It was the summer of 1995, a balmy one if I recall, and I had boosted my parents’ Ford LTD Crown Vic to drive out to some random suburban VFW hall in Pittsburgh’s eastern suburbs. Hardcore shows weren’t much of a thing in these days, to say nothing of the ones where half of the bands on the flyer don’t show up. Not exactly the kind of place where you expect to get your mind ripped open, but I believe a strong element of surprise is what gets us through dead times. Besides, was there no deader time than the mid-‘90s, when the bloat of alt-rock malaise ran through radio speakers like a gallon of ice cream out in the sun? When we had become bored with guitars, but considered new wave unthinkable? Nary.
Back to the night in question. My friends’ band Davenport plays, and then the next band starts loading their gear onto the stage. I spot a Casio keyboard with no stand, full guitar and bass stacks (as opposed to Davenport’s more conservative half-stack amplification), and a mysterious wooden box with footswitches leading out of it. I’m pretty sure they were hauling their own PA as well. The Casio was plugged in and leaned against a wall. The vocalist flipped a switch and electronic drum beats flooded the air. He asked if the venue could turn off the overhead lights, and that the audience, about a dozen strong between us, takes a few steps closer to the band. Guitarist, bassist, and drummer were at the ready, a thick hum of feedback hovering over the synth in an incredibly tense prelude to something we weren’t prepared for. You know how a storm can roll in over the horizon and choke out the sun, and you can’t help but stare at the darkest cloud bank, knowing all hell could break loose from within?
Well, it did.
Lightning struck in that dark room as the singer hit the footswitch and drenched the band in a blinding battery of strobe lighting. Guitar lurched forward, bass pointed threateningly towards the drop ceiling, and drums shattered whatever calm was left in an eye-rending display of stop-motion chaos, low-slung and dangerous. The vocals sounded inhuman, as if someone was willfully forcing out his last breaths. Riffs collided into one another and dropped out altogether, lost inside drum fills and incessant ranting. Every 90 seconds, the noise would shift, the singer walking back to the Casio and kicking the keys, causing a new drum pattern to break out. This went on for about ten minutes, twelve tops, before the guitarist had broken five strings across three guitars, and had run out of the replacements needed to finish the set. Then the houselights flickered back on, the noise receded, and the singer said, “We’re The VSS, we’re new, we don’t have any records for sale, thanks for coming out.”
That singer was Sonny Kay (pictured at right) and that guitarist Josh Hughes, both formerly of Gravity Records hardcore band Angel Hair, who’d recently broken up. The VSS was their immediate offspring, so new that they were still peddling Angel Hair’s posthumous 12” EP, hot off the press. They were joined by bassist Andrew Rothbard and drummer Dave Clifford, and in the decade since this show had passed, you may have seen these guys in a number of other outfits–Kay both on the mic for Year Future, and behind the scenes for now-defunct label Gold Standard Laboratories (one-time home for the Locust, Gogogo Airheart, and Le Shok), and the rest of the band in the groups Slaves and Pleasure Forever (Clifford now plays as a member of Isis side project Red Sparowes). But the lava that flowed from the VSS’ open veins was that of a minor-scale revolution, one which shook complacent heads until they rung like church bells. Previous attempts at such spastication were led so far underground as to devolve into atonal wrecks (check out Antioch Arrow on YouTube to catch my drift), but the VSS made significant strides in not only organizing post-hardcore fervor with thickened rhythms and spidery guitar lines, but also locked down past and future ideas into an unstable present. Cordoning off staunchly Gothic overtones with an eye towards seductive and memorable performances, and injecting it with punk energy, theirs was a cataclysmic sound, and moreover, a uniter of scenes that didn’t really know each other existed. Imagine the Germs footage from The Decline of Western Civilization as performed by Christian Death circa Only Theatre of Pain, with a horde of vampires attacking the crowd mid-set, and you were getting close to what the VSS had to offer.
Having existed for only two brief years before splintering, their limited recorded output (a couple of seven-inch singles, and one album, the superb Nervous Circuits), the VSS opened more doors and influenced so many young, malleable minds that their due has been long in coming. They made it OK for bands like the Faint to drop the guitars and pick up the synths and the eyeliner, and paved the way for grandiose performance art a la Fischerspooner to embrace similar sounds. They also cleared out the stumbling blocks that kept hardcore and alternateens from discovering a new wave past written out of their histories. And in a sense, they helped to edge a rock audience closer to the dance floor, even if their music was too hectic to keep time. Moreover, they proved that such musical miscegenation could not only be pulled off, but could make abstract, non-linear sense to all who witnessed it.
If you weren’t lucky enough to be there at the right place and time, don’t sweat it; Hydra Head has just reissued Nervous Circuits in a deluxe edition, containing the album itself, a bonus disc of live sets, demos, and unreleased tracks, and a DVD containing four live sets of the band in action. Pick it up and witness an underground rock scene allowing itself to be torn from its moorings.
