SWARM OF ANGELS DESCRIPTION, Down With the Scene Festival
Enigmatic, charismatic, hydromatic--they're greased lightning. Glamorous trash-pop from a bunch of local thugs, has-beens (always-will-be's), and pink clouds.
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South By Southwest Concert Review, Doug Van Pelt, Hard Music Magazine
I patiently waited for the show to start as 6 musicians set up on a stage not much bigger than a king-sized mattress. "That's not Ester Drang!" I quickly concluded, but I couldn't help but watch these noise terrors go nuts. They're called Swarm of Angels and they were insane.
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Speaking of shuttle disasters.... The Swarm of Angels are the sonic capturing of a shuttle disaster and eighteen times the speed of sound crashing to the ground. Something going wrong when you think you got it all in the bag. I dont know much about the Swarm, not much at all but I am learning.
I am willing to learn. and you will too if you want to go the route of sonic magic. This record magically appeared one day. One day it WASNT there, the next it was and it changed my fucking miserable life.
The Swarm of Angels leave nothing unturned in their sonic assault. Coming off like a modern day amalgamation of Pere Ubu, The Plasmatics and James Chance and the Contortions; the Swarm of Angels press release read like a fucking private eye report on me and the music I like.
That day a few years ago when I sat down and wrote The Neoteric Punk/Wave manifesto, what I was trying to get at was bands like this. What The Swarm do is strange and wierd. Listening to the Swarm of Angels makes me want to just fucking explode. The drama, the angst, the energy. Its all in this fucker!
I rank this band up there with the best of them. Kill the Hippies, Crimson Sweet, Radar Secret Service, The Cock Spaniels, Chalk.... Its bands like SWARM that I want to keep to myself and bring them out when I need them. im selfish over bands and as wrong as it may seem, I want the SWARM to jsut play for me. I want credit for discovering them even though I hadent, I want recognition for this band when all I done was JUST listen to them. Fuck up as it sounds, you just got the whole truth.
If you are a fan of art-punk or my new neoteric Punk/Wave then I suggest you do what you can to get this! Im a fan for life, Looking to The Swarm of Angels like a military unit....Im joining up.
Go and get one. A MUST-HAVE!, SHAWN ABNOXIOUS - the LANDING PARTY - BLANK GENERATION
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TEX,
LIES, and AUDIOTAPE, by Justin Crane
Swarm of Angels was born of
countless other bands of greater or lesser importance. That much they will tell
you.
Dom, as his friends call him, could name bands that he's been involved with for weeks: Bad NRG Band, Plumbers of Yanni·
"I was in
Rusted Shut, Japanix 2·" (That's Benczedi, still droning on about his
pedigree.)
...
"Afterparty, A Pink Cloud·I'll always be A Pink Cloud."
Benczedi is still stuck on the first question.
...
"My first band was
called Scrumptious Guts·"
...
"Then Goth Socks. Then Falcon Leather
Gift·"
COOKIE at SPACELAND, LA
Review of
Plessure Ep by Lewis Houston, Vinyl A GO GO
This is the
sort of record that arrives in your cold, barren tin box by mysterious means.
Thereās inevitably no return address and the package is so postally ravaged its
a miracle you got it at all. Thereās something bizarre inside but you canāt
quite guess what. The postmark is smudged and so it seems the package either
arrived from Texas or nowhere at all. You open it to discover a record as
intriguing as its packaging. The record is tactilely stimulating and visually
perplexing. It manages to excite before itās even played. The insert is composed
of stark, jagged photocopies immediately understandable as a rallying cry for
something new, or perhaps something past, or perhaps nothing at all. The sleeve
is obtuse; a blurry, mangled, bleeding silk-screened mass of ink that tickles
your fingers when you touch it. You soon find it hard not to. The only other
clues included are an equally obtuse sticker that barely includes the bandās
name along with a four by five photo of the band. Itās a blurry image that
appears as if taken from a movie still. Its only revealing attribute is the
glimpse of a pick guard and microphone head amidst the dense blacks and muted
reds.
You still
havenāt heard Swarm of Angels and theyāre already screaming at you. Clandestine,
contrary, obtuse; they seem to be searching for something new or at least
something more thrilling. Track one, "Plessure," starts with rolling jungle
drums and eerie bedlam. The Wire-inspired guitars join in and Niki Texas begins
to warble and rattle out the six lines of constrained sexual desires. Itās hard
to determine how the song keeps on track. Itās barely kept together by
discordant, call and response, sloppily calculated picking. When in the end it
dissolves into dropped out chaos you arenāt surprised, but you are excited. In
"Thousandaires" you notice the saxophone. But still it sounds like the fettered
squelching of the neighborās middle school-aged kid. The guitars are more
discordant, the proceedings more noisy, the lyrics more pointed but still
purposefully dense. The vocalization too is more desperate, more warbling, and
more intensely bored. On the flip side "Medea" rings out with the sound of
battered, loose-stringed guitars bashed at with razor blades in place of plastic
picks. Like the rest itās a densely quiet and yet noisy and infectious song. It
manages to creep under your skin while raising the hairs. The saxophone is still
there and still reserved like the neighborās kid. Medea is a girl. Which, like
the packaging, is perplexing. Despite her atypical name itās obvious Niki loves
her. You gauge this because Niki has lost intensity and is now desolate, dreary,
sorrowful and lovelorn. The slow, sullen, fuzz-tinged guitars and booming bass
drone on, adding pomp to his circumstance. The final attack, "All You
Flagwavers!" has bass turned up way beyond eleven resulting in
speaker-destroying thudding layered with ringing, mutilated guitars atop a
reserved examination of flagwaving in the face of terror. I have a good friend
Matt whose band used to play a noisy racket aimed at confusing and alienating.
