There’s something about San Antonio that breeds bands who just don’t give a fuck.
Like the Midwestern band that goes by the name Fuck, these groups aren’t playing to mainstream hopes of MTV name placement, like so many others who leave in search of the elusive contract. We should all be thankful for this, because SanAnto mainly produces bands who solidly follow trends: pop punk, ska, and most recently, the swing craze. It’s a flipside of a scene that finds itself in the wrong town for instant fame yet always in the shadow of the illusionary oasis (get the car gassed up for South by Southwest).
Specifically, many local groups are jumping on the acritical pop-punk bandwagon, following the trendy depoliticization of punk culture. A scenester friend of mine once categorized a certain band as “happy punk” without an ounce of irony, which seemed to aptly describe most bands out there, especially in terms of their complete lack of any dissonance musically, lyrically, or ideologically.
But a few recent CD releases play to different shades of dissonance SanAnto style. Starting out in 1990 as Worm, 1.0 came into existence four years ago, taking the forgotten half of guitarist Phillip Luna’s skateboard dubbed “Bedwetter 1.0”. Where Bedwetter left some time ago for Dallas, 1.0 plugs away with their e.p. Your Right (Even I Have Seizures Records), offering a good taste of what the band does live, which amounts to chaotic risk-taking rhythms speeding headlong into a wall of noise always on the verge of collapse.
Luna describes every show as “an episode” where the musicians seem to encounter each other for the first time at opposite ends of musical attack. Jerry Rincon lays down a steadily bulldozing bassline that erupts in unexpected time changes, while guitarists Luna and Jason Ucab execute alternating, sometimes arrhythmic chord progressions. And through it all, the expressively pained vocals of Luna and Rincon wrench out Nirvana-esque lyrics as on “Lyon’s Park”: “Through every crevice and crack goes me/ And on the edge of the world of life I stand/ I wake up fucking you with my hand.” This is not exactly “happy” stuff, delving more into love’s dark side.
Where 1.0 steps out side of local trends,…. band(s) express a punk approach to doing music despite relative lack of audiences, gigs, and opportunities in our fair city, and they do this without pandering to fans’ mass-culture produced tastes, as on 1.0’s “I Was Born”: “I was born with a microphone/ I was born to sing my song/ I get by on a shoestring, baby/ I get by when I’m falling apart.”
San Antonio Current, 1999
