Passionistas...are completely nuts
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An embarrassingly long time ago, I got an email from NewUsedRecords (www.mog.com/newusedrecords) who had noticed how much I love Kelley Stoltz. He was working with a new band called Passionistas, who had recorded their first album God's Boat with Kelley Stoltz. He cautioned that the Passionistas did not sound like Kelley Stoltz, but that he liked them a lot. The logic was that since I liked Kelley Stoltz and Kelley Stoltz liked Passionistas...well, you get the idea. A home-produced CD arrived in the mail shortly after, the disc enclosed in a blue translucent clamshell which had been decorated by hand with glitter paint and something that looked like lipstick. The track listing was perfectly legible, but torn in an irregular pattern out of some larger piece of paper, then taped onto the clam shell. The person behind this was obviously concerned with appearances, but not in the usual way...a whiff of extreme creativity, limited means and possible mental instability hung over the whole package.Of course, this is my favorite kind of record. I popped it into the stereo right way. It was barking mad.Well, no, let me restate that. It was primitive, minimal, and dead-eyed serious about inherently goofy topics like Y2K and being "Fucking Cold." It had an untrained Messthetics vibe to it, as if the people on the disc had just that instant picked up drum sticks and guitars and microphones and were using them for the very first time with the tape running. Most of the songs started, at least, with a jagged post-punk groove to them, straight up guitars, staccato drums, lyrics, all pounding against the same minimalist eighth-note rhythms. And yet, these songs would often veer dramatically off-course even from there, launching into turgid squalls of feedback and drone. It reminded me of Icky Boyfriends and the Shaggs...it began to seem sort of brilliant. And then I forgot about it. I was distracted. There were too many records, too many deadlines. Editors somehow got the idea that it was more important to review dreck like the New Pornographers record than this sort of insanity. So NewUsedrecords waited patiently for me to write something about a record that I had told him I liked. He waited and waited and finally wrote to ask me what my problem was. (Not in those words. He was far more polite.) And so I began listening to god's boat again...and again and here is what I think of it in a nutshell.You will never hear anything else remotely like this record. Either you will love it madly or it will drive you insane...or perhaps both. But you should check it out. After all, Kelley Stoltz likes the Passionistas. You can't miss.
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