The Morlocks – Emerge[ FULL ALBUM]1985 Twenty minutes and change, just how a quickie should be. Intense, high-quality, and without any drawn-out build-ups... what an album, damn - already said -
The weeping, like for every death, lasts little.
In the case of Gravedigger Five, just a month.
The time it takes to bury the dead and see the Morlocks resurface.
Makeshift instruments (recovered after a particularly out-of-mind concert of the Tell-Tale Hearts, NdLYS) and two days of recording: December 3rd and 4th, 1984. Thus Emerge was born, the most devastating garage punk album of the era. Five covers that almost no one knows and three songs written by Leighton Koizumi and his trusty sidekick from back then, Jeffrey “Luck” Lucas.
Leighton had already bitten into the primitive beat of bands like Stoics and Larry and The Blue Notes with his Gravedigger Five when he was just a teenager, while the second played with a tiny local psychedelic band called The Mirrors. Stories that lasted a season. Losing stories. Born Losers.
Leighton barely has time to taste the appetizer before the table is cleared, so when he arrives at Studio 517 in San Diego, he has the hunger of a hyena. And it shows. His voice on Emerge is the growl of a riled beast.
The production of the album is entrusted to Jordan Tarlow (then guitarist in that other troglodyte band called Outta Place and later axe-man for the Fuzztones of In Heat, NdLYS), who, however, has nothing to do: just plug in the mic cables to a battered two-track recorder and turn up the volumes.
The sound is filthy, derailing, psychotic garage played by a runaway train, with the instruments playing in unison the dirtiest covers of the time and Leighton’s throat scraping the rocky walls of the most absurd caveman beat of the season, grinding the surface until he’s spitting blood, as happens in the devastating rendition of Project Blue by the Banshees, in the blazing finale of It Don’t Take Much (still one of the best tracks birthed from Koizumi’s mind) or in the filthy One Way Ticket that closes the album with the grace of an anal deflowering. Fierce and deafening, Emerge leaves a trail of semen on any plate that passes by, leaving the perverse desire to be possessed by a Morlock.
Many were having fun digging graves at the time.
But they were the only ones to find a pit full of still-living bodies, in an eternal agony without respite.
