Live Skull - Dangerous Visions

Album - new. Release Date: 16/04/21. Black vinyl

Genre: Indie/Rock

emerging in the early 80s at the end of new york’s legendary no wave scene alongside manhattan comrades sonic youth and swans, live skull reshaped the aggression of burned-out post-punk into heavy, guitar-driven rock.

this new release showcases their evolution, with side 1 featuring recently recorded tracks, whilst side 2 digs into the archives and includes four tracks from their 1989 peel session, released here for the first time. “in a perfect world,” the first single to be taken from the album, is fraught with the tension of our times. sirens wail, then a bass crashes through. cooped up in his apartment during “the darkest moment of the [covid-19] shutdown in nyc,“ singer and guitarist mark c wrote lyrics and recorded vocals while ambulances sped past outside. “i sat in the dark...and dreamed of a more perfect world to replace the damaged one we lived in,” he recalls. “but, as gritty guitar sounds and the incessant beat of the drum and bass line charged forward, i knew we belonged to this world of struggle and chaos.” struggle and chaos is nothing new for live skull. mark c and his fellow founder, guitarist tom paine, were inspired by the nihilistic sounds of no new york and the dissonant walls of glenn branca and rhys chatham. live skull funneled those influences into hard-edged music that valued melody as much as anarchy. side one nods to that history via a fiery update on “debbie’s headache” (originally found on the 1987 album dusted). it also includes three new studio tracks from the current quartet, along with a live recording of “day one of the experiment” from a 2019 european tour. though performed with joyful energy, these songs also confront our current darkness. as mark c puts it, the marching “dispatches “plays out in a dystopian landscape and is a cry for help or at least understanding when things start to go wrong”, while the pounding double bass line on “twin towers” forms “an ode to living through disasters that could have taken you down, be it anarchist bomb making in the west village or planes crashing into the world trade towers.” side two of 'dangerous visions' reaches back to the late 80s, offering a slew of previously-unreleased material. the first four tracks come from a 1989 appearance on john peel’s bbc radio show. recorded during a tour for the album 'positraction' and featuring thalia zedek on vocals, the session includes two songs written after that final release. “we hear where live skull might have gone next if the band hadn’t been destined to break up within the year,” explains tom paine. “the emotionally raw and somewhat unfinished-sounding “someone else’s sweat”, and “adema”, a jacked-up smash-n-grab that still makes a pretty fine impression.” also included are “alive again”, a free-form outtake from the dusted sessions, and an alternate mix of “tri power” with mark on vocals and, for the first time, zedek on guitar from the 1989 compilation 'like a girl, i want you to keep coming'. “’positraction’ drills deeper than anything before, a record where pleasure and pain become inextricably entwined. live skull manage to hurt so good.” nme // it’s a festering, appropriately black-colored slab of grinding, slash’n’drone (stop me if you’ve heard these adjectives before) east village-trash-shit-noisecluster rock. spin // "a dark and smouldering set." uncut // "bursts with rebellious energy." the wire // "appropriately tense and dissonant." classic rock