Numerous burgeoning post-punks have thrown around the "No Wave" tag to describe their despondent experimentation, but often the implications seem to point to some of the more accessible acts that made waves around the mini-movement's waning days (for example, UT and many great, yet much more restrained post-Pop Group projects like Maximum Joy and Rip Rig & Panic; even the unclassifiable individualism of post-funk/disco geniuses like Liquid Liquid and ESG sometimes gets lumped in with the No Wave explosion). While No Wave is, to this day, open to interpretation, the promise of a band able to own up to the polarizing nihilism of the sub-genre's most unruly spawns (i.e., Lydia Lunch, Mars, DNA) feels like wishful thinking when any troop with a Sonic Youth-influence purports to deliver some non-existent sequel to No New York.
Well, The Magik Markers are it, folks. If any modern No Wave band has slithered, spewed, and thrashed its bile on the faces of a totally blindsided rock 'n' roll nation with such gorgeous gusto, it's this trio of noise-mongers. It's hard to know where to begin when describing what the Markers do. Maybe it's that Elisa Ambrogio forgoes the "no chords" rule a young Jad Fair set forth with and doesn't even bother playing notes, or that (former) member Leah Quimby's battalion of atonal bass thumps sound more like the apocalypse personified than anything resembling music, or that Pete Nolan's drumming recalls a potential murder victim scurrying away from their axe-wielding killers in an infinite loop. They're one of those bands that has to be heard or seen to be believed, and love them or hate them, they're guaranteed to get a reaction.
On that note, it took a few times seeing the band live before I could even conceive an opinion: were they the greatest living, breathing musicians in the universe, or was it all simply wretched nonsense laughing at all the fools who have just been had? Live, the band is potentially both at once, and across a CD-R/vinyl catalog to last a good box set or two, releases like Feel The Crayon proved the studio was the only thing that could reign in these three for a bit and establish some type of context for critical conclusions to be drawn.
While not as powerful as this year's factory-pressed CD or the sadly out-of-print vinyl opus I Trust My Guitar, Etc., Feel The Crayon is pretty factual proof (to noise-rock and No Wave fiends, anyway) that the Markers are not to be taken for granted. In a poorly-recorded environment, a terrifying claustrophobic tension is added to the Markers' dissonance. Ambrogio's tirades, recalling perhaps Mark E. Smith as a schizophrenic street preacher, feel all the more like she's purging herself of bona fide demons (nowhere better than on "Just A Child") while the Quimby/Nolan forcefield has the swagger of an oubliette's house band. And what's most successful about Crayon is that it aptly argues for the Markers as more than a trio of pranksters having a go at stuffy music folks, if the dynamics of a track like "Creaking Jesus" are anything to go by.
But what one realizes somewhere down the line while listening to Crayon is that the Markers are so special because they honestly seem to not give a shit. If they don't have much "talent" by the length virtuosos measure, then so fucking what? Didn't punk rock set out to obliterate all these notions of "talent" corresponding to great music? Such visceral noise, regardless of musical abilities, has its own special power. And dicking around is certainly not something to accuse the Markers of; their caterwauling has the urgency of their life depending on every shard of feedback reverberating as powerfully as allowable. And honestly, if No Wave was a reaction against punk becoming too conservative, what better time for a band like the Markers than during the commodification of every possible underground musical movement? Rock 'n' roll is becoming more and more lifeless with every passing month, which is why we need bands like the Magik Markers more than ever.
1. White Bikini
2. My Sweet
3. Hero For Our Times Pt. 1
4. Hero For Our Times Pt. 2
5. Creaking Jesus
6. Just A Child
7. Fuck You
