The Unclaimed The Sorrow
The birth certificate of the neogarage of the Eighties.
The record that set the coordinates for attitude, look, and sound for everything that came after was this 7” released by Dave Gibson for his Moxie Records, the label he founded in honor of his dog and the obscure beat/punk bands of the Sixties, of which Dave is a fervent collector. A passion shared by few others at the time. One of them is Shelley Ganz, who lives just a few blocks from Carondelet Street, Dave's headquarters, and who decided to get her hands dirty with that music by forming a band devoted to Music Machine, Electric Prunes, Chocolate Watch Band, Syndicate of Sound, and Count Five. They call themselves Unclaimed, after an obscure California band from fifteen years earlier, and they roam the city's venues with a beautiful selection of surf and garage covers that many have started to envy. Dave wants them on his label at all costs. And Shelley Ganz, Sid Griffin, Barry Shank, Thom Hand, and Matt Roberts are in. The debut E.P. of Unclaimed is released in 1980, when there's nothing but emptiness around. Four songs that mark the zero point of the garage fever that will soon spread not only in California but across two entire continents.
Four rudimentary, sparse, primitive songs, mostly copied (The Sorrow is nothing more than Train for Tomorrow by Electric Prunes and Run from Home is a clever version of Never Alone by the Five Canadians, NdLYS), played and sung with a roughness but at the same time an elegance that makes them fragile and fascinating yet necessary to imprint something that had been simmering among American teenagers since the release of Nuggets, which had been stifled by punk and was now re-emerging with the "nuggets" released by AIP Records. And at that precise moment, Ganz seemed like the Midas King with raven hair and beatle boots destined to turn every sound coming from those grooves into gold.
Others would have done more and better. But the image of the Unclaimed, black as crows, remains fluttering above all, as a warning and a perennial example.
Thank Rev
The birth certificate of the neogarage of the Eighties.
The record that set the coordinates for attitude, look, and sound for everything that came after was this 7” released by Dave Gibson for his Moxie Records, the label he founded in honor of his dog and the obscure beat/punk bands of the Sixties, of which Dave is a fervent collector. A passion shared by few others at the time. One of them is Shelley Ganz, who lives just a few blocks from Carondelet Street, Dave's headquarters, and who decided to get her hands dirty with that music by forming a band devoted to Music Machine, Electric Prunes, Chocolate Watch Band, Syndicate of Sound, and Count Five. They call themselves Unclaimed, after an obscure California band from fifteen years earlier, and they roam the city's venues with a beautiful selection of surf and garage covers that many have started to envy. Dave wants them on his label at all costs. And Shelley Ganz, Sid Griffin, Barry Shank, Thom Hand, and Matt Roberts are in. The debut E.P. of Unclaimed is released in 1980, when there's nothing but emptiness around. Four songs that mark the zero point of the garage fever that will soon spread not only in California but across two entire continents.
Four rudimentary, sparse, primitive songs, mostly copied (The Sorrow is nothing more than Train for Tomorrow by Electric Prunes and Run from Home is a clever version of Never Alone by the Five Canadians, NdLYS), played and sung with a roughness but at the same time an elegance that makes them fragile and fascinating yet necessary to imprint something that had been simmering among American teenagers since the release of Nuggets, which had been stifled by punk and was now re-emerging with the "nuggets" released by AIP Records. And at that precise moment, Ganz seemed like the Midas King with raven hair and beatle boots destined to turn every sound coming from those grooves into gold.
Others would have done more and better. But the image of the Unclaimed, black as crows, remains fluttering above all, as a warning and a perennial example.
Thank Rev
IlConte
6 feb 23
DeRank ™: 14,34
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