One for Dave/Lazarus.Under Neath What? were the slightly odd choice of support for the Dogs D'Amour in 1989, a tour I caught at the Hammersmith Odeon (this was before it became the 'Labbats Apollo' and all the other daft names - it's the Hammy O, let's just leave it at that). Less than 6 months earlier I'd seen the Dogs at the much smaller Bristol Bierkeller, and it looked as though they hadn't upgraded their equipment in that time as their small, 50w amps were simply on chairs on the Odeon stage and miked up - not quite the wall of Marshalls that you might see lined-up behind The Cult.
Anyway, back to Under Neath What? and their only album, What Is It?
. Difficult to describe (and that's not me being lazy; even the band's posthumous My Space page sidesteps any attempt at naming influences or describing their own sound), I did like Dave's description on the thread that refuses to die: "the musical version of taking Ketamin...warped, heavy and oppressive".Yet again Sleazegrinder comes through with another great piece (in fact I mention that site so often that I'm wondering whether I should make this blog a permanent link to it and forgot about writing anything of my own ...).
3 comments:
A very odd band. I like this record at least partly because I haven't figured it out yet. I do wish it could be given a remix/remaster - my CD makes them sound more anemic than I suspect was their intention. Maybe between you and Sleaze there'll be enough groundswell of interest to make it happen someday.
I've recently bought a cd version of "What Is It" from Amazon for next to nothing (my cassette version has long gone) and would agree that it sounds a bit tinny, having said that I still think it's a good album, they were a bizarre mish mash of styles with one foot firmly in the glam/sleaze metal camp but the other in the skuzzier end of the indie scene (Jesus and Mary Chain, Second Album era Primal Scream, Spaceman 3, Gaye Bykers On Acid etc). Should've been bigger than they were.
Psychogreebobillymetalhop of the finest kind, UNW tiptoed on the very edge of the rawk synapse in ten-ton concrete overshoes. Live they punched a deadly hole with a dense fist of overdrive, then filled it with whispered sweet sensual Bolanisms, an eclectic, electric Frankenstein patchworked from divebomb guitar and dubplate throb, T-Rextatic groove and Stooges bawl. They baffled critics and filled up the clued-up kids with sexy thrills, and frankly nonplussed the metal dumbos on their supports for Queensryche and its ilk. Compared to the trench-deep-to-peak-high zigzag of their onstage depth-charge dynamics, their recordings always came across a little sugared, but nonetheless head and shoulders above the mordant plateau of their hairsprayed contemporaries. At the time I saw them as a wigged-out hairy gene-splice equal measures Jane's Addiction, MC5, Hendrix, T-Rex and The Cramps. So why the hell they left the world agape and nonplussed in their flare-fast die-pretty wake, heck, I'll never know...
Post a Comment