When it comes to raw and scorching ’90s garage punk, few bands did it better than Teengenerate. Featuring singing guitarists Fink and Fifi, bassist Sammy, and drummer Suck (later replaced by Shoe), the Tokyo-based band swiped their name from a Dictators song and specialized in the snotty and surly, a la prime Dead Boys. No Teengenerate release better encapsulates the band’s strengths than the just-released Live at the Empty Bottle, a wild and wailing 16-song set captured on November 5, 1995, mastered by Tim Warren of Crypt Records fame and pressed onto vinyl by HoZac Records of Chicago. The album is an absolute necessity for garage punk mavens.
HoZac platters up the occasional record by a contemporary band, like the freshly issued and very appealing Hangin on a String by Laundry Bats (a trio comprised of Memphis garage punk royalty), but the label has been increasingly devoted to retrospective releases under the heading HoZac Archival, alongside an ever-growing shelf of books where music is the common subject matter.
HoZac Archival’s steady, sturdy, historically focused output largely mines the proto and pre-hardcore punk eras for revelatory material. Although there is a high standard of quality, the objective doesn’t seem to be the curation of flawless masterworks but rather documenting a spectrum of subterranean punk-aligned activity, often from the days before the movement even had a name.
There are releases of a more recent vintage in HoZac Archival’s discography, and many of those are from the 1990s, which makes total sense, as the decade was a certifiable hotbed of garage punk action. Nothing illustrates the garage punk dominance of the ’90s better than Live at the Empty Bottle, which presents Teengenerate in total command of their joyous viciousness.
While the 1980s saw the flourishing of retro garage acts with a common interest in the range of styles rounded up by Lenny Kaye for the Nuggets series, the subsequent garage punks were far more inclined toward uncut 1970s punk for inspiration, although the Back from the Grave compilations on Crypt did represent ’60s garage at its most punkish, and can be considered the baseline for non-psych, non-folk, non-pop garage action.
Getting to the meat of the matter, it’s the Killed by Death series of unauthorized comps gathering exquisitely unkempt bursts of late ’70s-early ’80s punk that really paved the road to immortality for Teengenerate and scads of other like-minded bands. Live at the Empty Bottle captures something most of those Killed by Death bands never managed to do, which was to blast out a potent live set culled from a handful of studio LPs.
Teengenerate filter in a few covers nabbed from the rather vast Killed by Death scene. There’s “I Don’t Care” by Belgium’s The Kids, “Six and Change” by Cleveland’s The Pagans, “Savage” by Australia’s Fun Things, and “Kicked Out of the Webelos” by Portsmouth, New Hampshire’s The Queers. And it’s interesting to note that three out of four of these bands managed to record at least one non-comp LP each (Fun Things is the exception, no shade).
What’s cool is that Teengenerate’s original songs are up to snuff next to the covers. The assembled crowd at the club is losing its collective noggin as the band gets down to business, and it’s amazing to soak up the whole set as it unwinds.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
