Guerilla Toss

Boston's quintet Guerilla Toss (vocalist Kassie Carlson, aka Jane La Onda, who started singing in her family's four-part harmony gospel quartet, bassist Simon Hanes, keyboardist Ian Kovac, drummer Peter Negroponte and guitarist Arian Shafiee) concocted a blend of noise-rock and no-wave, with both punk and industrial overtones. The "songs" of the EP Jeffery Johnson (2012) are volcanic eruptions of hysterical screams, dissonant guitars, abominable rhythms and occasional synth mayhem. The EP is structured in the two three-song sides: Chronophobia/ Just Puss/ Shitty Gary (16:22) and CGB Spender/ Breeding Snakes/ For Variety (14:16) The six-song EP Guerilla Toss (Tzadik, 2013) contains the demented cabaret skit Cash Now, the delirious cacophony of Judy Wants Sex in the News (their first major song) and the spastic seven-minute industrial funk jam Diluted Fetus Circuit Tycoon. She screams like a scratching turntable in Scary Monster.

The split EP Kicked Back into the Crypt (2013) includes three of their songs, notably the bacchanal God Fearing Sex Symbol and the manic pounding of Drip Decay. Increasingly, this feels like a meeting of Old Time Relijun and Teenage Jesus & The Jerks.

They incorporated elements of funk and disco-music on the six-song mini-album Gay Disco (NNA Tapes, 2013). Trash Bed has the discordant quality of the no-wave while Gay Disco is tribal music for drunk dadaists and Pink Elephant has an extra-terrestrial quality as if Sun Ra with jammed Arto Lindsay.

They evolved via the EPs 367 Equalizer (Infinity Cat, 2014), with the surrealistic skit Cookie and the more or less anthemic 367 Equalizer, Smack The Brick (NNA Tapes, 2014), with the subhuman industrial dance Be The Breeder and the feverish hyper-polka Etqueeny, and the more musical Flood Dosed (DFA, 2015), with the prog-rock lied Realistic Rabbit, the fractured funk of Ritual In Light and the seven-minute psychedelic disco jam Polly's Crystal; eventually replacing the bassist and Kovac with keyboardist Sam Lisabeth.

The eight-song mini-album Eraser Stargazer (DFA, 2016) is another demonstration of their post-dancefloor acumen, from hip-hop (Multibeast TV) to syncopated dance-punk (Diamond Girls) to a peak of funk vertigoes in Perfume. At times they sound like a noisy version of the B52's, at times like a faster version of the Golden Palominos. Peter Negroponte is a force of nature.

The eight-song mini-album GT Ultra (2017) further normalized the sound, removing much of the cacophony, thereby revealing the obvious influence of the new wave of a generation earlier. Betty Dreams of Green Men sounds like the Talking Heads fronted by a punkette, and TV Do Tell is Devo with a funky rhythm section. Crystal Run dances between acid-rock and minimalist repetition (like Polyrock 37 years earlier). The songs are energetic but not hysterical. Carlson actually sings Can I Get the Real Stuff and actually shows crooning skills in the galopping Skull Pop. Dog in the Mirror is a frenzied Caribbean dance, but it never loses focus and never straddles into cacophony.

There are many more synthesizer flourishes and much louder bass lines on the nine-song album Twisted Crystal (DFA, 2018) where the band can be said to have migrated into the broader camp of prog-rock. Magic is Easy is Pink Floyd with Joe Satriani on guitar. On the other hand, the childish singalong Jesus Rabbit, the robotic Hacking Machine and especially the corrosive Meteorological evoke a punk music-hall of the 1980s. The catchy Come Up With Me has the synth sequence of Peter Schilling's Major Tom and a catchy refrain reminiscent of the French ye-ye girls of the 1960s. The last songs of the album are disposable, which proves that their best format was indeed the EP.

In fact, the five-song EP What Would The Odd Do? (2019) is a lot better. The hypnotic psychedelic psalm What Would the Odd Do? is one of their gems, but easily outdone by the colossal funk locomotive Plants, which also boasts an anthemic refrain. Another catchy hook shows up in the punk rigmarole Moth Like Me, while Land Where Money's Nightmare Lives is a slow synth-tribal jam.

Relocating to New York, they recorded a more conventional album of synth-pop, Famously Alive (SubPop, 2022), with way more sophisticated electronic arrangements. The exuberant psych-pop Cannibal Capital sounds artificial, and Wild Fantasy is only marginally more spontaneous. All the songs sound like they had been composed by algorithms. I Got Spirit (the standout) could have been at least a radio-friendly gem if it had a more effective progression to the undeniably catchy hook. Most of them are built around trite second-hand melodies. Carlson has become a (mediocre) ordinary singer. This should have been a four-song EP.

After leaving Guerilla Toss, multi-instrumentalist Ian Kovac released: You Know It When You Feel It (2014), Double Negative (2018) with the Channels (where he plays bass), Songs About the Sun (2020), on which he plays just about everything (acoustic guitar, bells, bass guitar, cello, coke bottle, cowbell, crotale, cymbals, djembe, double bass, drums, electric guitar, egg shaker, electric kalimba, gourd shaker, no-input electronics, samples, synthesizers, tambourine, tape loops, vocals, woodblock, electric piano), Bird News (2021), and the concept album There Was Such A Long Line Around The Theater When Star Wars Came To Town (2022), about Vasili Arkhipov, a Soviet submarine officer who disobeyed orders and saved humankind from nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.