Note: Photo by Phil In Phlash

THE PROLETARIAT - RIch Men Poor Men

One of the most fucked-up and amazing things about the music that matters most this year is how so much of it draws on the heretofore unfashionable baroque and mystical tendencies of '70's art-rock. Listen to recent records and/or live sets by Die Kreuzen and Discharge and Das Damen and Vertical Slit and F/1 and Uzi, not to mention I-don't -know-how-many speed-death-indy-metal crews, and you get the idea that symphonic flourishes, intricate time changes, medieval metaphors, and seven-minute anthems have developed into a tradition of their own. These bands are, thankfully, a lot noisier and harder-edged than bombast-rocque used to be, and for someone who grew up on as steady a force-fed diet of "Stairway to Heaven" and "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Aqualung" as I did, they're both a revelation and a reminiscence. They've even kinda made me appreciate Rush, always (thanx to Geddy Lee's whipped-hound squeal) the one progresso conglom I couldn't stomach: This summer I heard their way-fresh "Tom Sawyer" in my Plymouth and thought it drilled holes through the Robert Palmers, Simple Minds, postprog Peter Gabriels (if Sledgehammer" is "funky", I'm James Fucking Brown), Janet Jacksons, and Fab-T-Birds who by now all sound the same. When Lars Ulrich, who slams skins for the band that recorded 1986's most-rad rock'n'roll masterpiece, told me Metallica likes Rush and vice versa, I understood why: Geddy Lee is one of the few superstars left who still has the guts to be obnoxious. Suck-ass times like these sure make you appreciate the importance of high-quality trash. What all this has to do with eastern Massachusetts punk-plus commie combo the Proletariat will be real goddam obvious to anybody who hears their new album Indifference (Homestead, P.O. Box 570, Rockville Centre, NY 11571). Pundits (Robert Christgau, for one) who though Richard Brown sounded like Geddy on Soma Holiday, the Prole's Wire-y and relentlessly abrasive 1983 debut LP, might blanch when they hear new throat Laurel Bowman's two tracks on the follow-up. "Homeland" starts loud 'n' fast, gets even louder as it slows down, revolves around the line "We're singing anthems in the rain," and has Bowman stretching the two-syllable title to eight syllables at one point and to 21 seconds at another. He get even more nasal and operatic (past Geddy, toward Art Bears/Slapp Happy chanteuse Dagmar Krause) in "The Guns Are Winning," which builds its soaring U2-gone-heavy axe lines to a climax that goes "The guns! The GUNS! Are winning!" Are WINNING! Again! The guns are winning again! Again! AGAIN! AGAIN! AGAAIIINN!!!", and then makes way for "No Real Hope," or rather (first) "No Real Hope/Prelude." The dozen tunes the since-departed Brown sings aren't quite so, er, extreme, but they're still fairly Joy Division/late Husker/heavycore grandiloquent. Ad the steadily diminishing jaggedness of Frank Michael's fed-back-atop-its-own-residue guitar buzz, the still-meager insight and compassion of Brown's (no doubt sincere) war-kills-work-dehumanizes-rich-rule-poor-starve-nobody-cares lyrics, and the almost-prudish denouncement of "cheap visions of the flesh" in songs like "Instinct" and "An Uneasy Peace" (as well as the non-LP B-side "Death Of A Hedon"), and it's easy to figure why somebody might scoff at Indifference. But I think it's a trip. The album does have a few smart words, not least of which are in the apathy-busting title track and Marxist-polemic "Marketplace" single that open and close the record-"Believe me it's not envy/Or petty jealousy/That makes me despise the lifestyle/Of decadence and wealth," Brown screeches in the latter. What really redeems Indifference, though, is its paradoxical status as punk-rock made inspirational by virtue of its grandiosity, which feels unpretentious since its creators are children of the pomp-rock '70's. The radio stations I grew up with sure as shit didn't play much Big Star or Velvet Underground.

-Chuck Eddy, Village Voice, Vol. XXXI No. 36, September, 9th, , 1986