Long Fin Killie >> Friday night in a stolen car

Long Fin Killie - "Clinch"

(Too Pure Records, 1996)

I first read about Long Fin Killie in a spotlight article in Alternative Press in 1996 (the article used this exact photo), and later learned that I missed them at Lollapalooza '96.  (It was at the field outside of UNO's Lakefront Arena, not at Tad Gormley Stadium as this poster incorrectly says.  That poster also omits Rage Against The Machine, who played right before Soundgarden.)  My friend Clark was not keen on going, so he went with me under the condition that we would only see Soundgarden, and then leave.  We did leave, right before Metallica came on.  I was such an indie rebel, brah.  But too dumb to wander around and check out the side stage / second stage bands during the long amount of time we stood around waiting for Soundgarden (who kicked ass, by the way) to go on.  Long Fin Killie were an unorthodox group, to say the least, so you must read about them in AllMusic Guide's excellent bio.  The key phrase is "staggering levels of musicianly talent."  I personally recommend their second album, Valentino, with its haunting ambient-pop title track, plus more intense standouts "Cupid" and "Cop".  Mark E. Smith of The Fall did some grating guest vocals on "The Heads Of Dead Surfers" on their debut album, Houdini.  All three of their albums were named after people who garnered the public's fascination before dying young, and all their artwork was intricate wood etchings.  As for fame and dying young, the Killies got in a near-fatal wreck on tour, in N. Europe I believe, but never became even slightly well-known.  I bet the head of Lollapalooza's accounting division resigned when he found out these passive-aggressive art terrorists were being bused around the U.S. on his dime with nary a Beavis & Butt-head or Buzz Bin appearance to their name.

The fact that this song didn't make it onto Valentino is pretty infuriating to me.  The band's artsy, dense music is grounded by bouncy-yet-predatory basslines, and Luke Sutherland's vocals are usually mesmerizing, going from a whisper to a booming falsetto in half an instant.  To call LFK's drummer one of the best and most innovative ever would be pointing out the obvious.  The swaying, tropical-noir feel provided by the bassline has always intrigued me, and has made me return to this song again and again since I first downloaded this EP (Hands And Lips) on eMusic in '03.  The "Dope, sex, protest, rock n' roll" chant at the end of the song has to be one of the most subtly hilarious / postmodern things in the history of music.  When it comes down to it, most musicians' lyrical conceits can be summed up as either: a.) boasting about all the rad/illicit things they do, b.) whining about all the injustices in the world, or c.) reminding us how hard / capably / frequently they rock.  Sutherland simply reduces all these things to a simple jingoistic slogan, repeated as nonchalantly as though it were a child's schoolyard song, thus squashing the previous several decades of popular music into a little ball of putty in his hand.  This is a perfect example of why LFK were so far outside the mainstream, and equally far outside the alterna-stream.  Not surprisingly, their fanbase today is small but very devoted.

From a broader standpoint, while recently thinking back about the fact that my opinion of this song is always in flux, I've realized that one of the coolest things about this song is that it seems to fit and adapt to my mood, or my mood can bend it (the song) in different ways.  You can pay attention only to the pretty vocals and the snappy beat in the verses and it sounds like a breezy jangle-pop song.  Or you can focus on the savage drums in the instrumental breaks and let the bass overwhelm you and it's a post-punk song.  Someone with so-called classical training may follow the violin as the main instrument and hence view the song as a chamber-pop piece.  To use more intangible terms, it can be either a blurry / pastel / 2-D kind of song, or an edgy / primary color / 3-D one.  Sometimes this song just goes in one ear and out the other in a pleasant way, and sometimes I focus intently on it, obsessing over all the dozens of little details.

