WHAT OTHERS THINK
WHAT OTHERS THINK
NME, September 1992
The first time I saw Huggy Bear I walked out after three songs-this time I managed to stay for at least five. Which means by October I should be somewhere near the end of their set.
Not it really matters. Huggy Bear are the first British band in ages to take the sordid old spirit of punk to such an abrasive conclusion. In fact they can barely play, start most songs twice and make a squalling racket that sounds like Sonic Youth being force-fed through a liquidiser doesn't matter a light.
The Huggys are gloriously messy. But at the same time they evoke a spirit of retaliation which the Manic Street Preachers have always claimed, but never managed to pull off. Even before the gig one of the Huggy posse waners around handing out a hastily typed and xeroxed "manifesto"-going by the title Prik Teeze-which gives some clues to their extreme denial of social conditioning and attitudes towards sex.
There's an unrelenting aggresion coursing through their veins, which gives them the feel of being threatening-despite tonight's cosy, cliquey crowd. The Huggys are about equality-and telling the rest of the world it can go take a running jump.
As a soundtrack the songs aren't easy. On first listen they're like a frenzied C86, with an added does of hardcore. But if anything, HB sounds like something you'd find coming out of the International pop underground: a manic mix of cult American garage, The Pastels, and the Chapel Hill mob.
In between swapping instruments and squabbling over the running order, they stumble along with a singer-who looks like DJ Giles Peterson-shouting over the top. You will be equally appalled and enthralled! (Shameless Plug: their debut seven inch EP "Rubbing The Impossible To Burst" featuring tonight's set stopper "High Street Jupiter Supercone" is out now. It will sell by the ton)
When Huggy Bear's first EP came out, there was in instant buzz about the English group in the international pop underground-they were "boy/girl revolutionaries" (translation: a credible riot grrrl band with a boy singing most of the time), they covered their record packages with political manifestos that didn't make much sense, they refused to be interviewed or photographed, they didn't reveal their actual identities abd they were young and irrepressibly energetic. Rubbing The Impossible To Burst doesn't exactly have any decent songs beneath the bluster, but Huggy Bear sure was promising.
Kiss Curl... consolidated the band's position with some pretty good (if hookless) songs, a couple odd tape recordings and an awful lot of energy flying off in all directions. (The band's side of the split LP with Bikini Kill is pretty much a piece of these EP's.) Don't Die is better, with the still anonymous male singer screaming his throat off on "Dissthentic Penetration" and "Pansy Twist," a short, explosive boy/girl chant called "No Sleep." (Released almost simultaneosly, the 12 song Taking The Rough With The Smooch collects the EP's.) The double 7" Shimmies in Super 8, a v/a release on Stereolab's label, devotes a side to 4 tracks from an early Huggy Bear tape: one quiet song, a couple found, noise piecesand sombody's attempt to sing "Foolish Little Girl" into a walkman. It's tossed off, but very affecting and unusual.
Then Huggy Bear dissappeared for a year, something happened. The dreadfully recorded Long Distance Lovers is so dull and akwardly played that it is hard to believe it is the same bland. Main Squeeze is more of the same: muddy, unimaginitive riffs that go nowhere. By its final recording and only real album, Huggy Bear is a complete disastor, a stunningly dull band grinding away behind a singer who won't shut up. He still sound passionate, but what he's saying makes no sense at all, and it's not worth the effort to figure out at all.
HUGGY BEAR: Taking the Rough with the Smooch (Wiiija Records)
This two girl-two boy band has been around for a year or two putting out 45's and EP's, but for some reason I have been
unconsciously avoiding them. Perhaps it is because they are the current darling/scapegoats of the English music press (NME,
Melody Maker), who are as fickle as they are thorough. You read one too many reviews and you think you know what they
sound like: pale imitators of Sonic Youth touting trendy PC anti-paternalistic cliches. That they are the standard bearers of the London Riot Grrrl movement - London, city of trends and hollow rhetoric - only confirmed this hypothesis to my subconscious. So, I assumed they couldn't play, couldn't sing.
