Monkey Bar “Monkey Bar” 1990/2021. Rockhaus records, limited release of 200. Today, September 7th, is our friend, Monkey Bar’s bassist and former Rockhaus Guitars owner Greg Kurczewski’s 65th birthday (second from left on the LP’s cover). He’s back in Milwaukee from Washington DC (where’s lived for over 20 years at this point) this weekend and we got dinner Friday night and plan to head out to his family’s lake house this afternoon for the Labor Day holiday (photo is of Joe, Greg and me at Vanguard on Friday). The band was an alternative rock grungey garagey lofi band out of Milwaukee active from 1988-1993 with Greg on bass, Steve Wahlen (who was in a a zillion Milwaukee bands including Einstein’s Riceboys in the early 80’s, Figgy Figgy and Cherry Cake, both in the mid-to-late 80’s, and then too many more to list 80’s through the 2000’s) on vocals; Rusty Olson (Rockhaus owner after Greg moved, in Couch Flambeau, F/I and others) on drums; Tim Taylor (Buck Byron & The Little Seizures, Ghostly Trio) on guitar, and Bobby Friedman (owner of Sound Sound Studios) on keys and sax.

Monkey Bar’s first album was recorded in 1990 at Grunert Sound (from what Greg tells us this was Chris Grunert’s basement) onto a 4-track cassette in 1990 but wasn’t released until 30+ years later. They released just one more record, in 1997 (That’s It which is likely an after-the-fact comp however Couch Flambeau’s Jay Tiller is credited with drums on a couple of the tracks that appear on both the S/T and That’s It so not entirely sure of the timeline of multiple recording sessions). Some of the tracks that appear on both include “Kill Chevy,” the bluesy “Going Blind,” Existence” the hard jangle-rocker “Sick on the Porch” and a couple of others. (Sadly “Die Kreuzen” isn’t on Monkey Bar so I’m not sure if it’s a salutatory ode or a snide slap.) My top track is the slowish grungy ass-shaking rocker “I’ll Be There.” “Math Song” is fun, too, with an excellent bass groove. Some tracks are a bit hard to listen to like “Love Hate and Pain” which is really strained – think a tinny version of a painful grunge ballad. Same with “Petrol” which has the bones of an anthemic rocker (great beat, solid bass-line, respectable guitar solo) but falls short because of the tortured vocals. As Greg wrote in the note he attached to the album when he sent it a couple years ago “The vocals are cringe worthy at times, but here you go!”

Dusk “Glass Pastures” 2023. Don Giovanni Records. The Appleton, WI-based alt-country/honky tonk Americana band’s second full-length release. We’re heading up to our hometown of Appleton this weekend for a family thing (which will not involve seeing Dusk or really any honky tonk at all) so it felt like a good time to finally put this on for a spin. I’m pretty sure we bought it in  ’24 up in Green Bay when they performed at the GBUFO Festival, though we’ve seen them a whole slew of times over the past 10ish years, both in the Valley and down here in Milwaukee. (I know I have more photos but this one from 2022 at Cactus Club was the only one I could easily find).

While their style of music isn’t usually in my main wheelhouse I really do like Dusk. With six band members, each of whom are incredibly talented, their live sound is pretty huge, even when the individual songs can be sparse (on Glass Pastures the track “Organized Crime” is a good example of this). The opener of Glass Pastures “Pissing in a Wishing Well” is great – it wins for best title on the LP – and my top track is the rocking, excellently harmonized second song “Changes.” Their theme(?) song “Dusk” is a twang-swaying alt-country rocker and also great. “Don’t Let Them Tell You” has some psych elements mixed with country rock (the song’s intro has a Grateful Dead feel to it). I’m sure we will be seeing Dusk play out again very soon.

Pete Shelley “Telephone Operator” 1983. 12″ single on Genetic Records. Heavily electronic, 80’s new wave synthpop with just a whisper of punk attitude (that Buzzcocks snot). The track was a single from Shelley’s second solo LP XL1 and hit #66 on the UK singles chart. I’m not too familiar with the album but Wiki tells me the original pressing was “packaged with a computer program for the ZX Spectrum which displayed lyrics and graphics in time with the music The computer program was written in a mixture of BASIC and Assembly and is widely considered to be one of the first multimedia albums ever released.” While “Telephone Operator” – a hard driving, industrial-edged dance track – is clearly the feature/single of this 12″, it’s the non-single Devo-esque track (also on XL1) “Many a Time” — with its hook that almost exactly mirrors his controversial single “Homosapien” single from 1981 — that gets the most attention. Side One has the extended mix which, I believe, appears on the UK release (the US version has a shorter version) and Side Two has the Dub Mix of “Many a Time” which isn’t much different from the Extended Mix other than it’s even longer and has a harder-edged beat; I’m not sure it is included on any other releases.