Rating:
Genre:
Rock
Release Date: 06/24/2003
New York Noise covers roughly the same stretch of time as
In the Beginning There Was Rhythm, another compilation from the reliable
Soul Jazz label. There aren't any gaping stylistic gulfs between the two discs, but the geographic focus here is completely different.
In the Beginning features
post-punk groups from England, while this disc highlights the genre-bending and cultural cross-breeding that was taking place in New York City, synchronously, during the late '70s and early '80s. The disc takes in most of the movements that took root in the city during the era, from
no wave to mutant
disco to
hip-hop to art
funk and a handful of points in between -- all without overlapping a great deal with other sets that were released just before and just after, like
Downtown 81,
Rough Trade Post Punk 01,
N.Y. No Wave, and a swollen reissue of
ZE's
Mutant Disco.
Mars'
"Helen Fordsdale," plucked from the increasingly hard to find
No New York, is emblematic of
no wave, with lines of screeching guitars, furiously rolling toms, frantic bass, and unintelligible yelps.
Lizzy Mercier Descloux's
"Wawa," a sparse, brittle instrumental with spindly guitars, could be slipped onto either of
Talking Heads' first two albums with little notice.
Dinosaur L's
"Clean on Your Bean No. 1" isn't nearly as wild as the
dub-drenched
Latin funk of
François Kevorkian's
"Go Bang" remix, despite having several of the same ingredients, but it's still pleasurably loose-limbed, like an out-there abstraction of
Roy Ayers' best dancefloor-oriented moments.
Soul Jazz has the tendency to pull out at least one obscurity that even graying hipsters have trouble remembering; in this case it's from
the Bloods, who could be more easily placed in the company of
ESG and
Delta 5 if they had recorded more than one single. Compilations like this are necessary because they document bygone fragments of time and keep them alive for younger generations. Compilations like this are dangerous because they tend to fall in the hands of young bands who spend more time looking behind than ahead. Besides, who's to say that
no wave and
post-punk won't spawn their own analogs of
traditional blues musicians -- if they haven't already? Still,
New York Noise is another title demonstrating that the late '70s and early '80s were awesome for music.
~Andy Kellman, All Music Guide
;)
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