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| Zoloto Skooshny, whose name is Russian for "boring", started out in Los Angeles in the early '70s and played together for six years without performing live. There's no flash or pretension in anything they do. Their website and press releases are simple and down to earth. So here's what you know about Skooshny so far: they are boring and simple. However, "boring" and "simple" have nothing to do with their music. Zoloto, a nominal "best of" compilation of the group's wistful psych-pop, offers ample opportunities to dig into their rich, multilayered work. Opener "Even My Eyes" begins with swirls of layered instrumentation, formulating a vivid, surreal texture. Mark Breyer's vocals hint at despair, longing and unhappiness -- his natural tone shifts easily from smooth to gruff. "Even My Eyes" is the strongest track; Bruce Wagner's impressive guitar work rolls alongside David Winogrond's larger-than-life drumming and Breyer's silky vocals. "Beautiful Bruise", one of the album's four new tracks, is a stepladder of melody; it scatters up and down scales, complete with organ and guitar solos. The overlapping layers create an ethereal texture reminiscent of The Byrds' spacy psychedelia -- stirring stuff. Skooshny may have missed out on major attention -- it's easy when your name means "boring" -- but Zoloto could be their long-awaited breakthrough. After thirty-odd years, don't they deserve it? - Ryan Humm, Splendid Usually the kids plunking away on their guitars in their makeshift garage studio are about as good as their meager entourage (composed mainly of girlfriends) would suggest, and even worse when the same kids have grown to middle age while their aesthetic has ossified where they left it in the Pleistocene era, along with their hairlines. Skooshny's latest release looks for all the world to be one of those "just-for-the-fun-of-it" releases by the same garage-dwelling, middle-aged hacks with nothing better to do than take the ol' Rickenbacker for a spin around their suburban cul-de-sac. Formed in L.A. in 1971 and self-described as "boring" (supposedly this is "skooshny" translated from Russian), the band never took off for the simple reason that none of the band members had a car, and by the end of the decade they disbanded. Their languid, paisley pop tunes were re-discovered in the dank collectors' bins of psychedelia's English motherland by Bill Forsyth of Minus Zero Records, who reissued Skooshny's rare recordings in the early '90s. Having apparently decided to pick up their career where they left off, though still sans voiture, their newest album Zoloto (translation: "Gold") is a retrospective of their work plus four new songs ("Beautiful Bruise", "I See You Now", "Angel With a Devil's Heart", "You Paint My World"). With an album cover featuring a satiric title, posed band photo, and vaguely anachronistic Cold War overtones, the album screams bourgeois self-indulgence; but, what it whispers below the garish veneer is a brilliant cacophony of genre-defiant pop that broods over California traffic-induced white noise and utopian dreams of folk pop psychedelic transcendence. Slipping past the album's chintzy cardboard sleeve, the listener finds apt comparisons with the Byrds, post-hallucinogenic Monkees, modern sincere mock rockers Ween. and awkward shoe-gazers the world over. Most retrospective albums show some sort of aesthetic progress over time; rather Zoloto presents Skooshny's career as more or less one cohesive musical concept rooted in bright tongue-in-cheek pop in a rainbow of psychedelic colors from sunny yellow ballads to blue-tinged melancholy tunes and occasionally red hot rock. Yet, this is no nostalgic romp through a mawkish field of daisies and love beads. Skooshny is peering at us through the haze of smog that has since descended upon the ruins of Haight-Asbury. The song "Beautiful Bruise" recalls the pensive guitar strumming and jangly keyboards of hippie-era greats the Byrds, yet the melancholy deadpan vocals transform the colors of peace and love into the "big, bad, bright, beautiful bruise" that has since taken its place. Skooshny are particularly adept at moving through these kinds of juxtapositions, and slogging through the complexities of idealized imagery and monotonous, lumbering decay. One of the finer tracks on the album is "I See You Now", a haunting and poignant ballad that harnesses pulsing guitars and a gut wrenching chorus that churns with musical complexity, translating straight pop form into a mixture of meter changes and layers of contrasting timbres. On the incendiary track "It Hides More Than It Tells", Skooshny's glum shoe-gazing pose is transformed into a brooding tension that explodes into a tight garage rocker, whose youthful roughshod energy bleeds through raucous percussion and fuzz guitars in a gratifying flurry of pop rock brilliance. As the band explores this tension further on songs that range from "No Life Story" and its urban cowboy spaghetti western feel to mournful folk ballad "Dessert for Two", Skooshny stakes its territory on that squeamish tickly spot somewhere between the intuitive ever loving heart and the guilty gluttonous pleasures in the bowels of the human beast. Yet with all the layers of irony, the lyric double takes, and the bitter sweet harmonies, Skooshny never confesses their true intensions. Do they rock, or do they mock rock? At times their lyric opacity is a welcome vacation from contemporary prurient pop that loves to revel in lyric titillation, as lyrics like "Yellows and greens / My teeth through your jeans" dress their sensual reverie in tasteful undergarments. However, sometimes this opacity is simply