PREVIEW
NEBULA
Saturday, June 16
The Night Gallery
It’s the goo, the glue: that sonic substance of thundering bass-lines and mighty main riffs that young, hairy dudes have used for generations to hold the rock to the roll.
One music scribe a few years ago tried to define this white noise of fuzz-bomb wah-wahs and rama-lama-fa-fas as: "The KING OF IT and The KING OF THING." It, of course, being the classic combo of guitar, bass and drums at their most…
"Primal?" offers Mark Abshire, drummer for L.A. Sub Poppers Nebula, who along with label-mates Zen Guerilla, the Hellacopters and the Murder City Devils, are doing their best to restore the bad (read "good") reputation of their now tarnished, once mighty recording company.
Abshire agrees that for every downturn in popular culture’s taste for IT, there will always be enough distorted six-string rumbling in the underground to keep the pulse pounding.
Witness the fallout of the ’60s. Feature: the Stooges and Sabbath. Dig the big hairspray meltdown of the ’80s. Hit play: Mudhoney and riot grrrls.
"It always seems to happen when popular music gets worse and worse – the underground starts happening again," Abshire concurs. "It just goes in cycles."
Indeed, Nebula seem tailor-made for said cyclical masterplan, employing all the necessary ingredients of the slow and heavy low-down (Abshire and his compadres, guitarist/vocalist Eddie Glass and bassist Rueben Romano are all vets of stoner rock icons Fu Manchu): aggression without angst; intensity minus polemics.
"Politics isn’t really our thing," he says. "It’s more about the feeling and the energy. Rueben’s pissed off by the high price of gas, though, and he’ll tell you about it."
As he should be, for Nebula and their ilk are the Mach 5 bluesmen of the 21st century. White, gearhead blues that swaps the share-cropping tools and John Barley Corn of their forebears for muscle cars and MDMA.
"Actually, none of us are into cars other than to get around town. We’re basically just into music. When we’re home, we’re either playing or doing stuff around town, which for us is Los Angeles, so there are beaches and lots of other shit going on."
Don’t interrupt, Mark, I’m on a roll here. It’s the subterranean psilocybin blues. Blue Cheer highs intercut with Black Flag psychosis; the natural sound of intense, extracurricular chemical experimentation.
"Well, I think it’s more the natural sound of playing in small, hot, sweaty bars," he says, correcting me.
Fine. I concede. While he may put a damper on my prose, Abshire succinctly posits his formula for kicking out high-voltage jams – appropriately devoid of any deep cultural connotations.
"Playing heavy rock music in small smoky bars is as primal as it gets."
Or, as they say on the lead track of their latest long-player, Charged: "Turn it on/ Plug it in/ There’s no reason/ It just is.../ DO IT!" |
