The Firehose #8: The American Horse Will Save Us All

Welcome to The Firehose, a personal listening diary from Chris Banks. You can follow me on Bluesky or RateYourMusic if you haven't already. There should also be a subscribe button somewhere on the page that'll send it to your inbox for free. Let's get to it.

Hi there. It's been a tough time for everyone. I hope you're doing well wherever you are, and hopefully you're finding peace in your own way. After the election, one of the things that resonated most with me was a chorus of people shouting, "Make stuff." Doing Born on Trash Day isn't anything close to activism, but it helps me doomscroll less and gives me something to sink my anxiety into all week, and I'm going to try and pick up the posting schedule a bit. Besides The Firehose, I have some other things in mind for BoTD, and I'm glad you're along for the ride.

Aneurysm Rats - Dying to Live

A few weeks ago, I spun up a Plex Server for the MP3 library I've been lugging around most of my adult life. I've been increasingly frustrated with Spotify and the algorithmic internet, so this seemed like a decent project to escape from The Horrors™. So far, my favorite part about the server (I call mine CRiTunes) has been putting it on shuffle and enjoying some music I haven't heard in a long time. A bunch of these were pulled from CDs I bought in high school, MySpace rips, and the kind of "take everything on my hard drive" type of filesharing we all did in college through the Aughts. So, in the middle of the night this week when 00's hardcore punk band The Aneurysm Rats appeared on shuffle with "Babies Don't Eat Sandwiches" from their 2008 record Dying to Live, I felt it my civic duty to jot some thoughts down.

First, background: The Aneurysm Rats were a hardcore punk band from Philly in the late '00s. They notably feature Colin P McGinnis on guitar, who was in both Paint it Black and None More Black around this time (also in H2O for a minute). The Rats also featured singer Larry Wiechecki from Crumbler, and Greg Polrd from One Up and Go Time. I'm not familiar with Larry or Greg's projects prior to writing this, but both of them are a pretty good example of where the genre was at the time. I'd probably listen to them both a fair amount 16 years ago if I'd been hipped to them. I particularly love Larry's "I'm this close to losing my shit" vocal inflection on both Crumbler and The Rats' records. Dying to Live is (to the best of my knowledge) the only thing the Rats ever released. It's not on streaming as far as I can find; the best you can do is hear "Babies Don't Eat Sandwiches" uploaded to YouTube with the cover art displayed using all but 8-pixels.

A certain magic comes from a debut punk record made by a group with experience in the genre. While it's the initial statement from the artist, it's not unintentionally rough around the edges like a group of high school buds ripping in their parents' garage. The Aneurysm Rats, to their credit, appeared to take this pretty damn seriously. Dying to Live was produced by Will Yip, and it sounds like everyone in the process gave a shit resulting in a fantastic album of mid-tempo hardcore with a metal slant. The band listed Cro-Mags, Metallica, Bad Brains, Minor Threat, and Black Flag as influences back on their MySpace (which has been burnt into my memory for 16 years, somehow), and all those influences click at some point on the record. Songs like "Maximum Salvation" start with a haphazard bassline that would feel at home on any decent 80's hardcore record, but the record isn't afraid to show a little flair with a guitar solo here and there. Unlike the '80s punk records we all love, the musicianship here is very apparent.

The album's high point (and the only song I can present to you) is "Babies Don't Eat Sandwiches." I make a point to reference their influences above because "Sandwiches" is a pretty perfect intersection of punk, hardcore, and metal without featuring the stupidest indulgences of whenever those genres crossover usually.

I never bought Dying to Live on vinyl when they were active. It came out when vinyl was actually affordable, but I was still a broke college student in 2009. Years later, probably in 2015-16, I was at Siren Records in Doylestown, PA, and they had about 7 copies of Dying to Live, and I righted that oversight by my younger self. You can still buy it from them, apparently. You should.

