Speedking - The Fist and the Laurels
(Tiger Style)
Never heard of this band? Me neither, and it's not surprising. Only in existence from 1995 to 1997, Speedking, who hailed from Brooklyn, NY, released four 7"'s and promptly broke up, never managing to release the full-length that they had already recorded. Touted as one of those groups who had to be seen live, and best known for their live shows (or so says the press kit), Speedking's legacy, until now, was one of hard-to-find 7"s, and tales (probably somewhat posthumously hyperbolic) of pummeling live performances. Enter The Fist and the Laurels as a more concrete and readily available document: two discs containing all of the group's previous 7" recordings, the unreleased LP, and more than twenty minutes of bonus tracks.
The first disc contains the entirety of the aforementioned debut album, eleven tracks in which the vocals, Sonic Youth style, are split among the band members, and, just as with some eras of Sonic Youth, though most of the tracks are credited as group compositions, it's easy to find the stylistic patterns that correspond to the vocalists of each song. The tracks sung by bassist/guitarist Chet Sherwood are frenzied shards of the jarring music that magazines with glossy covers have recently been calling post punk, bassist Miriam Maltagliati's are cool, detached indie rock, and drummer James Murphy leads the band through two cuts of deep-grooved electro-rock that, if it were slightly less visceral, wouldn't be out of place emanating from the speakers of some German über-hipster's stereo. Just as all Marines are gunmen, and every member of Sun Ra's Arkestra is a percussionist, everyone in Speedking has a hand in the synthesizers that flesh out the disc's rock tunes and comprise completely its more ambient electronic instrumental meditations. Ringer Matthew Harmon offers Moog support on four of the tracks, and Jeremiah Ryan lends lead vocals to "Hearts and Flowers." Sherwood's tracks are the disc's most arresting, as the rest of the album is too heavily stylized to match the punch of "Yi Ma" and Sherwood's James Chance impression on "Put Me Up Against the Wall."
The band's earlier material found on disc two (most of which was previously released on labels like Amish Records and Troubleman) follows somewhat the same pattern, though Bob Weston's production on the first seven tracks sounds limp and muffled after the superior job done by Murphy (who's also produced Le Tigre, The Rapture, Massive Attack, and others) on the first disc. Sherwood's first two selections are punkier and simpler than his later material, trading abrasiveness for a moodier emo-twinged feel. "Sway," sung by Murphy, is the disc's swaggering highlight, and though a few other songs demand attention, the earlier material is much more formulaic than the first disc, and, though free of much of the synthesizer than weighs down the full-length, ends up sounding more pedestrian. Tracks nineteen through twenty-two are more previously unheard examples of Speedking's instrumental side, largely forgettable electronic forays whose inclusion makes up more than half of the second disc, filling space but bogging down any inertia that's been gained through the songs from the 7"'s, which make up less than half of disc two.
Perhaps Speedking sounded better in the mid-90's, but both the earlier 7" material, with its brooding aggressiveness, and the unreleased full-length, full of synth rhythms and electronic accompaniment, sound dated in 2002; Speedking have the unlucky fortune to have delved into areas of rock that have became broadly traversed and played out by this time, and though it's hard to tell what I would have thought of The Fist and the Laurels in 1997, had their debut LP been released at the time of its completion, it's not hard to imagine that Speedking may have been some of the best practitioners of a sound that's since lost its luster.
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