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Mutant garage from Detroit..., By Brian Costello, May 7, 2009

VARIOUS ARTISTS Shiftless Decay: New Sounds of Detroit (X! Records)

"The Renaissance City has certainly seen better days, but for more than a decade now Detroit has been spawning some of the most exciting and innovative garage bands anywhere—from the Piranhas and Clone Defects of ten years ago to the Frustrations and Terrible Twos of today. Avant-punk has never sounded more desperate, disparate, and beautifully unhealthy than it does in Detroit now—the music both reflects and defies the urban blight from which it hatched, displaying a strange mutant vigor, like weeds running riot after an atomic blast.

I love Shiftless Decay, a compilation released on the label run by Frustrations drummer Scott Dunkerley, for the same reason I love Detroit: it’s unsafe, chaotic, and sickeningly alive. So many indie rockers seem to be in retreat from reality, taking their beards to their Bon Iver forest cabins to make whimpering yuppie sex music while the world continues its inexorable decline. In Detroit, though, there’s no escaping the shit, no pretending everything’s just swell aside from the occasional bout of girl trouble. The bands on Shiftless Decay breathe air that’s poisoned with the city’s slow, decades-long death rattle, and that’s how they sound—these aren’t tenth-generation MC5 imitators self-consciously adopting the rip-roaring attitude of Detroit rock tradition.

You may remember a similar comp that came out of the Motor City in 2001, documenting the likes of the White Stripes, Detroit Cobras, and Dirtbombs—but these songs are the unsympathetic sounds of Detroit. The 12 bands here let loose with barbaric yawps of free-punk outer-space hate, oddball antisongs that sound like what happens when a Hamtramck beer-binge afterparty adjourns to a basement rehearsal space at 5 AM for an improvised jam with synths, horns, and piles of effects pedals. From Tentacle Lizardo’s “Haunted Closet,” which opens the comp with its howling, stomping robotic skree, to Odd Clouds’ “Gum Coup Follicle,” which closes it with a clash of quasi-harmolodic brass and sustained, triumphal guitar chords, there’s not a moment of compromise on Shiftless Decay, not a single postmodern wink at a familiar style. Though Detroit has a rich history of fusing free jazz with garage punk, these songs are connected to it by only the thinnest of threads.

Relatively familiar bands like Little Claw (now based in Portland), Human Eye, and Tyvek chip in with an unreleased version of a song from an earlier seven-inch, a recent LP cut, and a tune from a tour-only CD-R, respectively. The Frustrations’ “Psychedelic Motorcrash” and Terrible Twos’ “Negative Drip” both combine intense, immediate vocals, layers of guitar or keyboard processed so insanely that they sometimes sound like white noise, and explosively driving rhythm sections that drag you face-first through the splintery, turbulent songs. The Mahonies’ “Paint the Town Brown” grinds along on the primitive side of “future primitive,” and THTX’s relatively conventional “Monorails to Nowhere”—a midtempo number with a clear verse-chorus structure—pulls some extra weight with its lyrics, offering a vision of a town fighting to survive that’s as unsparing as anything else on the comp. The health of Detroit’s garage scene seems to have an inverse relationship to the health of the city, and Shiftless Decay almost makes you hope the recession never lifts."