This is a song for really sweaty, pushy, hair-pulling, crying-out-into-the-belly-of-the- animalhungry dark, colorblurred sex with a total stranger, the soundtrack for a staggering “zipless fuck” that leaves you splay-drained and fuse-blown, a total train wreck that you’ll rewind and play over and over in your head for years to come.

lovely as a split lip... soulful as the city
move and skip, swivel it
sink my fingers in your hair,
the sweat and the smell of our liquid affair
in a gasoline burn our bodies will churn,
with a flick of the switch
you're plugged into the itch.
watch your videos all day... rewind and play... play and play and play.
my battery got a surge from my finger triggering your sparkplug
i felt that nervous boost when you bent down and licked my boots
headed in the direction of soma car-crash intersection
it's called "why don't we do it in the road?"
at least that's what I am told.

laser branded lover, syphilitic thing
bound up and tied, you can't fly without wings
over oceans of skin, bathed in perversion and sin
my parasitic couplet,
a needle descending,
my poisonous twin.
you're in danger.
Love walks with a stranger... getting stranger all the time.
my battery got a charge with my finger triggering your spark plug
i felt that nervous boost when you bent down and licked my boots
headed in the direction of soma car-crash intersection
it's called "why don't we do it in the road"
or at least that's what I am told...
play... fade away...

lo-grade fever

weird nightmare piece of bruise. this is such an un-Chemlab piece to so many people that thought that we could, and should, be only one thing, that to be good we had to remain land-locked, forever dancing for them on a little pedestal, twisting in space and frozen in time. fuck that shit. we were never interested in that sort of pandering, so we did this, a tale of sadness for all of the people that we knew that hadn’t made it. this piece feels really lush and rich to me and reminds me of the smell of the just-rained-on concrete outside Trax right before the sun came up the morning we finished it off, after working for 31 straight hours mixing and balancing it, torn and frayed and black-eyed, knowing that we’d accomplished something odd and unequivocally different for us, that it had just rained and washed the streets slick with traffic lights and morning.

wake up, the blackened spoon
overturned in Fiber's womb
an optic cable shining in the gloom
foul medicine sets
the precedent to live
a life of accidents and fables
signal interference under hi-tension cables.

burning in the time code (x2)
a silent seep into distortion
always bent a little more out of proportion
lo revelations at slow revolutions
scratching the light off the horizon
black light heading in the dim blue dawn
turned to touch your lips and you were gone
stumbled into overload
burning in the time code (x3)

electric molecular

first it seemed electrical another way to stimulate
chaos-on-chaos collapsing more every day
next the wires disrupting, molecules exploding, combined in acid corroding
cannot block the signal from the battery to the brain
cannot block the poison from the trigger to the vein
cannot stop the impact in the breakdown lane
spinning off the axis, madness burning brighter every day
shine on... Decimator
shine on... into oblivion
poles opposed in shuddering, chattering strobe
hangin' upside down now in cold magnetic limbo
next a burning circuit, the white hot noise
you'll recognize your demons by the shrieking of their voice

shine on... Decimator
shine on... into oblivion
wire line to isolate destructive combination
supernova overloaded in acceleration
hard wired, hard drive, spinning down
now static is the final sound
shine on... Decimator
shine on... into oblivion

latex

this one comes straight out of the hole of Servo’s machine, it’s totally punk rock. We really wanted to have more material from him, but he was as destroyed as we were by this time and wasn’t really able to pull lots of music out of his fracture though he came out with this thing, barrels blazing in full-throttle fury. I love this track and, as we tightened it up at Trax, I was lacing the lyrics up the back though everything from the first chorus on down is totally riffed off the frayed improvisational cuff, made up as I went along and inspired by the energy of the moment of the session. I got so wound up that I recorded the vocals right there in the control room, twitching and revving next to Critter at the mixing desk instead of out in the main room. I was so amped and juiced on the track that I pulled the vox out in one take, only one or two tiny fixes, yelling and shaking my way straight through to the end, almost climbing up on the SSL mixing desk and pitching all bug-eyed into the maw of Servo’s beast. There were a couple of people sitting in the control room, there so often were during the time we spent working on records in that building, Amy and Servo and Tucker and Lick, and they stayed while I kicked the lyrics out, clapping at the end of the song, the laughing you hear is Dylan, “god damn” echoing out down the corridors of that night and into nowhere.

