Celebrating Greg Norton in advance of his 65th birthday tomorrow. —Ed.
Hard and fast rules so let’s dispense with the long instrumental intro and get right down to the nitty-gritty; on 1985’s New Day Rising, St. Paul, Minnesota power trio Hüsker Dü permanently set themselves apart from the hardcore pack by leavening the genre’s speed freak aesthetic with increasing dollops of real melody.
The results are still bracing, but New Day Rising is friendlier than most hardcore, and more welcoming too. Parts of it are even nice, nice in the way that the iconic album cover (two dogs, one beautiful body of water, a sunrise) is nice.
Most of the “nice” comes to us thanks to drummer/vocalist Grant Hart, who was the Jekyll to Bob Mould’s Hyde in what amounted to a schizophrenic division of band labor. Hart provided the melody, sweetness and light. Bob Mould provided the buzz saw guitar and angst; he may not have doing the fashionable by spitting bile at Reagan’s America, but his personal life sounded a hot mess. As for Greg Norton, he had a very cool mustache. And he played bass guitar.
New Day Rising is a sonic world away from Hüsker Dü’s 1982 debut Land Speed Record, a landmark in speedcore that more than lives up to its bragging title. But like their SST label mates the Minutemen and Meat Puppets, Hüsker Dü soon chafed against the formal constraints of hardcore.
Unlike said bands, however, Hüsker Dü didn’t abandon hardcore altogether. Instead they set themselves to the business of expanding hardcore’s horizons by employing catchy riffs and hooks, and the results are to be heard on such sweet (and bordering on silly) Hart-penned cuts as “Books About UFOs,” which features a piano of all things. Betcha Ian MacKaye didn’t see that one coming.
In short, on New Day Rising Hüsker Dü expanded the horizons of loud, hard, and fast, while still playing, well, loud, hard and fast. They added some nice melodies to the blitzkrieg tempos, and by so doing breathed new life into a once radical musical genre that was quickly codifying into yet another set of stultifying rules. Of course there were those who accused them of selling out.
But if this is the sound of selling out, I encourage everybody to do it. Besides, you certainly can’t apply the label to such mad Mould ravers as “Plans I Make” (all unintelligible bellowing and sonic shred), “59 Times the Pain” (sounds like a very unpleasant trip to the dentist’s office), or “How to Skin a Cat” (all whiplash tempo shifts, guitar mayhem, and deranged vocal spiel). And while the title track (a psychic battering ram of a tune that does without a hook) may not be your idea of hardcore–it somehow manages to sound almost transcendental–it’s nobody’s idea of selling out.
Nor does the sellout label apply to such Mould contributions as “Whatcha Drinkin’ (as pure a draught of old school hardcore as you’ll ever spill down your earlobes), the streamlined “Powerline,” “Plans I Make” (another tallboy of pure HC ear suds), and “I Apologize,” all of which practically scream turn it up. And let’s not forget standout track “Celebrated Summer,” on which Mould sets his guitar on savage and literally attacks the lyrics sheet.
Mould wrote the preponderance of the songs on New Day Rising, but it’s Hart’s contributions that will forever set it apart as something completely new and different. “Girl Who Lives on Heaven Hill” is a full-on sonic assault (chainsaw guitar, shouted vocals) mated to the most unlikely set of lyrics to ever grace a hardcore song. Imagine Fats Domino getting down with Black Flag. Now imagine Fats is on speed.
Meanwhile, “Terms of Psychic Warfare” belies its very menacing title and comes across as, well, a kind of swinging sixties Bob Dylan song. It’s inexplicably happy-making and has a lot of… er… San Francisco in it. And despite Mould’s murdering guitar “Books About UFOs” is a jaunty and very friendly salute to a nice girl who likes to say hi to everybody. Hart spreads good cheer, the piano invites you into the parlor, and the lyrics are a thousand miles away from the fuck you terrain mapped out by such bands as Black Flag and Fear.
New Day Rising marks the high-water mark of both Hüsker Dü and hardcore itself. And oddly enough, we have the tension between Mould’s angry powerline aesthetic and Hart’s sweeter and more pop-oriented tendencies to thank for it.
Call it a case of multiple personality disorder, and call it the first manifestation of the very real differences in outlook that would ultimately culminate in Hüsker Dü’s dissolution, but here’s what you can’t call it–just another example of a band following the rules of a genre that was invented to break rules. New Day Rising isn’t just a great album–it’s a refreshing example of a trio of guys playing hooky from punk rock school.
Fuck orthodoxy! Hardcore rules is an oxymoron!
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
