Up against the wall: the Icarus Line.
From the first sighting of the Icarus Line as they opened for Primal Scream during the XTRMTR tour, it was clear that their chaotic and abrasive music was something special. The performances were startlingly raw. This was a band from the ghettoes of Los Angeles coming on like a 90s version of the Germs; a no-holds-barred rock'n'roll experience. Like all the punk greats, the Icarus Line have a sound that compels an immediate love/hate reaction. Whether they are playing in a huge venue or a Barfly, surrounded by broken glass and screams, the Icarus Line are defiant and uncompromising.
Frontman Joe Cardamone and the Icarus Line gang have been playing rock'n'roll since their teens. The band was never a career decision to them but a compulsion. Their first album, Mono, sounds like rock'n'roll as religion. And that is how it should be with punk rock. It's a sensation that can't be conveyed by fashionable retreads in skinny jeans lifting Gang of Four riffs. Mono is a breathlessly raucous record. Upon its release in 2003 it actually felt like the Icarus Line could breath new life into rock'n'roll. And who knew? The band didn't. As they travelled up and down America playing shows and releasing 7" singles, I suspect they may have been oblivious to the fact that they had produced something so devastatingly good.
By the time of their second release, the following year's Penance Soiree, events were taking a turn for the strange. The album was iconic drugged-up, scuzzed-up rock with the only directives being that of Detroit rock'n'roll (MC5, The Stooges) and grimy H-drenched English psychedelia (Spacemen 3). At the time of its release in the UK, Penance Soiree sounded alien and intimidating. What's more, it came out on V2. Signing to a major label is always a big no-no in the Los Angeles hardcore world they's belonged to but the Icarus Line were unconcerned. The politics of scenesters is a drag the band always kick against. If that isn't punk rock, I don't know what is. But refreshingly, the music here is bigger than the attitude.
Selling out? Their lead single was entitled Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers. They painted the Strokes' tour bus with the words $uckin' Dick$. Guitarist Aaron North received death threats when, at the climax of a gig in the Texas Hard Rock Café, he smashed a glass case holding Stevie Ray Vauhgan's guitar and started to play it. The band went to the NME awards as the Datsuns who didn't show and sat at the front rowdily abusing the acts. They started a hilarious DIY site called Buddyhead posting up celebrities' phone numbers. Attention and PR seeking? None of them want to discuss what they did and do. If they do, they will tell you that they did those things out of sheer boredom.
And then they disappeared. The guitarist left and joined Nine Inch Nails. The only appearance for Joe and the rest was on the side-project Souls She Said. Annie from Giant Drag told the NME that the Icarus Line album Black Lives at the Golden Coast was the best thing she's ever heard and that it might never be released. And then out of nowhere, it was announced that the Icarus Line were back with a handful of shows opening up for the Jesus and Mary Chain with a new album coming out in June.
After a few listens to Black Lives at the Golden Coast, you have to be thankful that The Icarus Line went underground. They have created a rock'n'roll classic. The record is an addictive brew which conjours up Funkadelic, the droning jams of the Velvet Underground, Sun Ra's space-rock and the burned-out swagger of 70s Stones. Live, these ingredients morph into something that seems bizarrely natural: street-tough LA hooligans hustling heavy-rock riffs whilst scoring some super-sleazy soul in the Los Angeles sun. Black Lives at the Golden Coast is a howling, nihilistic, adrenaline charge of a record in the tradition of Iggy's 70s junkie blues. This is their third album. It almost never came out. The Icarus Line know that and are out to prove something: that rock'n'roll can still be a genuinely uncompromising, thrilling and transcendent experience.
