Philly Pops Every Which Way.

Entertainment/Art
Sunday May 15, 1983. By Ken Tucker Inquirer Popular Music Critic

Young local bands are gaining recognition on the recording scene:

The Philadelphia music scene is one of the most disparate in the country. Throughout the last three decades, the city has been identified by its roots in rhythm and blues. As the home of “Philly soul” and a nexus of recording studios, music clubs and performers, Philadelphia was – and is – internationally famous.

But since the advent of punk and new wave rock in the late 1970’s, another, very different sort of pop music milieu has emerged here. Philadelphia’s reaction to punk/new wave is a notably diffuse, engagingly disorganized music scene that hasn’t yet succumbed to hip cliques or the tiresome hegemony of a formal “movement”. There are arty rock bands here; livid hardcore punk bands there, stubborn eccentrics everywhere.

Even within the increasingly narrow confines of punk/new wave, the Philadelphia area has produced a diverse array of acts. Many of these bands are now putting out their music on record.

At one extreme, there’s the best-known Philadelphia rock act, Robert Hazard, who inflates his rapid new wave melodies with gaseously melodramatic sentiments. (Hazard’s five song EP, a local effort issued last year but recently remixed and re-released on RCA Records, is struggling to dent Billboard magazine’s top 100 record chart).

At the other extreme is a first rate band like the Stickmen, whose new record, “Get on Board”, is charmingly accessible (strong beats, funky rhythms) and ditheringly radical (splintered melodies, cacophonous guitar playing).

Three more young local bands have released records in the last week, a good indication of the energy that pervades the Philadelphia scene.

Perhaps the most adventurous of the three is Bunnydrums, whose brand new four song record is called “Feather’s Web” (Funk Dungeon Music). The quartet has managed a difficult feat: dark toned, moody music that is nonetheless exhilarating, witty stuff.

Each composition is structured around the course, rumbling guitar lines of Frank Marr, Dave Goerk and bassist Greg Davis. The combination of Davis’ bass and Joe Ankenbrand’s drums gives Bunnydrums the most powerful rhythm sections in Philadelphia rock and has led some people to label the group a “funk band”. This is a silly misnomer, since funk is just one of the many genres that Bunnydrums employs in its pursuit of sinuous rhythms.

Bunnydrums has taken a few of the common clichès of experimental white rock (strangled vocals, slippery melodies) and given them a good hard twist. On the scary, thrilling “Crawl” for example, the band builds tension with an implacable angry slowness. This may be rock’n’roll, but it is reminiscent of the well measured rage of the blues as played by John Lee Hooker, a sort of punk equivalent to his reptilian rhythms. Abruptly, the compositions explode in a welter of guitar screams, synthesizer and saxophone squeals and cymbal crashes – it’s the stuff that monster movies made genuinely troubling.

Bunnydrums has dedicated “Feather’s Web” to Philip K. Dick, popular science fiction author whom non-science fiction readers may know as the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep ? . Later made into the film Bladerunner. Comparisons between rock music and the so-called “higher” arts are usually egregious ones – rock’n’roll simply does not abide by the aesthetic rules that applies to, say the novel or poetry.

In this case, though, the Bunnydrums’ ominous songs have the same tinge of paranoia that suffused Dick’s work. When Goerk, in “Shiver”, yells, “No places to hide anymore!” while walls of noisy guitars close in on him, his wrathful despair sounds a lot like the gloomy sentiments that permeate one of Dick’s best novels, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. A dark, edgy sense of humor similar to Dick’s enlivens the work of Bunnydrums as well.

Bunnydrums, “On the Surface” (Red Music)
The Philadelphia Inquirer: Entertainment/Art
Sunday April 15, 1984. By Ken Tucker Inquirer Popular Music Critic

I don’t think it was meant to be this difficult to figure out what’s on the record, but nonetheless the jacket lists two songs on the first side when there are three of them, fans. In fact, the unlisted “Switchblade “, with it’s rumbling rhythm and thick melody is the best thing on the record. The other side lists two songs, but one of them sports the same title as the records opening cut, “On the Surface”. Funny thing though: the second side’s “On the Surface” sounds so dissimilar to the first side’s “On the Surface” that it might as well be considered a different song.

Confused? That’s because of one of Bunnydrums’ central aesthetic strategies. This quartet specializes in off kilter rhythms, scrambled melodies and ambivalent lyrics. As such, “On the Surface” is the most accomplished of Bunnydrums releases to date – more angular than its previous record, “PKD” and more ferociously uncompromising than “Feather’s Web” in 1983. “On the Surface” benefits from sharp, clear sound and its meticulously organized feeling of all craziness breaking loose. Smart fellows indeed.