Adult Problems - You Should Listen To Coffin Pricks And Slug Guts (Despite The Fact That I Refuse To Interview Them)

Slug Guts

Coffin Pricks and Slug Guts are two new bands with little in common besides misanthropy, talent, improbable names, and the fact that I recently couldn’t be fucked to interview them properly.

Slug Guts is from Australia. They supposedly really hate Nick Cave. Which is fine. We all hate our dads sometimes. Their new album is totally ace and sounds like an afterparty in Hell, with Chrome Cranks, PIL, The Scientists, and a bunch of other bands with horrific drug problems thrown in the mix. The state of the bathrooms is appalling. When I asked what their interests were, before I got distracted by a flickering light in the distance and neglected to finish the interview, they listed “The death of Johnny Thunders…foul play? Overdose or burrito? Les Rallizes Denudes, rock biographies—no matter what band, I will read it—early Guns N' Roses, America (the country, not the band), Karl Lagerfeld and Burberry, AIDS techno, Arthur Russell, Italo soundtrack techno, Gianni Rossi.” I admire, if not share, all those interests, though the only rock biography that didn’t send me into a somnambulant frenzy was Le Freak by Nile Rodgers. It may be the greatest book ever written. Just FYI.

Coffin Pricks

Coffin Pricks is from Chicago. They're the newest outfit by Revolution Summer’s token cynic Chris Thomson (Circus Lupus, Red Eyed Legends, a bunch of other bands angry girls too tough to put up with Mark E. Smith’s domestic abuse dig) joined by dudes from Cavity and Daylight Robbery. They sound like what garage bands are supposed to sound like but rarely do: damaged, mean fuck-ups trying to get their hands, perpetually shaking from the knowledge that death looms and mediocrity reigns, to just stay steady long enough to play the damn chords right. Poor rascals. I sympathize! Anyway, before I discovered a family of squirrels outside my window and decided to ask them a bunch of questions about their influences, Coffin Pricks wrote me and listed their interests as: Chris - "Mexican food, funky 45s, booze, obscure bands, stained glass, Chicago haunts." Ryan - “I'm personally interested in records, The Fall, Mexican food, Nervous Norvus, movies, guitars, John Fante, playing baseball, the ocean, Disneyland (going to it), novelty songs, surf music, playing records in bars, skulls, etc.” I actually know quite a bit about a few of these things, but not as much as I know about comic books and the cartoons in the back pages of Dragon Magazine. I just wasn’t built to interview bands.

If the cliché of politics and sausage making holds true, then music writing is politics in reverse. You start off with delicious sausage (music) and end up with a fetid pool of pig innards, finger nail clippings, and chicken beaks (music writing). Both of them are awesome, and if I didn’t think band interviews were one of the lowest form of media, below listicles, above celebrity op-ed pieces on Huffington Post, I would have talked to these guys for days. Their devotion to their craft (and I don’t care if that sounds pretentious) is worthy of attention, even if I’m not giving it its just due. You should buy their music. And I was just kidding about sausage. It’s gross.

Both Slug Guts and Coffin Pricks have current releases that are sweller than swell. Slug Guts' new album is Playin’ In Time With The Deadbeat on Sacred Bones. Coffin Pricks have a seven-inch called “Group Home Haircut,” out via Stationary Heart Records.

@zacharylipez