Poem Rocket >> Nothing is stopping me

Poem Rocket - "Small White Animal"

(PCP Entertainment, 1995)

Every great band has a song on which it eclipses its influences and creates an entirely new form of music, and for me this is that song for Poem Rocket.  The guitar feedback seems to levitate and take on a life of its own, like a cobra swaying to lull its prey to sleep.  A sinister, Ron Carter-esque bassline churns away underneath, and a robotic drum pattern forces the listener's mind into lock-step.  Michael Peters' lyrics are as confounding and dense as ever: "Thousands of incorporeal pieces / Fragments of the new form / So lucky you will never forget me."  It seems that he's singing about feeling insignificant in this big universe, and the cover art of the 7" (sort of a faceless take on Munch's The Scream) does nothing to dispel that.  The "small white animal" in question could be the moon, though, considering the line "I've seen the moon sink to the ocean."  Sandra Gardner's backing vocals add an element of disembodied coolness and mystery that most bands would kill for.  How has she not become a go-to vocalist for today's leading trip-hop bands?  There are no leading trip-hop bands today, but there could be, if only they would enlist Sand-Gar's services.

To see two short clips from the (apparently stunning) official music video, go here.  These clips should give us all impetus to pester the band to upload the full video (and the video for "Ka-boom") to its YouTube channel.  Even if this song is not your cup of tea, you have to take your hat off to the band for having the balls to actually release a song like this as a single, and to shoot such a cinematography-intensive video for it.  Though unthinkable to budding young noise rockers of today, back in the mid-'90s MTV would occasionally play videos by bands like this.  So I guess it was worth a shot for Poem Rocket to make several videos.

As for what I said about "an entirely new form of music," that might sound hyperbolic, and I thought about changing it until I stroked my chin and pondered the collision of space rock guitarscapes + industrial-style drumming + rubbery basslines + high-art lyrics + diametrically-opposed coed vocals.  This recipe is very different from the one used by most bands that could be classified as "noise rock."  If they had dumbed their sound down for the Neanderthal crowd, they could've easily become stars of the AmRep, Skin Graft, or Touch & Go stables, but instead they signed to PCP Entertainment, which was apparently a subsidiary of Matador Records that focused on NYC bands.  I'm not sure if PCP started off on its own and then was incorporated into Matador, or Matador created it out of thin air, but it had quite a varied roster.  Peters said he was a fan of The Church, which would explain his knack for cryptic lyrics.  The Church's Steve Kilbey is probably my favorite or 2nd-favorite lyricist ever, mainly because decoding his verbal webs is part of the fun.  The simple line "Nothing is stopping me" could be a high school football team's weight room motto, but if you look deeper into the phrase, it could also mean "The only thing that is stopping me is the concept of nothingness / insignificance."  Maybe I'm just reading too much into it and I should go back to rocking out on air feedback guitar while jumping up and down.  And that's the real beauty of a creation like this: Anyone, regardless of his or her care for, or knowledge of, specific types and subgenres of music, can just let his or her ass get rocked by a song like this.  It speaks in a primal, unspoken language, the one that impelled our amphibious ancestors to crawl out of the primordial ooze and head for higher land to build some sort of proto-life.  It has that visceral edge that the brain subconsciously craves in order to sharpen its fight-or-flight response.  Try getting that from a song by Guided By Voices, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Spoon, or any other Pitchfork favorites.  (My hatred of Pitchfork is deep and longstanding, as you might know by now.  That site has literally never printed a single thing about Poem Rocket, at least not since 1999.  Maybe they did sometime between 1996-98.)

This is such a great photo, and one of the few live pics of the Rockets that can be found on the web.  All I know is that it's from Brownie's in NYC, dated 1994:

I've been wanting a semi-hollowbody guitar like that, since they are notorious for their tendency to create unwanted (or wanted) feedback, and having three pickups rather than one or two would obviously help with feedback creation too.  Then again, maybe he used a totally different guitar to record this song in the studio.  Plexi's Michael Barragan is the only other guitarist I know of who had such a consistently abstract, feedback-laced guitar sound, and he always used Gibsons with P-90 pickups.

Here are my two invaluable Poem Rocket t-shirts, bought as a lot on eBay in late 2003:

I have recently been able to determine that the design on the left shirt is by Michael Peters himself, an accomplished visual artist (as well as singer, songwriter, guitarist, experimental author, college literature professor, biographer, etc.).  See / buy more of his art, and watch him give a rather intimidating book reading, here.  I miraculously stumbled onto & bought his incredibly bizarre book Vaast Bin; n ephemerisi at a bookstore in Houma earlier this year.

The shirt on the right is based on the striking cover art of the band's Into The Aether (a.k.a. Blue Chevy Impala) 10" EP.  And their old website uses a similar design for site navigation.

Noth'd Rookery by Michael Peters

Sorry to scatter out so much stuff about Poem Rocket, but like I said, any bit of info that can be shared about them is important, since this was not a band that practiced much self-promotion.  Those types of "secretive" bands, including many of my all-time favorites (e.g. Unwound, Hovercraft, Bailter Space, Bare Minimum) are the ones for which I am proud to take up the promotional mantle, to help "pay it forward" to the next generation of music fans.

Planets with similar climates: Live Skull - "Fort Belvedere" (1986), Bare Minimum - "Night We Streak, Divine Failure" (1995) & "Swim In Anxious Moment" (1997), Bright Channel - "Final Stretch" & "Night Eyes" (2004), Helmet - "Sinatra" (1990).