Fortunately, my compulsive record-buying got the better of me and I inevitably ended up with this 22-minute compilation. I was
prepared for the worst, expecting titles like "shaved pussy poetry" to be yet more pseudo-feminist collegiate "let's shock the authorities" rant. Well, I was wrong. Huggy Bear isn't 70's Sex Pistols or even 80's Sonic Youth.
They actually give me hope: not all 90's punk bands are like Pavement, Archers of Loaf or any other band from Chapel Hill, the Pacific Northwest or D.C. I usually look to American indie bands for sincerity - but right now, most of them (particularly the all-male ones) lack any substance outside their own cynical slacker whinings. Huggy Bear have balls, they have ovaries.
The girls have balls and the boys have ovaries and vice-versa. They make Sonic Youth sound old. They can sing and they can scream. Sometimes, in their East London accents, they even recite poetry. Not the sort of cheese you'd hear from the disciples of Morrison (Jim or Van), but shit about rape, slashing people's faces . . .
Of course, they're pretty pompous when it comes to interviews, album liners and the millennial coming of what they call Huggy
Nation. Yes, they still believe in revolution-but their sincerity makes their music great. Shit, we're not all dead yet. (Alec Vance)
Then again, perhaps you prefer your punk to be performed with bass, drums, and the normal trappings of a band. And perhaps you're pining because it's been a while since the last Fugazi album. If so, I suggest Huggy Bear as an interim measure. I bought this album on the grounds that I'd heard of Huggy Bear, but hadn't the slightest idea what they sounded like, and that the title struck me as extremely cool.
What they sound like is, well, Fugazi more than anything else. But, in case you haven't heard Fugazi (or in case you have), I ought to elaborate.
Like Mecca Normal, Huggy Bear strip a number of layers off of rock music that you might have previously thought were connected to vital organ-systems. Their music is frequently bristling, angry, profane, literate, discordant, deliberately arrhythmic, ugly, berserk, claustrophobic and monumental. The album credits list only pseudonyms, so I can't tell you anything much about the group's make up, but there are apparently four people (it sounds like there are both male and female voices singing, so my assumption is that the group is of mixed gender). The drums clatter spasmodically. The guitars howl with strings combined in ways that the ones on my guitar just don't. The singers scream lines in desperate monotones. You couldn't even start to do sheet music for this stuff. There's no key for it, no time signature, no staff for the vocals to be plotted on. Actually, I expect that a truly dedicated expert scribe could probably execute a technically accurate score for this album, but you'd still never be able to reconstruct the music from it.
And that would be a shame. On the basis of this one album I can't be completely sure whether Huggy Bear have the same rigorous internal discipline that Fugazi have, the adherence to musical principles that gives a music that sounds, on first listen, cacophonous, as much underlying structure as anything conventional. If I had to guess from this much evidence, though, I'd be inclined to give them credit. There are profoundly disturbing moments both in the music and the lyrics (like: "Everybody has a brother outside / Everybody has a sister outside / Says your date has pulled up in the drive / And guess what? They're looking pissed off / (What's keeping them alive?)"), and a crazed non-lyric rant on the last two pages of the liner that breaks off abruptly when the page ends (with the intriguing epigram "An inauthentic appetite is serviced by an inauthentic diet"). All these things simmer with intent, and I prefer to believe that they'd have been hard to come by haphazardly.
Your parents won't like it. Your friends probably won't like it. What about you?
LONDON HAMPSTED WHITE HORSE by Steve Lamacq
THE TROUSER GUIDE PRESS REVIEW:
REVIEW I FOUND SOMEWHERE ONLINE
REVIEW OF WEAPONRY FROM WWW.FURIA.COM
REVIEW CLIPPED FROM THE NME
