Mozart – ‘The Tick’
I needed to catch my breath after blasting this demo. FFFFFFFFUCK is this a ripper! Helmed by Maximum Rocknroll lead editor Grace Ambrose, a brutal aural assault emerges from the ashes of our technocratic dystopia, steeped in the finest strains of obscure hardcore esoterica which Ambrose regularly labors to catalog for others. What strains, you ask? Oh, just the disparate influences of Italian maniacs Wretched, Texas’ theremin new-wavers Plastic Idols, Swiss art-punkers Kleenex, Portland retro-rippers Lebenden Toten, or Finnish screamers Terveet Kadet, to name just a few gems I’ve encountered through a voracious appetite for the aforementioned rag. Once the bastion of the international Californization of punk rock — centering hyper-regional, inchoate spurts of musical anarchy around the nexus of mass media’s birthplace — the Ambrose-led iteration of MRR’s vision seems intent on reversing the process by turning spoiled Anglocentric eyes and ears out toward the rest of the world’s ruckus. Mozart — whose Bandcamp reports their full line-up as “Wörmhole, Spoon, Idiot, and Marissa” — is one example of what that can sound like.
When you hear a punk band whose songs are a tad too formulaic, you may wonder if they’re primarily drawing influence from the US and UK. Fair enough in 1977, but after then you start running out of excuses. In our bubble, punk tends to restrict itself to rock; it’s the diaspora of the ethos, that fuck your parents for better or worse attitude that spread across incompatible social contexts, that really diversified the sound. Mid-80s Japanese bands often rode roughshod over hardcore until only feedback was left; Mexican teenagers screamed themselves hoarse in response to the police state; from Scandinavia to the Balkans, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, atonality reached a high watermark Schoenberg would have killed to achieve. Clearly, Mozart could not sound like Mozart without extensive exposure to the worldwide meta-genre punk has become. How else could the warbly psychedelia of the opening title-track perfectly cohere alongside the one-two shuffling madness of “The Monster?” Or the excruciating, crawling dirge of “The Embarrassment?” It seems like music only serious record nerds could churn out, though one clearly need not be an expert to appreciate it.
Now that I’m done listening, I’m itching to spin all the tapes and records I collected during my MRR-fueled adolescence: to relive that sensation, that incomparable high I got from musty magazine pages and mysterious foreign mailing addresses. Sometimes “sincerity” is scarce, especially in countercultures, but Mozart piles it on like salsa roja on a wet burrito. It’s the feeling of sweating so much in a noisy basement show you can’t feel your own body anymore (because it’s melted into the walls). It’s a feeling I’ve gotten to relive with this tape, and it hasn’t even arrived in my mailbox yet!
Order a copy from Mozart’s Bandcamp.