Live they would drag an entire house on stage. Then theyād paint themselves
green and roll around in fits of screaming. They were so contrary to the idea of
a normal band that that you couldnāt get a straight answer about a name,
releases, shows, or if in fact they were even a real band. They seemed to revel
in the mystery. I did too. I loved their enigmatic racket but yearned for more
pointed, purposeful, infectious songs, and less screaming. Swarm of Angels
strike me as the kindred spirits of Matt and his band mates. Except they give me
infections without screaming, and they've got a name.
John Nova
Lomax, Houston Press: Best Of Houston, 2002.
Nikki Texas is
now hovering about in his new underground supergroup, Swarm of Angels,
with various former or current members of Rusted Shut, the Vulgarians, Matty
& Mossy and Culturcide (among others). Of that band's first EP, Splendid
E-zine said the following: "Static and dense at best, this short EP is
quasi-catchy on a brute, animalistic level" and meant it as a slam. Sounds
pretty cool to us. Then again, maybe we're just quasi-smart brute
animals.
REVIEW OF PLESSURE EP by ERIN YANKE, MAXIMUM ROCK AND
ROLL
The Swarm of Angels sound like the first wave of post punk
bands from England, Gang of Four, The Fall, all that kind of stuff, but they're
from modern times Texas! Good and danceable, interesting guitar stuff and there
are surprises in the songs as they build up into each other...fuck yeah this is
great!
BUNNY
REVIEW OF PLESSURE EP by JOSH KAZMAN, SPLENDID EZINE
The
Swarm of Angels' frenzied and distorted style of indie-pop gone awry is
headache-inducing to say the least. Maybe these four tracks hint at some sort of
subconscious love for dismantled hooks that are attached to rough guitar work,
but I honestly can't see anyone enjoying it. Following one or, at the most, two
verses, the lyrics quickly grow repetitious and taxing. The title track is
especially guilty of this; the song ends with the lead singer yelping
"Pleasure!....Pleasure!", as if that means something significant to the average
listener. Following "Plessure", the disc slowly becomes less intrusive. The only
song that I can begin to make sense of is "Medea", which builds from a
charmingly unromantic chorus that reminds me of Syd Barrett's "Mazie".
Nonetheless, the majority of Plessure can be summed up as stale pop. Static and
dense at best, this short EP is quasi-catchy on a brute, animalistic level --
but then again, that could be considered a compliment these days.
ERIKA THRASHER IN
GALVESTON
SMARMY
ANGELS, by Elena Markova, Houston Post
Bette Davis eyes, fake names, bad
jokes, and worse make-up-- the Swarming Angels muddy the waters surrounding any
discussion of their band to such an extent that any discussion threatens to
become as muddy and incoherent as the music they make.
Nonetheless, the
train-going-off-the-tracks rhythm section of Matt Freining and Ralph Amado is
worth checking out.
--May 2002, reprinted with permission
FEATHER at
FIRESTATION 3 (photograph by Russell Erwin)
WINGS OVER
THE ASPHALT: SPACE CITY SWARM and DANG, by DAVE BOTTOMS
...PLESSURE
offers a taste of the nascent sound. It's a whipping, whirring sound-plane
that gets its hooks in slowly and deeply.
The title track makes the band's sonic case, to wit: if you can't convey your message with 1:47 of toms, snares, and barking whoops, maybe you should reconsider your career field. The band's not here for a lot of navel-gazing. In-floo-ential Bay Area jazz critic Ralph Gleason once described the Jefferson Airplane as playing "... with all the delicacy and finesse of a mule team kicking down a picket fence." That's sorta the thing here; to move past the dead weight, plug in, play the damn show and have some fun.
Maybe--maybe-- if James Chance and The Contortions and Dayton's late lamented Brainiac found themselves in a triple-canopy jungle, beset by hungry and pissed headhunters, and wanted a last hurrah, you'd get a result like "1000Aires." Pallenberg's sax drives the thing wildly home.
If the band
just wanted to front you, they blew it with "Medea." Too honest.
More great sax. Plangent. This ain't about being a come-on. Too
real. Too good. Is this a single yet? Why the hell not? Trac four,
"Flag Wavers," combines hypnotic, wind-tunnel vocals with so much fuzz you'll
think you've blown your bass cones. It's Throbbing Gristle
channeled. It's an insistent melodic germ-- pop for the collective
unconscious. Hey, they'll even make you mentally name-check the storied
Velvets (with the crucial distinction being that SOA doesn't suck).
FEATHER &
PRODUCER
Fray Gaspar Jose de Solis reported that:
All assemble together and when the harsh instrument, the
cayman,
begins to play they begin to dance
and to leap,
making many gestures and very
fierce grimaces with funereal and discordant cries.
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