Poem Rocket >> I don't want to be your satellite

Note: In order to declutter this site and keep it more focused on the specific musical artist at hand, I'll be posting most of my personal photos, musings, etc. on a conveniently-URL'ed Tumblr page from now on.  This is just one of the many services that is provided to the Blowtorch Baby reader.  Subscribers of course get free landscaping advice (USDA climate zones 8 & 9 only) and the ability to stop time for up to four days.

Poem Rocket - "Flaw"

(Bear Records, 1994)

If you've been paying attention to the little "Planets with similar climates" sections at the bottom of every post for the last two years, you've seen this band pop up constantly.  And the previous post probably tipped you off to what was coming next.  I think the reason I haven't gotten around to posting anything by a lot of my all-time favorite bands yet is that I get sort of paralyzed by what to do, since I often have to decide between several photos, maybe a promo poster, a live pic that I took long ago and have on some disc somewhere, a review from some zine that's being stored in a closet, a music video that got yanked from YouTube, a tour t-shirt, etc.  The problem is that I want so badly to do a band justice that I don't want to leave any pertinent info out.  This especially applies to a band like Poem Rocket, about whom information & photos are quite scarce.  Any tidbit of information that can be unearthed about them is important.  So if you know of any review or live gig listing or photo, etc., please post it online somewhere so that it doesn't become buried beneath the mists of time.  This song is a great representation of Poem Rocket's quieter side.  It's the b-side to their "Period (Punctuation Or The Interval Of Time Required For A Cyclic Motion)" 7", which came on orangey red vinyl pressed at the audiophile-friendly speed of 33 rpm.  Like most of the band's chameleonic early non-album tracks, it can be found on the great compilation CD Felix Culpa.

Maybe due to the opening lyric "I'm waking up," as well as the sluggish tempo, this song makes me think of an alligator or capybara emerging from hibernation.  The drumming changes dramatically over the course of the song, and for what it's worth, Poem Rocket had a ton of drummers.  The core of the band was always singer / guitarist Michael Peters and bassist / singer Sandra Gardner.  They got married in 2003.  I think my online zine Cold Comfort was actually responsible for "breaking" that news in 2003, when I did an email interview with Peters, but for some unknown reason, it didn't shake the indie rock world to its core.  I'll post excerpts from that interview soon.  Peters' slide guitar brings a bluesy, desolate, wounded feel to the song, in an era when slide guitar was probably the most uncool thing on the planet.  (Juned also used it that same year in their great song "So White.")

As you can tell by the band's name, the cover art of this 7", and the use of a satellite as a lyrical metaphor, this band was kind of obsessed with outer space, but not in an overt or obnoxious way.  I think they viewed it as a good prism through which to deal with the subtleties of human relationships, e.g. the (real or imagined) distance between two people, rather than in a simplistic "Hey, let's jump on a rocket and go to Mars" way.  People who actually know about space know just how stupid most of those ideas are, mainly due to the fact that most cosmic distances are measured in a little thing called the light year.

Some publication called Sound Views praised this single's "guitar-powered concoctions that slowly bloom into atmospheric/noise-rock":

This came in my Into The Aether 10" EP. Flower was a mighty fine Wipers-esque band that evolved into Versus, by the way.

L-R: Michael Peters, Sandra Gardner, Andy Nelson (I think), someone (probably Dennis Bass, a.k.a. Dennye)

I bought this 8x10" promo pic on eBay about 5 years ago, and, amazingly, it seems that it has never appeared anywhere on the internet.  Way to go, Poem Rocket's publicity team / person.  I even asked the (really nice) guy at PCP Records mailorder for one in 2003 to use in my interview, and he sheepishly told me they didn't have any.  If that is indeed drummer Andy Nelson, the pic must be from the mid to late '90s, since he was apparently in the band from 1993 to '98.  I know this because I created P.R.'s Wikipedia page and lots of people proceeded to add lots of details that I never knew about, such as exact years of tenure in the band.

Check out this hilarious review I found in the April / May 1995 issue of the California skatepunk zine Flipside:
"These guys could take up a whole side just with their guitarist's introduction and just as his guitar work was approaching a solo on the level of Led Zeppelin, in jumps the singer who has a rather annoying style of purposely changing the inflection in his [sic] voice in a manner which makes him [sic] sound very off-tune.  In jump the other instruments as the songs play on and this whole scenario appears so overly self-indulgent as to make one want to vomit.  They bring new meaning to the word 'obnoxious.'"  The review was by their usually-reliable scribe Michele, who must've mistaken them for some sort of classic rock-influenced grunge band angling for a major-label deal.  (Flipside was obsessed with trying to valiantly sniff out and expose those types of bands.  If you thought that review was harsh, you should read some of their Lollapalooza reviews.)

Song credits from the inside flap of the Felix Culpa Digipak:

Planets with similar climates: Live Skull - "Bootcamp" (1986), Bardo Pond - "Tantric Porno" (1996), Opal - "Supernova" (1987), Bleach - "Crimson 'O'" (1990), Warpaint - "Warpaint" (2010).

Currently drinking: Three intriguing dark beers - Brooklyn Brewery Black Chocolate Stout, Sierra Nevada Narwhal Imperial Stout, Fuller's London Porter.