BLISTERING EP’S!Garage Rock: Modey Lemon’s Predator EP and Punk Rock: The Fever’s Pink on Pink

Five tracks to make an impression. Five tracks to the leave the listener wanting more. Five tracks to show just how many walls you can bring down, how many fires you can start, how many blisters you can get while hitting the driving wheel keeping up with the frenetic beat. Five tracks plus five tracks equals 10 blistering tracks on these two EP’s.

While Modey Lemon and the Fever are in two different categories of the Spectrum, their EP’s catch my attention with the same velocity, ferocity, electricity, tenacity, forget-this-city.

Modey Lemon from Pittsburgh lands in the Garage Rock section next to Soul Asylum, because there’s a similar quality in their ranting, raving, raging sound when compared to Soul Asylum’s early release of live bits, odds-and-sods called Time’s Incinerator. Modey Lemon’s “Predator” gives strong hints of “Dragging Me Down” and “Broken Glass,” while also having some vocal qualities similar to Soul Asylum’s cover of the Monkees’ “Goin’ Down,” a Monkees song done like no one else ever could. (See the end of this post for more info about Time’s Incinerator).

Modey’s got this funk groove going that can’t keep up with the speed, the guitar breaks, and the smashing kit. Soul Asylum revealed their roots on Time’s Incinerator, pulling out the grooves and funk and the godfather of soul, James Brown. I can hear those same fascinating roots in Modey. It isn’t what you’d expect, but there’s no way to build the blistering rhythm of Garage Rock without knowing where it came from, without knowing that the rhythms begins with the funk.

“Tongues (Everybody’s Got One),” an alternate take on only the EP, rises like a blues rock classic, but it goes way over the line, fully exploding that late 60s/early 70s rock sound. “Poisonous Ink Clouds” leads with a Moog line that comes up with that dark, swirling, driving keyboard sound of the Doors (the break/bridge even sounds like maybe the break from “Touch Me”), but again, Modey piles on the sound in such a way as to never let us forget that we’re in the 21st century now. Sorry, Jim, this ain’t no “20th Century Fox.”


The Fever, on the other hand, give tremendous nods to rockabilly. You can hear the 50s, the leather jackets and white T-shirts, the grease in the hair, the drive-in diners; you can hear S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders coming through the jukebox on this one.

Except, the Fever is pure punk energy.

There’s those great bass lines of rockabilly, but then Geremy Jasper is screaming the lyrics with the rest of the band belting out their own brand of doo-wop. You might even think the Stray Cats, but it smashes and bashes way too much. The Ramones is probably a better match.

When Achilles lays down the beat on the drums and Pony enters with the bass on “Ladyfingers,” I’m actually ready for the Pixies. Here Jasper’s vocals are no less given to screaming, but there’s a little something in the back of his voice, a certain air during the stanzas that almost makes you think David Bowie walked into the room. Again, though, that all breaks down, and we’re pogo-ing in front of the stage, fists in the air.

What grabs my attention with the Fever, though, isn’t just the speed and smashing and screaming; it’s the breaks. Guitar breaks, drum breaks, bass breaks, complete breaks. Songs that are between two and three minutes still make room to break down the song into different pieces, to build it back up again. If they simply blasted through these songs, I guess it’d be fun but not all that interesting. The hooks are when Achilles breaks from the speed-metal smashing and gives some great fills, when Pony gets a chance to take center speaker and build up the song again, when the rhythm goes into triplets with outstanding effect.

These, of course, are standard techniques of rock ‘n’ roll, but I’ve heard too many bands who only want to play fast and never take the time to throw something in that breaks up the song. When that song breaks, it only makes you want that speed and rhythm all the more. Take “Pink Paganz,” for instance. The song mainly is a slower Rockabilly, a dirty blues, but there’s these great speedy surf guitar breaks. As the song lurks in the alley, you find yourself just waiting for those little surf breaks. The breaks make that song.

Five songs on each EP. Ten songs to make an impression. Ten blistering songs (bring on Dr. Scholl’s). Ten songs that prove that blistering speed is made all the more compelling when it nods to the forefathers, nods to other musical ingredients. We’re not just coming to watch you smash guitars and make the amps smoke; we want to hear what you know about the history of rock ‘n’ roll and how your music fits into this great grand history. Five songs from Modey Lemon and the Fever convince me that they did their homework, passed history class, signed up for AP, and smoked that AP test.

There’s an idea for a new VH1 series: “History Behind the Music,” where we find all of the references to earlier rock music in one song. (If you hear about anyone doing something like this, let me know. It’s my idea!)

Thanks to Screaming Peach (Modey Lemon) and Palm Pictures (The Fever) for the review copies.

Soul Asylum’s Time’s Incinerator is still available from to Twin Tone Records in Minneapolis. Apparently, they’ll custom burn a CD of any album in their back catalog while they still are trying to find ways to release the old catalog. I didn’t have time to find out more, but contact Twin Tone and tell them Music Spectrum sent you. They’ve got a back catalog of Soul Asylum, the Replacements, the Jayhawks, Pere Ubu, Robyn Hitchcock, and many others.