Via
Dromedary Records
Its members went on to infiltrate more celebrated indie-rock noisemakers like Cell, Come, Live Skull, and Uzi, just to name a few. Briefly, however, their attention, not entirely undivided, was focused on Via, a nascent comet that blazed through the late-1980s Boston/New York City underground and was gone in a flash, with only two shows to their credit and a handful of dank and feral basement recordings under their belts, each tightened to the final notch.
Before abandoning the blustery and often cacophonous Via, guitar wranglers Thalia Zedek and Jerry di Rienzo, plus James Apt, Adam Gaynor, and tape loop provocateur Phil Milstein — all just getting their feet wet as musical subversives at this point — birthed the six songs on a shadowy, rough-and-tumble self-titled EP just now seeing the light of day. Establishing a clangorous love connection between The Stooges’ seedy, proto-punk fury and Concrete Blonde’s burning soul, the bruising Via could sweep across a breathtaking and trashy “1,000 MPH” like a ghostly conflagration or rumble through “Cell” — episodes of squealing, starry dissonance and toxic waltzing lying in wait — and a haunted, dark-hearted “JJ” with searing menace.
“How We Got This Way” is all crashing catharsis, as is the fierce and chaotic “Way You Say You Feel,” while a hard-hitting and relentlessly churning “The Other” keeps ramming its head against a wall, a squirrelly no-wave squall blowing in from whatever urban blight it was that spawned Sonic Youth. This is where Zedek and the rest come from, and Chris Brokaw, himself a bandmate of Zedek’s and an alternative-rock nomad, digs up Via’s past to pen the gripping release’s liner notes. They weren’t in it for the long haul, but they knew the way to “Death Valley ’69.”