Thankfully I saw them live twice that winter/spring. In late 2008 they opened for The Ergs! on their last run of shows before The Ergs! took a thankfully short-lived hiatus. I was working at the ill-fated music vertical of the Philadelphia Inquirer at the time, Phrequency, and through some finagling (my buddy Steve gave me his ticket as he was also going to the Asbury Park Ergs show) I got to photograph that show. Unfortunately I can't find those photos, I'm hoping they're on some old computer in my house but who knows? If I ever find them, I'll throw them in a future edition of The Firehose.

The second time I saw them was shortly after I was mugged at gunpoint in early 2009 (a story for another time). A few days after that incident The Rats opened for The Bronx at The First Unitarian Church, and that was one of the first nights I started feeling like myself again. Something about jumping on top of a crowd of people and coming out unscathed reminds you that you're less fragile than you give yourself credit for. They stopped performing shortly after that, but for a brief moment in the late aughts, The Aneurysm Rats were precisely what I needed to feel okay again. It doesn't shock me that they're what I focused on in these stupid times.

Mazarin - a tall-tale storyline

For no reason other than being bored, I was browsing some old Philly blogs I read in college from the early '00s and stumbled upon a quick reference to Mazarin's 2001 record a tall-tale storyline. They were a Philly band that called it quits right as I moved to the city. I didn't experience them firsthand; I never heard of them until now, but I've been falling into nostalgia recently, and Mazarin, being vaguely from that era, piqued my interest. They remind me of Yo La Tengo in the louder moments, but a lot of that's probably due to singer Quentin Stoltzfus sounding similar to Ira Kaplan and doing the self-harmonizing thing YLT always does. The record frequently takes diversions into 60's British-Folk (Flying Arms for Driving) and The Band style Americana (Limits of Language), which thematically invokes YLT if not sonically. I did a small amount of Googling around the record since it wasn't on streaming and found this page from Rocket Girl Records, explaining that they broke up because of a trademark troll claiming the band name. Instead of litigating, they just decided to call it a day. It's unfortunate for a million reasons, the least of which is that I would have loved to see them.

Jimi Hendrix - Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision

This new box set of Jimi Hendrix demos, outtakes, and loose scraps of studio recordings is the exact opposite kind of thing I'd be drawn to. First, I have only recently become a classic rock guy. The singular question that dominated my 20s was: is it punk? Hendrix was decidedly un-punk, so I avoided him. Now a bit older and a fraction more mature, I still ask myself that question daily but quickly realize the answer doesn't matter. We all make weird choices on the way to becoming who we are.

Anyways, the second reason this isn't for me is that posthumous recordings always feel a little gross. I'm not super well versed in Hendrix as a guy for the reasons I mentioned in the last paragraph; maybe he would have been OK with these releases, or perhaps he would have been miffed (or worse); I don't know. But taking an artist's private archive and making it public reaches a level of voyeurism that makes me a little uncomfortable. The third reason is simply that it's 3+ hours of music, and I'm generally of the mindset that every second a record is over 45 minutes, it needs to earn exponentially. Most don't.

So, looking those three things in the face, I expected to put this on for 15-20 minutes and get bored before I shifted to other things. Instead this has been the de facto soundtrack to my office in the post-election hangover, serving as a backing track to whatever I'm working on. Many songs don't feature vocals, with Hendrix and his backing band (Billy Cox on bass and Mitch Mitchell on drums) figuring stuff out or just riffing with each other. Electric Lady Studios isn't a record I'm going to put on in my car or hack up onto playlists of favorite songs, but it's a good listen that I've been coming back to a lot. I even picked up the CD box set for the Blu-ray that's included, so you know it's serious. Guess I'm a Hendrix guy after all.

One final note: It seems that the mass-migration from Twitter to Bluesky is upon us. It's the most positive experience I've had on social-media for a hot sec, and I'm posting music-related nonsense on there most days. If that moves you I'm at @chrisbanks and @sickshows (where I post a concert I found on YouTube every day). Will continue to throw my handles in the opener but thought worthwhile to callout here.

Take care of yourself. Plant iris. I'll talk to you soon.