article/ box set review from Rip It Up, Dec. 1992.
BY MATTHEW HYLAND
Some things confound every law of nature, especially those to do with causes and effects. Like there’s no discernible reason for Palmerston North, or New Zealand or the world for that matter, to have produced a group like Skeptics in the early 1980s. Actually that sentence is a nonsense because there never has been, nor shall there ever be, “a group like Skeptics”. But what matters here is that such occurrences are singular, unimaginable, everything Mr Lyotard would call sublime.
It’s one of life’s wretched little ironies that practically the only existing eyewitness account of the band’s spontaneous combustion in their club Snailclamps (and if the ability to invent a word like that isn’t a sign of nascent genius I don’t know what is) is Chris Matthew’s 1990 RIU obituary to David D’Ath. Of course a dead band member is always a critic’s / fan’s/ record company slime’s excuse to wax rhapsodical about the most inappropriate music (viz now-rotting clowns Morrison and Mercury) but if you weren’t there at the time you’ve just gotta believe for once that Skeptics made people feel that way when D’Ath was alive. In 1989, for instance, they played at the Venue with two drummers and a mixture of 3 and Amalgam material and I remember a whole audience being left speechless by the joyous alacrity with which they smashed every rule then (and now) in force about what New Zealand music should be (to whit, grey, guitar-based, reasonable); suddenly it seemed not only possible and necessary but entirely to be expected that the music of the future would be composed of sparkling, multicoloured surfaces that collided with bone-crushing force, of heart-stoppingly elusive rhythms and melodies, sound and language fragments and the constant, never realised threat of pure hysteria, total sonic and emotional breakdown (and lo and behold, the 1990s turned out to be among the most miserable years for rock music since maybe the late 1960s, but that’s another story). So yeah, Skeptics were pretentious, ‘Wagnerian’ as Paul McKessar called them, but somehow they always, always got away with it, they were never prog, even in the rehabilitated Zarakov sense, perhaps because nothing they did was about virtuosity, or because it all had a violent, post-punk (?) edge, or because they were absolutely never guilty of Floydian over-explanation (musical or lyrical); some of the best sound-morsels were left buried, and D’Ath’s lyrics always maintained an ironic distance from the massive traumas they implied, a sense that tragedy is embodied in absurdity, obscurity and contradiction.
Incidentally, in case you were wondering, the occasion for this panegyric is the release on Flying Nun of an extra-tasty Skeptics box set, including Skeptics 3 and Amalgam, the FN albums which every sentient being must surely own by now, Sensible, a compilation of earlier recordings, and If I Will I Can, an Ep made in 1990 but previously unreleased. It ought to be mentioned at this point that there exist two earlier records,Chowder Over Wisconsin and Ponds, both of which are rare as (the apparently proverbial) rocking-horse shit. I’ve heard neither of them but on the available evidence it seems likely that murder and pillage would be eminently justifiable methods of acquiring them (Hint: Z.Bob esq. has been heard to namedrop Chowder).
Anyway, descriptions of Skeptics music is always futile, but if it’ll cause one person to include this lovingly packaged commodity-fetish among their Christmas purchases, I don’t mind failing at one more thing in life. Skeptics 3, in that case, features the video hits ‘Agitator’ and ‘AFFCO’, only you probably won’t have seen the latter with its freezing works footage, because TVNZ’s programme director declared that it would be played “over my dead body” (an option which should definitely have received greater consideration at the time). In general it’s probably the heaviest, rawest Skeptics album: AFFCO sounds just like a slaughter-house making up for lost time, while ‘Feeling Bad’, the middle section of ‘Agitator’ and ‘Turnover’ are built around enormous electrical spasms, as if a bionic Sabbath or Swans was having an epileptic fit. Side two is even more extraordinary, ‘La Motta’ is the sound of a boxer losing consciousness, no drums, just absolute blackness, but ‘Notice’, ‘Luna’ and the extraordinarily affecting love song ‘Rain’ (imagine being brought to the brink of tears by a man bellowing ‘cockles and mussels’) sound even more punch drunk; the rhythm lurch along slowly, inconsistently while John Halvorsen’s guitar sheds coils of exquisitely patterned skin and D’Ath is visited variously by orchestras, saxophone tortures and the Aurora Borealis. ‘Crave’ closes the album with a Holy war.
Amalgam is Skeptics business as usual, among other things it features four of the most marvellous pieces of recorded music in the known universe. They are: ‘And We Bake’ (not unlike Mahler’s First Symphony’ condensed into fur minutes, with drums that stimulate very single nerve ending in the body), ‘Pack Ice’ (one of the most self-explanatory titles in history: vast, crystalline, capable of freezing the blood). ‘Heathery Men’ (a doomed call to arms, massed drums and visceral samples, “breathe the smoke” cries D’Ath and you do) and ‘Sheen of Gold’ (self-explanatory again, but thrown into glorious turmoil by the fact that it seems to be about fighting over money on the streets of Glasgow, or something similar). About half of Sensible was recorded when the band were between guitarists; for the most part this stuff sounds like early Severed Heads or DAF with about a million times the senses of beauty, frailty, drama. The other half, some of which has already appeared as the Sensible Shoes EP, is roughly contemporaneous with 3 and is glorious in more or less the manner related above; you must be getting the idea by now.
The “new” EP, finally, is probably the lushest thing in the box: it’s also a record of the band’s last Auckland gig only a few weeks before D’Ath died. Needless to say the performance was and the three new and three old songs recorded live are mesmerising. I think I’ve run out of extravagant metaphors for the noises produces by this amazing freak of nature. Just for god’s sake buy these records, ungentle reader, all of them at once if you can afford it, otherwise one at a time as fast as you can. The last words should belong to David D’Ath, who besides being the owner of a wonderful voice, was an immensely skilled manipulator of language. In the booklet of his writings and drawings in the box set he has this to say: “terpsicorleum popahalutuate finguisshytuam porliuishcalubate hingfetishnisobumauatum porsanamuke...bleeding barakes...”
