Celluloid Lunch Vinyl, CD & Tape 4 Items

Having listened to three records by Deb Edison’s analytically invaluable project The Submissives, I’m more inclined to hear them as The Subversives. Their monotony rubs clear through to obsession, toppy subs who demand the same amount of attention they’re paying to their unnamed paramours, only to brush it off once received. The dynamic at play is more OnlyFans than Bandcamp. While this plays on its face as re-recordings from her Do You Really Love Me? tape and interim tracks that drifted away before her 2022 comeback Wanna Be Your Thing, the full band brought out here opens up these songs more effectively as the deceptive traps they are. Everyone’s wearing the red dress, singing in pitch-separated unison, innocence fully cast away, waiting for you to give in or chew your own leg off to get away. It’s a withering amount of attention, impossible to predict and fully in control. It’s also not something anyone really ever pulled off this well as a musical project, and the Shaggs-meets-Seven Sistersness of it all gives it that private press feel that’ll attract the wrong kind of attention. I wonder who has time for this kind of all-consuming relationship, then I realize that’s something left for the world outside of here, described in worrying detail and fictionalized to supremely unnerving effect. Really one of the great projects of the last 10 years or so, and they’ve never sounded better."—Doug Mosurock

This unreleased slab dates back to 1980 Montreal, where the freshly formed D-vices practiced and perfected their particular brand of mutant thug rock. These 2 cuts would fit nicely on a KBD comp and ooze with sluggish dirg. Peewee guitar theatrics and vocals that drip attitude take this 7" to the next level. This is damaged punk in its most brutish and unpretentious iteration. Edition of 300 copies.

Montreal-based musician Chris Burns played his first gig when he was 15 years old, back in 1982. Today, aged 57, he is more active than ever. Primarily a guitarist, he is also a composer, improviser, singer and songwriter. His distinctive style can be heard in a vast and varied catalogue of records and soundtracks spanning over 40 years and some 50 releases by artists such as Terminal Sunglasses, American Devices, Nutsak, Crackpot, The Ratchet Orchestra and, most recently, Tha Retail Simps. Chris Burns & His Going Concerns is the culmination of everything he has experienced, learned, unlearned, toiled over, honed and forgotten throughout his musical adventures. Herein: passionate, committed and energetic performances featuring strong musicianship mixed with a healthy dose of cathartic abandon. Edition of 150 copies.

News came through while getting comfortable with the sounds of Surveillance’s debut album Less Than One, More Than Zero that guitarists/vocalists Dave Burns and Rachel Fry were to be married later that week. Not having access to their registry, I suppose I could send a chafing dish, though to be fair their record is burning brightly enough to heat up whatever canapes might await in their ostensibly long life together. After an initial blast of activity in the mid-‘10s, which produced a 7” single that I found quite fetching, and a number of cassettes that I hadn’t the good fortune to hear, activity around Surveillance proved sporadic, as did information about them (here I was in Chicago, here they were in Halifax). I was delighted to find their Planet Serum tape through an American punk distro during the pandemic pause (hey, what better time to unearth forgotten studio recordings, right? Also, how many other musical acts named Surveillance would trickle down that path?) and with it came some weird close-talkin’ vibes couching top-flyte buzzsaw song-based material—the band I really liked before was still in there, plowing away, intact in the presence of hard-hitter Tri Le on the drums and eventual addition of Ben Brennan in the pocket on bass. Which leads us to this album, a purity test of sorts that hearkens, for some, back to a time of greater innocence, tempered with the expectations of now. There’s grunge, there’s flyin’ the flannel, and the piney, open-air, guitar-stacks-to-the-bluest-skies approach Surveillance takes on this one that’ll instantly touch a gritty nerve to a lot of listeners—both Amherst Dinosaur before the Jr and Donna Dresch hair-windmill era, that Solomon Grundy LP on New Alliance, the top layer of pop iceberg-bobbing in the violent diagonals of Eastern seaboard shoegaze, patchouli, your aunt’s surprisingly deep cabinet of folk records, the leftover gear of uncles and burnouts to rattle the windows with, chain smoking over a bottomless cup of coffee in an all night diner with somebody elses and everything to talk about between you, artificially cheap fossil fuels and one car/maybe one license between all of you. I don’t know where these folks fall in the age range to have experienced this sort of thing, what the rituals were in their adolescence and the early years of underemployed freedom, but something’s been activated here in these 11 songs, like a smell or sense memory, a match lit, a breath visible in the chilly air, that’s bringing it all back. I’m especially taken with Rachel Fry’s vocals—not gonna mention whose they remind me of, as I’ve done enough extrapolating here already. The words she’s singing on songs like 'On My Way,' 'Iron Rose' and 'Last Breath' offset Burns’ righteous anger with a defiance of her own. There’s a big goddamn difference between aching teenage lovage and the questions asked in these songs, but they come from the same place—an overwhelming feeling of deep emotions, and the innate desire for trust beyond those feelings to protect it and the people it touches. Love is great and all, but some of us need to be sure, and these songs represent the challenge of a commitment: to unite and stay together, through lives lived, projects started and reconvened to make certain that magic is true. Surveillance started something and are sticking around to continue it. In an era of woeful impermanence, that’s gotta be worth something."—Doug Mosurock, a fan