4/6/2023 0 Comments Urge overkill![]() First the band has to finish the record, decide on a first single and film a video, and set a summer tour. They aren’t providing previews of the result yet, so it’s too early to tell whether this unholy alliance with the twin brothers’ “contraband sound,” as the band calls it, will be the production coup of the year or an unsatisfactory mess. Ultimately the band bade the underground good-bye and grabbed Joe and Phil Nicolo, creators of a sledgehammer-hard pop-rap fusion on albums like Cypress Hill the Goats’ Tricks of the Shade and Kris Kross’s triple platinum Totally Krossed Out. (Or did the fax go to Nirvana? When you’re spreading rumors, it’s hard to keep your stories straight.) For the record: “Steve really helped the band once upon a time,” says Roeser. The best ones: (a) that he dubbed off an Enuff Z’Nuff tape and left copies of it in club bathrooms with the legend, “New Urge demo” and (b) that he faxed them a two-page plea to produce the record. Urge now respond by cheerfully spreading a variety of possibly invented scurrilous rumors about the producer. Relations with Albini broke down early on, though it’s unclear whether this happened before or after he trashed the group in a New City interview last year. For production help, the band considered Butch Vig, Nevermind auteur and old Urge hand Albini and even the purer pop mind of Jim Rondinelli, consultant to Matthew Sweet’s studio masterpiece Girlfriend and producer of Eleventh Dream Day’s new El Moodio. “We can produce our own records and make our own videos if we want to,” says Kato.). In the wake of Geffen’s success with Sonic Youth and Nirvana, the company courted Urge and in time duly won their hand. On songs like “What Is Artane?,” “The Candidate,” and particularly the momentous “Vacation in Tokyo,” they sought and found a balance between their uncompromising local heritage and the measured, faded grandeur of a faraway rock ‘n’ roll past. Molten guitar lines and corrosive vocals drip onto a spacious foundation of thumping bass and Blackie’s thundering drums. But with 1991’s Supersonic Storybook, which was coproduced with Albini, the band found an original texture. Mentored early on by Big Black founder, producer-engineer extraordinaire, and underground theorist Steve Albini, the group in its first albums laid out nervous, doctrinaire expositions of the rough Chicago sound. What they’ve done, so far in their career, is slowly extricate themselves from the harsh constraints of the Chicago scene that spawned them. ![]() The album is fully intended as Urge’s national breakout. It was like the ten-millionth time you’d heard it. We were driving one day and ‘Satisfaction’ came on. It’s when you overload the tape and everything blends into all the other sounds.” Blackie: “Or media saturation. The title, which may change, refers to a lot of things. Saturation is due out at the end of June. Urge exude a taut cool as they wind up the final mixing for their fourth album and major-label debut. Where we live now, in Humboldt Park, I’m sorry, but you don’t hear guys in pajamas playing Marshalls.” So many of the ‘hip’ bands are unlistenable. “Most ‘hip’ bands can’t listen to us,” says Blackie, who drums like he’s pouring gasoline over a hostage. And they’re passionate about getting out of the indie-underground rock treadmill, where a twisted kind of hipness is all. Beatle-like, they often wear matching suits–or other variety of attractive and handsome Urge wear (see photo). They talk in an almost sincere commercial patois: “This is the hardest-rockin’ Urge album ever!” avers Roeser. They see themselves as an old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll band aiming for stardom the old-fashioned way. (formerly Blackie Onassis)–bridle at such talk. The band–a guitarist who calls himself Nash (formerly National) Kato, a bassist named Eddie “King” Roeser, and an unrelievedly brutal drummer named Blackie O. Urge Overkill, I think, are the Reservoir Dogs of rock: a snazzily dressed bunch of pop-culture sadists. Look at their look: a snicker of an homage to Rat Pacl sartorial splendor, glamorous and cruel. And on the epic slurs of raging rock on songs like “Vacation in Tokyo,” “(Now That’s) the Barclords,” or “Goodbye to Guyville,” I hear the baleful offspring of the worn, decayed creators of “Midnight Rambler,” “Gimme Shelter,” and Sticky Fingers. When, on “Bionic Revolution,” they wail “Free the children!” over a dated funkified beat, I hear a scathing refutation of 60s pieties. When they croon Nell Diamond’s “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon,” I hear murder in the mix. ![]() When I listen to Urge Overkill, this is what I hear: A caustic landscape of scarred but somehow noble guitar sounds harsh, raspy vocals and a deeply sardonic view of rock ‘n’ roll.
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