FUR
For me, Sleater-Kinney has transcended all of these categories. Their songwriting is simply brilliant and as varied as anyone I can think of. What Sleater-Kinney can do with their guitars (and without a bass guitar in sight) is a revelation. Corin Tucker’s lead vocals aren’t everyone’s cup of tea (they tell me), but they suit me just fine, and those of Carrie Brownstein do as well. I have little doubt that I have played One Beat more than any other album that has been released in the current century; my second favorite among their albums (at the moment at least) is their first, Sleater-Kinney. Original drummer Lora MacFarlane performs the vocals on the truly marvelous “Lora’s Song” on that album that reminds me of past UARB Fur.
(January 2014)
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The above headline took my breath away when I first noticed it a few months ago on NBCNews.com: “This Oscar Winner Has the Most Supportive Wife Ever”. The wife in question is Holly Ramos, one of my Facebook friends as a result of this series of Under Appreciated Rock Band posts; and she was the bandleader in the UARB with the shortest name (Fur) coming at the end of the longest post (June 2013).
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I knew that Holly Ramos had worked in film as well as music in my research for the post on her punk rock band Fur more than five years ago. In silent testimony to her acumen in the acting field, Holly appears in four different photographs on the cover and in the booklet and also on the Fur CD itself. By looking closely, you can tell that it is Holly in all four pictures, but her look is startlingly different in each of them.
Holly Ramos was one of the actors in a 2001 independent film that was the debut feature by Ilya Chaiken called Margarita Happy Hour. The Fur song “Sex Drive” was featured in the soundtrack for this film. The movie was nominated for a Prism Award; from Wikipedia: “The Annual Prism Awards honor the creative community for accurate portrayals of substance abuse, addiction and mental health in entertainment programming.”
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Fur was a relatively early CD purchase by me many years before I described it in my Under Appreciated Rock Band post. As a matter of fact, in my mind Fur was always one of the example bands of the kind that I wanted to talk about in this series of posts: unknown or little known bands creating music that is not like anyone else’s. I would not be at all surprised if I had not owned this CD 12 or 15 years before I finally wrote about in June 2013; the release date on the CD is 1995.
I have expounded on this band extensively on the UARB post that is now shown in my website. Fur is a roughcut masterpiece that wears its seams proudly; and someone who knows a lot more about it than I do could probably tell when a particular button or slide was struck on the sound mixing board when the CD was being compiled.
It is as though Holly Ramos and the other bandmembers in Fur boiled down the essence of what a punk rock band is all about when they recorded their album. Most people who are not fans probably imagine that the punk rock milieu is a very narrow spectrum of music; when actually, punk rock covers the range of popular music amazingly well – for example, I have many albums in my collection that are in the “cowpunk” subgenre, that is, punk stylings applied to country music. As I said when I put up the post in 2013, the lyrics in the songs by Fur are conversational, like something that you might overhear at a bar. Fur did not even bother to rhyme the lyrics as best I remember. They just sang them the way they felt them.
I have probably played the Fur CD 50 times at least. I could probably play the CD another 50 times, and never even begin to tire of hearing it.
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But I have it now, and much as was true of the Fur CD, I fell in love with the album on its first spin. The above quote is a perfect description of Racehorse. The same conversational tone that is present on the Fur album is here as well, along with charming vocal flourishes that will be familiar to Fur fans. I have little doubt that I will rack up dozens of spins on this album as well – I’ve probably logged my first dozen plays already.
(Year 9 Review)
