Back when I was starting out as a music scribe doing the Skyscraper Magazine thing around the turn of the century I first heard Amps For Christ, and I can say with surety I was not-not-NOT ready for it. At all. There was something creepy about the project that caught my ear, but it was too diverse, too seemingly contradictory, too perverse. Had I known AFC (my favorite NFL conference too) arose from the liquid-black death of Man Is The Bastard and Bastard Noise I might have given them more time to stretch out in my brain’s womb. As it stood, I moved on without a thought to whatever I was deep-diggin’ at the time (Pinback, Kingsbury Manx, Interpol; basically all-indie-rock, all-the-time) and tossed Amps For Christ into the ‘loser’ bin with Gulcher releases and Gay Tastee (that Xiu Xiu EP with the naked Asian dude on the cover might have been in there too; oh, the embarrassment).
Now that Circuits, originally released on Vermiform in 1999, is finally available on a bulbous 2xLP mainframe, I can absorb what I missed the first time around and hopefully make up for the mistakes of the past (which of course, considering my track record, would take three lifetimes to compensate for) in some small way by giving the all-important, sought-after, gold-encrusted Gumshoe stamp of approval and perhaps pointing the stragglers in the right direction. You need this music, is what I’m trying to say. Not because you’re a sad sap, in particular, but because successful, art-damaged takes on folk are hunted to extinction these days, drowned in overly serious Pentangle/Fairport Convention apery, somber drudgery, and an all-too-common refusal to do anything new with the medium.
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Amps For Christ dash any folk expectations the listener might have almost immediately, dabbling in pseudo-fuzz-metal slamma-bamma a few times on Side A and busting out the occasional drum-machine beat and/or noise freakout. Apparently sketched out from songs AFC leader Henry Barnes remembers hearing his ‘mum’ sing, or some such thing, the only hint of nursery-rhyme melody comes from the vocals; other than that, it’s often tough to parse what’s going on. One thing I do know for sure is the troop have little use for acoustic guitars and delicately plucked folkpeggios. They’re all about washed-out fuzz that floods the compositions like an oceanside apartment, dirty synths (or noisemakers; not sure where a lot of these squiggles originate), high-pitched squeals, feedback in any and all forms, and rumbling, tumbling bass that likely exudes from anything but a bass guitar, though I could be wrong.
When AFC are at their best, they’re pushing the limits of Song to the breaking point. “Wishful Thinking” is basically looped vocals atop a gnarly-ass riff of some sort, but it sounds so utterly foreign you wonder how it was all chopped up and assembled together, yet the track holds together perfectly, bound by the glue of the gods rather than chewing gum and bailing wire. It’s like Ariel Pink’s old stuff, Frusciante’s heroin dreams, Aaron Dilloway’s viciousness, and a bittersweet folk rumination packed into the same dusty duffelbag, yet I’ve completely failed to capture its beauty; these are roadsigns in a blizzard, not any kind of basis for what’s actually happening on this record.
Such a tough-to-pin-down record is exactly what the doctor ordered amid the often-dismal hordes of drone-dwellers (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Get your brain fried by Circuits again, for the first time.