Fun Packaging Fact: The CD apparently came with a green plastic tray, as seen in this pic of a still-sealed copy:

I've amassed lots of different colored CD trays over the years, from gold (Primus' Brown Album), silver (Sonichrome's Breathe The Daylight), seafoam green (some CD by Pure), glittery gray (Eve's Plum's Envy), neon green (Alice In Chains' Alice In Chains), purple (Alice In Chains' Alice In Chains) (alt. color scheme), white, red, neon pink (Bagman's Wrap), yellow, orange (REM's Monster, bane of all clearance bins nationwide), taupe, etc.  But I had never seen a green one until this one.
Sutherland gained underground fame (incl. comparisons to Morrissey) for his cryptic lyrics, and he was no pretender, later becoming a minor literary sensation upon the publication of his books Jelly Roll, Sweetmeat, and Venus As A Boy.  The latter was later adapted for the stage, and its title rings a bell to me only as the title of one of Björk's best songs, but I'm sure it has some deeper meaning.  A multi-instrumentalist virtuoso (violin, guitar, mandolin, bouzouki, saxophone, hammer dulcimer, thumb piano) in LFK, he also played some violin on Mogwai's downer LP Come On Die Young.  Definitely a genius of some sort.  Read an informative little article on him here – "So I started reading everything I could lay my hands on: fiction, history, mythology. You name it, I devoured it in an attempt to create a wider context for myself. And all the rigid constructs of race, nationality, sexuality just fell apart."

Press photo from mid or late '90s; Luke Sutherland is second from right

Since LFK broke up in the late '90s, Sutherland has helmed Bows and Music A.M., which are more trip-hop / downtempo / "glitch-pop" type projects.  Fun German Fact: Music A.M. included bassist Stefan Schnieder of To Rococo Rot and Kreidler.

My cousin Shane is studying killifishes and cocahoe minnows in grad school at Mississippi State University right now, so this song goes out to him by default.  The tropical killifishes kept by aquarists are often mind-blowingly gorgeous, so one can understand why Long Fin Killie chose its name.  Here are some drawings I made ca. age 13, when I had recently gotten my first saltwater aquarium:

Blue Ring Angelfish (Pomacanthus annularis)

Some species of Rainbow Wrasse (Thalassoma spp.). No idea which one b/c their colors morph dramatically from juveniles to adults

I've long disowned these as somewhat pathetic, since they're just factual representations of these two species of fishes, and the white backgrounds always made them look incomplete.  But I guess a tweenager can't be expected to do much more than simply try to be a Xerox machine, and there is a certain beauty in giving someone or some critter an accurate, detailed portrait.  I now find the white background kind of cool, since lots of films / music videos have used it to create a disorienting feel.  My grandmother Marcie made sure that I signed & dated them, though I didn't understand why at the time.  I went on to have at least one saltwater aquarium, & sometimes up to three, between 1989-2010, excluding the year right after Katrina.

Sorry for the long, graphics-intensive post, but the study and care of fishes was my main obsession for about half my life, and I planned to become an ichthyologist or marine biologist.  Even notched a 102 test average in ichthyology @ Loyola Univ. New Orleans, which trumped my ~96 test avg. in herpetology (reptile / amphibian biology).  I took both of those courses in '98, and the field trips for each were extremely fun, especially the trip to the Ozarks in Arkansas for ichthyology and the trip to the swamps around the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi for herpetology.  I still jaunt over to the latter site every few years to look around, but mainly for botanical lifeforms now.  Since I never even finished my last year of college, all the studying was for naught, but I think any sort of intensive learning of data makes one's brain better at gathering & manipulating info.  So in a weird way, my studying of scaly beasts made me better at remembering songs by obscure bands, and vice versa.  As I told Shane 2 weeks ago, "All I did in college was study and go to concerts."

It's a steal! How Columbia House made money giving away music - "On top of that, the clubs generally weren’t buying their records from labels and then selling them. Instead, the clubs would acquire the master tapes of records and press their own copies on the cheap. Moreover, remember those 'bonus' or 'free' records you got for signing up for the clubs? The clubs generally didn’t pay any royalties at all on those, which further slashed their costs."

2 great videos from The Onion:
New ad urges hipsters to go to Applebee's ironically
New Prius helps environment by killing its owner

Planets with similar climates: Simple Minds - "Sons And Fascination" (1981), The Dears - "We Can Have It" (2002), Lowercase - "Willing To Follow You Down" (1998), Bark Psychosis - "A Street Scene" (1993), Plexi - "Change" (1996), Cocteau Twins - "My Love Paramour" (1983).