By Matt Sussman
Should bands just stick to their guns and stay broken up? Now that the seemingly impossible has happened and the formerly estranged members of My Bloody Valentine have caught the reunion fever - along with fellow British shut-ins Portishead, who follow on last year’s much ballyhooed reunion of Scottish depressives the Jesus and Mary Chain - what’s to stop other fantasy reformations from coming true? Every other week Pitchfork’s news feed seems to include word of some impending resurrection. Sure, Marr and Morrisey won’t take the stage together until hell freezes over, but honestly, concerts these days really seem like a buyer’s market where any number of groups whose flame was once considered snuffed - whether the Pixies or the Stooges or the Fire Engines - can be seen playing alongside younger bands who openly ape their sound and cite them as formative influences.
Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate wish fulfillment as much as the next music nerd. I thoroughly enjoyed watching the new cross-generational formation of ESG and shaking my ass to “The Beat” played live on a loud sound-system. But I know it’s a far, far cry from hearing the Skroggins sisters and cousin Tito funk up the Paradise Garage’s last party ever. And my friends who saw the Stooges - yeah, I really missed the boat there - couldn’t stop effusing over how much it fucking rocked, despite the fact that Iggy qualifies for the Grand Slam at Denny’s. (At least art punks Wire were being frank when they said that their live dips into their classic first two albums Pink Flag and Chairs Missing were convenient means to get back into proper physical shape. I wish the Spice Girls were as forthcoming since, clearly, this last reunion didn’t exactly turn into the sisterhood of the traveling Cavalli, girl-powered slumber party it was hyped as).
But all griping and throat-clearing aside, if I had the kind of dough that Coachella and All Tommorow’s Parties regularly wave under the noses of some their more resistant would-be reformed headliners, I would send an offer, pronto, to Mizutani Takahashi and his partners in crime in ‘70s underground legends Les Razilles Denudes, who ceased activity around 1996 (even though their first official CD wasn’t released until 1991).
Like Jandek, the mysterious stranger from Corwood Industries, Les Razilles Denudes are a force as much as a band. Their grip on the fevered imaginations and burning ears of Japanese psych fans, power noise freaks, and Wooden Shjips supporters refuses to relent, even as many anecdotes once touted as apocrypha have been confirmed as fact (their split from an avant-garde theater troop for being too loud; their original bassist’s involvement with the 1970 highjacking of JAL flight 351 by Japanese Communist League’s Red Army Faction), and even though their discography forms a palimpsest of blown-out live recordings from the late '60s through the early '80s of roughly the same 10 songs, bootlegged and re-bootlegged, in painfully priced limited edition runs, alternately sanctioned or left unacknowledged by reclusive mastermind Mizutani.
To say that Les Razilles played noisy psychedelic jams doesn’t really convey the extremity or massiveness of their sound, and so reviewers and fans - such as this one - often find themselves straining the limits of descriptive language. There’s hyperbole: over a simple 12-bar bass line and lazy drums, Mizutani often lets a riff thin out into a single strangulated note, which then disintegrates into a howl of echo-drenched feedback threatening to lance the already in-the-red recording and unleash even more gobs of oozing white noise. Alternately, I could be less flashy and tick off a list of metaphors: dense fog, vortex, maelstrom, black hole. Or, I could proffer a list of more familiar musical points of comparison - all descendants in some way: Psychocandy, Big Black, Keiji Haino, Skull Flower, DMBQ, High Rise, Comets on Fire, et al. But, honestly, you really just have to experience them for yourselves.
And, thanks to the recently released, officially sanctioned and widely distributed Yodo-Go-a-Go-Go compilation (10th Avenue Freeze Out) - the group’s first-ever release of material recorded in a studio way back in ‘69 or so - now you can. Even though this is a supposed step up from the shakily-held-Dictaphone-in-a-crowded-club fidelity of many of the group’s live bootlegs, the sound is still very much overblown and deliciously murky. In addition to trial versions of oft-recorded jams “Enter the Mirror” and “Flames of Ice, ” you get to hear a surprisingly poppy side to the group in both versions of the early number “Otherwise My Conviction” and the Velvets worthy ballad “Valle d’leau.”
But really, it’s the 17-minute version of “Flames of Ice” that make this strongest case for a Les Rallizes reunion at Coachella ’09. True to its title, Mizutani’s guitar is all icy hot beams of distortion reflected and refracted along with is vocals through an Echoplex hall of mirrors. A Place to Bury Strangers would kill for his sound. Judging from Mizutani’s haunted pleas between the song’s incessantly stabbing chords, he just might have.
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