Blow Up Blow’s equations for a falling body

PHOTO by BARRI YORK HOOVER

Blow Up Blow live together under humming power lines alongside a long bleak highway and next to a nursery behind a fence—little leaves poking under wire—and sometimes creepy people come walking silently along the top of their backyard wall, and if waking up to those kinds of horizons each morning doesn’t mess with their music, it’s only because they moved in with an amenable vibe already inside them.
“We were all already preoccupied with certain odd dark aspects of society anyway,” says bassist Dennis Owens, familiar also to many as the co-founder of soul-funk club Good Foot or from behind the counter at Fingerprints.

“And now we’re living the dream,” says guitarist END, sitting with the rest of the band in a backyard circle under the power lines at twilight.

Their first show in seven months was last week at the Prospector—drummer Bob Kurthy took some time to explore a side project called fatherhood—and once they got everything turned back on, Long Beach’s gravity increased massively. Owens and Kurthy are a rhythm section whose fossil footprints will be found in nuclear mud a million years from now—one unreleased song turns two notes into a boat about to roll over—and END and singer/guitarist Paul Zansler use particularly ruined rock guitar—riffs that could have been sold to girl groups, if they weren’t turned inside out—to reanimate the troglodytic caveband ethos of the unsung late ’60s. They’re a dark, loud and nervous band with that power line electricity somewhere as inspiration—“The average person who likes indie would look at us and think, ‘They’re harshing my mellow!’” says Owens.

Zansler says Owens turned him on to Can, and drummer Kurthy’s dedication to prog-rock is so noted that he’s been specifically profiled in other papers, but Owens easily details the band overlaps anyway: “Ramones, Devo, AC/DC, Motorhead, Turbonegro’s Apocalypse Dudes, James Brown, the Stooges, and ’60s garage rock,” he says, and certainly all those actual records rest ready for action not 20 feet away in the Blow house’s album bunker. (Currently rolling: African wedding-band music from the ’70s.)

A lot of that is rust-rock—not so clinical as “proto-punk,” and alive with a specific dread that hovers between Pere Ubu’s “vaporous dawn” (last phrase of their first liner notes) and Pere Ubu’s “formless void.” (Last phrase of their second liner notes, from the “Final Solution” 45 that lent Blow Up Blow a particularly ferocious cover.) Head down in the Blow Up Blow practice space, listening to stridently grimy live tapes recorded on Kurthy’s little digital unit, it’s easy to sense the menace. At the end of “It’s Time,” a seven-minute track nailed into Kurthy’s rigid drum pattern, the song heaves and surges and Zansler looks up: “This is like when the tanks come over the trenches.”

They’re funny guys, too—END always has something ready—but as Behemoth once said: “It’s just a joke, man!” (And as Zansler once sang: “I wanna laugh!”) But what’s Zansler’s most cheerful lyric? Well, everyone gets a laugh about that as he wonders: “Pick out the prettiest worm in the can?” he says. “What a can of worms. ‘Did Jesus let it happen? The devil ran wild / everybody got it / they put the fear back in style.’ Doesn’t that make you happy?”

They get to have the first song on the coming Fidotrust Long Beach compilation, and so their sound will introduce the city to the world: “Sunshine Part 1,” a tight and tense riff, locked into repetition until the song cracks and hiss and wind sweep in—not so much a kick in a soft spot as a chilly finger tapped on the top of the spine. Maybe not cheerful either, but still: It’s dark by the time we’re done with the interview, but they’re all around a lit little candle and laughing as I leave.

BLOW UP BLOW WITH THE WEST AND WINDY CITY GENTLEMEN THE PROSPECTOR | 2400 E SEVENTH ST | LONG BEACH 90804 | THURS 10PM | $5 | 21+ | MYSPACE.COM/THEPROSPECTORLONGBEACH

Tags: blow up blow, bob kurthy, comp, dennis ownens, end, fidotrust, Long Beach, Music