More from Larry Boyd: 90 minutes (roughly) by his band Disarray. This is labeled as “Angle\/Reangle 1979-1985,” an Ahooastia recording — if you google “Ahooastia,” the only real hit you’ll find is the credits to song lyrics the reconstituted Disarray wrote after Larry was gone, so I guess that was the band’s music publishing company.<\/p>\n
The tape package also sometimes has Disarray spelled “DSR@.”<\/p>\n
It’s 24 songs, apparently in chronological order; the band’s style changed over time. I like the early stuff a lot — I don’t know if I’d ever played it, and suspect I didn’t, because I think I’d remember it if I had, as it’s damn good. “Straight Line\/Brick Wall” is probably my favorite.<\/p>\n
The middle period, from “Radio Free” through “War is Big Dicks,” I don’t care for much, really, but then in the last part “Ghost Fuckers” and “My Intimate Friend” are nice stuff.<\/p>\n
Most of this seems to be studio recordings, but there are a few live numbers on Side 2.<\/p>\n
Larry always said Disarray was a punk band, which was one reason I didn’t play all the tapes he sent — I didn’t really get into punk until later. Listening to this stuff, while it’s deliberately pretty raw, I wouldn’t really call it punk. It antedates grunge, but that’s the same esthetic, really.<\/p>\n
I mean, I can see punk influence certainly — when one song’s lyrics include a little speech something like, “Hi, we’re Disarray, and here’s a one-chord song about flies,” it’s not exactly hard to see a disdain for the niceties of traditional performance — but it’s not manic enough for real punk.<\/p>\n
Anyway, I have the impression that Disarray sort of broke up in 1985, and then re-formed several times but not necessarily with the same personnel, so if I have it right this tape is pretty much the entire repertoire of the original line-up.<\/p>\n
I pasted up a cover for it from the only picture of Larry Boyd I’ve ever seen, for lack of anything better; I had already used the only Disarray poster I could find for the 15th anniversary concert album.<\/p>\n
The transfer — well, the new version of Audacity doesn’t crash. I got distracted and recorded about an hour and a half of silence between sides, and it still worked just fine. And the tape was mostly excellent quality. There were a few tracks with noise here and there, and one or two of the live numbers (e.g., “Helicopter Dreemz”) aren’t exactly perfect, but I’m pretty sure that’s in the originals, not a problem on my end.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
More from Larry Boyd: 90 minutes (roughly) by his band Disarray. This is labeled as “Angle\/Reangle 1979-1985,” an Ahooastia recording — if you google “Ahooastia,” the only real hit you’ll find is the credits to song lyrics the reconstituted Disarray wrote after Larry was gone, so I guess that was the band’s music publishing company.… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-generalities-rants","category-strange-days"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":865,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216\/revisions\/865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}