🇺🇸 The Morlocks - Submerged Alive (Full Album 1987, Vinyl) And if Emerge is a wild fuck in the basement without even taking your clothes off… this beloved fake live little record is the sequel… playful and perverse games, sudden changes of “rhythm,” dirty but in that wonderfully dirty way… a marvelous playground…
Three years later All Black and Hairy, Ron Rimsite from the 99th floor is still writing the liner notes for a Leighton Koizumi record. The record with which the Morlocks piss all over a scene that has turned into a puppet circus.
While the Sunset Strip fills up with Brian Jones imitators hanging around the sidewalks, the Morlocks move to San Francisco and record a desperate record for a punk-style label, the Metallic KO of the garage-punk season.
There is no clash with the fans.
No Jewish ladies in the audience.
Yet Submerged Alive oozes hate, boredom, and depravity.
Leighton opens the cage. And he’s a hungry beast.
Jordan Tarlow’s guitar feeds his appetites.
The sound becomes metallic and decadent (She‘s My Fix, My Friend the Bird), cryptic (Different World, Black Box), and drugged (Empty). The derailing garage covers of the first record are banned in favor of a syncopated and infected blues like Get Out of My Life, Woman, a burning Leavin’ Here (renamed due to a trivial misprint as Leavin’ Home, NdLYS) more Motörhead than Who, and a relentless Your Body Not Your Soul.
The Morlocks seem to want to tear themselves apart.
There is a hate simmering within the band. There are abuses and excesses that intensify the tones, until they turn blood red.
They are captive beasts mutilating themselves, smashing their fangs against the wall, dripping blood and bile. Brett Gurewitz will find himself forced to clean up the Epitaph catalog with a decade of punk records at neutral pH.
Submerged Alive is the Blair Witch Project of a band alone against the rest of the world.
I’m afraid to close my eyes… and afraid to open them again.
Don’t be afraid to open your ears.
At the dawn of the new century, it seems no one remembers Leighton anymore.
The last, tragic whispers declared him gone. Even written off.
Taken by drugs, a corpse among the corpses he had unearthed with the Gravedigger Five and the Morlocks, when he was a young thug in San Diego and a heroin addict ravaged by abuse in San Francisco.
