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Amebix - Winter

The Amebix are playing in Providence RI this weekend. I’m pretty psyched although I’m bummed I can’t attend with my pal DFJ. When I say the Amebix are playing, what I mean is the singer (THE BARON!)  and a bunch of scabs, but I think they will actually be pretty cool. Reviews so far have been positive so far, and the setlist reports are promising.

The other night we were driving around listening to the Amebix singles/eps collection and remarking how utterly bizarre of a band they are. I’ve posted about this before, but I guess I’m just getting amped up for the gig on Friday… You see their patches and shirts adorning teens, but there’s nothing straight forward about their sound, it’s not terribly accessible. They’re not ever very fast (which is generally what one would expect from a ‘landmark’ punk band). They employ prominent keyboards at times, and often work a lot of industrial and metal textures into their sound. In short they’re extremely atypical for any style, but especially for beginner level punk.

So, despite being beloved by spiked punkers the world around, the two bands I’m most reminded of on the Winter single are Joy Division and Killing Joke. In the title track, the circular, tribal sounding rhythms, clash with the cold, white noise guitar, and the propulsive, high note bass guitar. It really suggests nothing so much as a monstrous jam between Stephen Morris, Peter Hook, Geordie Walker, and some kind of transiant maniac on the vocals. Winter is a beautiful song in how bleak and churning it is, and well titled at that. It’s hypnotic and highly atmospheric, in some ways because of this, and the contrast of the harsh rasping style vocals, it prefigures a lot of 90’s/00’s black metal. Don’t be mistaken though, The Amebix, no matter how many bands they inspired are their own island to me.

The B-Side, The Beginning of the End, opens with a riff that’s basically Killing Joke’s “The Wait”, transposed in a lower key. Actually the whole song isn’t much more than a variation on “The Wait”, but with your standard anarcho shouts. Honestly, I wish half the bands that name the Amebix as a major influence could get in the ball park of how good this one is. Never mind that it’s barely even their song, they make it an Amebix song by the way they play it and the way it’s mixed. The drums are pushed back into the distance like rolls of thunder, the guitars are little more than sheets of steel grinding against each other, and the vocals come from a place of dark desperation.  Some of the best apocalypse rock ever made.

 The sleeve is a nice fold out that matches the vibe of the music so well, and it’s of course on Spiderleg recs (SDL 010).