Anyone with even a passing familiarity with American hardcore knows the Screamers logo. Like in the Eighties when more people were wearing Motorhead t-shirts than were probably still buying Motorhead music in this country, that image from Gary Panter is truly iconic and burned into the collective consciousness. Oddly, the L.A. punk pioneers never officially released anything until now.
Screamers Demo Hollywood 1977, out on Friday via Superior Viaduct, collects five cuts from the group's earliest days, featuring numbers that are frantic like "Magazine Love", and others, like "Punish or Be Damned", that place this group's POV squarely next to that of Frank Tovey on the other side of the Atlantic. Claustrophobic and grim, this music is in its own genre, despite being pegged as West Coast punk. While the group was part of that scene, it's hard now to imagine a band with two keyboardists making this kind of stuff being so warmly welcomed in the pit.
Liners by Jon Savage place this in context, of course, but it needs to be repeated just how radical this sounds now. Imagine Fad Gadget and Magazine collaborating and you'll get a sense of where this is in terms of mood. It's brutalist, minimalist, and full of real passion. In that sense, the demos of Screamers remind us of an era where the keyboard could an instrument that created sonic chaos as much as a guitar and three chords.
Screamers Demo Hollywood 1977 is out on Friday via Superior Viaduct.