i tried to make out, to catch a flash with my eye
not a glimmer, all I seen, it drove me blind
i lost my sight to save my mind.
photon flashes in my eye
sometimes I wonder where you are
while I'm burning out so fast,
a downtown train is rushing past
a thousand loaded chambered shooting stars.
a blue light swingin' overhead
this desperation sets my teeth on edge
doubt has taught me how to crawl
i stick my fingers in the wall and it's all gone
remove them radiation blues!

battery drain (x2)
blue... i got them radiation blues
chain smokin' my ill humor
in a cast iron loathin',
thinkin'; ‘nothing’s stoppin'’
light the fuse and go!

battery drain (x4)
pushin', leave another cigarette(burn) now push it in and shove it
fire gun! fire gun! fire up! fire away! fire away! Fire!
comin' down, love it! feel it movin', tear it apart,
everything is, Go! Flame On! And it’s all coming down!

pink

I got Amy to read my fractured film-referential jibberish straight into the mic, no rehearsal. She was running a fever, hung over and silver with sweat, but soldiered on. A lot of the sounds are from Dylan and me fucking with the insides of the grand piano in Studio A at Trax, irreligiously playing’n’plucking’n’sawing its guts with screwdrivers and knives, “we’re soooo progressive”. The piano refrain itself is a thing Dylan used to play late at night, or at sound checks, a Chopin vignette of fractured love he scrawled for Ace, his gal at the time. My fave sound in here is a whirring that’s taken from “Predator” after Bald dude has chased Predator through the jungle in vain and is standing in the clearing all bug-eyed, clutching that spent gattling gun, its barrel whirring away uselessly, smoking hot...then there’s the bending loop in the second half of the piece, the one that slews in and out of time and key, it’s a weave of three different sounds, part of it a wash from between two songs on a my bloody valentine record, slowed down yellow cab horns from 9th avenue, and some weirdness that Dylan stitched out of melted ones and zeros. It’s the loneliest sound I’ve ever heard.

darkness, and a scratching, whirring noise.
darkness, and then, slowly, the pictures shudder up in sight.
a building string of images like silvery bubbles surfacing from the deep.
it's almost always raining, drizzling, misting, slightly, lightly, heavily,
but almost always dripping.
the kitchen faucet marking time.
camera pans across it through washed out black and white Tin-tack.
across the dark, the color a saturated smear;
the Lighting Director’s guiding
the highlights all the time.
the print is scratchy and smells mildewy... too much rain.
stomach's empty... the fridge is a booming echo chamber.
they edit in stock horror darkening footage of
starvation, atrocities, Vietnam war footage,
descending through it. the crackling of outtake sections litter the stairwell, serpentine and yet brittle, a close crop.
zoom to feet descending, descending,
frames skipping and jumping in vertical crash scratching.
the hallway to street sub-lit in shadow,
casting rotting thick as broken glass shards,
and the reflections sparkle in the rain-speckled sidewalk.
it's always raining.
but that's the way this film runs.
the scenes seem clear, but the final print is always too grainy or scratched...
blurs the longer you watch it and
finally just falls away to clips and snapshots of its former glory.
Loop that frames the whole world outside, often running in slow motion.
perhaps the projectionist has nodded off in a stupor during the last showing,
his elbow hitting a switch,
and for a second, or a week, the world runs in reverse,
the images all silent,
filmed and jerking nervously back across the streets.
seems like the reel is always running backwards.
Time is fiction.
Time is fiction.
so, why don't you come lay down with me
in this pitch-bending film loop,
and let the acid rain beat down on our bodies.