unintelligible and mildly ridiculous, as on the chronically mediocre "Clickin' My Fingers", where one lyric quips "Sterno in a cup / Drink up" and the redundant "Chicken Little was right / The sky is falling". While at times the album seems to fall into a cycle of self-quotation that is made all the worse considering the album's span includes what Skooshny considers their retrospective best, more often their apparent honesty and insistent aversion to pretense make it nearly impossible to conclude they have anything but the best and most mind-boggling intensions. Like Ween after them, and now before them, Skooshny's music dwells in the twilight zone of popular culture between authenticity and parody that exasperates some and thrills others. Whether Skooshny's latest release is zoloto or merely skooshny, this is a band that is worth a listen. - Katie Zerwas, PopMatters Imagine - a Los Angeles band that has been a semi-ongoing concern since the mid-1970s obtains cult status in Europe, remains all but unsniffed Stateside and then releases a gigantic 20-track retrospective, replete with old, new and previously unreleased tracks. Well, my friends, meet Skooshny. Plying a sparkling brew of folk-tinged, twangy pop rock that conjures up the pristine conceits of The Kinks and The Byrds (albeit occasionally brushed with washes that include wild violins) while dancing on the edges of Pink Floyd, R.E.M., and even, dare it be said, Lords Of The New Church, this trio may have released three albums on a budget that make a shoestring look grand, but Skooshny certainly don't sound like it. While the band's earlier songs (late-1970s), "Crossing Double Lines," "It Hides More Than It Tells" and "Ceiling To The Lies," certainly sound more of their era than later efforts, their break between old and newer doesn't stand out. Newer songs such as "Even My Eyes" evoke a delightful alt-guitar fuzz, while others ("Clickin' My Fingers") fall somewhere between the two. Add the Michael Penn-produced "Dessert For Two" and "Masking The Moon," and the resulting Zoloto is a startling sonic array. Although Skooshny may well have been lost in the leviathan grind of contemporary music, they remain pure and untouched - an earnest sidestep into pop rock. - Amy Hanson, Goldmine |
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WATER
The story of Skooshny should be a familiar one to most of you.
The LA band put out two wonderful singles in the late 70's that
went unnoticed at the time. Bill Forsyth of Minus Zero picked up
on these gems and finally tracked down the band, only to find they
had an album's worth of recordings just gathering dust, including
some that featured none other than Michael Penn guesting on chamberlin
and backing vocals. Bill decided to release this material to much
critical acclaim and this spurred on the band to reform and start
recording new material. The result was Even My Eyes an album
even better than what had gone before. Water, Skooshny's third full-length offering, is yet another in
a long line of excellent discs from a bumper crop of indie pop albums
that were released in 2000. The power pop trio (augmented by studio
guest musicians) penned nine of the ten songs on the disc, with
the “borrowed” tune a terrific cover of Gene Clark's “For
Me Again” (from the Byrds' Preflyte album). The opening
song, “Flawed”, introduces the listener to the guitar-oriented,
layered pop songs that follow. “Sad Summer Spring” stands
out as a Byrds-inspired ballad and “Lullabye” has an echo
chamber/psych-pop sound that is reminiscent of Rich Hopkins &
The Luminaros' body of work. In fact, lead vocalist Mark Breyer's
voice sounds a little like Hopkins. “Desert Rain” could
pass for an Arthur Lee/Love ballad, and the fusion of 80's power
pop with 90's guitar crunch on “Kate's Green Phone” will
evoke pleasant memories of the Amboy Dukes. We may not hear from
Skooshny as often as we like, but when we do it merits a serious
listening. |
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| EVEN
MY EYES Co-produced by Beach Boys engineer Jeff Peters, this album contains
all four tracks from 1992's celebrated Holy Land EP. Californian trio Skooshny formed in the mid-1970s and recorded
two singles before disbanding in 1979, too late for psychedelic
guitar-pop's first wave and too soon for REM's 1980's revival. A
cache of unreleased material comprised 1991's eponymous Skooshny
compilation LP, and a smattering of rave reviews provoked a reunion
and the recording of Even My Eyes. |
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SKOOSHNY This brilliant 17 track compilation brings to an expectant public
the very best of the, until now, mostly unreleased output of this
Los Angeles based outfit built around the individual songwriting
talents of one Mark Breyer. The story of Skooshny is not one of
your standard rock & roll flash. Formed initially in 1971 by Breyer
and drummer Winogrond, they remained very much a bedroom band and
it wasn't until 1975, with the addition of guitarist Bruce Wagner,
that the band started recording in earnest but sporadic style in
various, low-budget studios. They never did get as far as playing
live, but they did release a four song EP and a single before splitting
in 1981 - ironically, just as the type of sixties-styled melodic
guitar music that they played started to come back into vogue. Skooshny
were in their time a fish out of water; five years before or five
years later they would have been acclaimed for their quality and
the depth of the music they created, a tiny legacy which wasn't
to be appreciated until the more appropriate musical climate of
the REM & Rain Parade-ish 1980s. Enter Bill Forsyth of rock record
emporium Minus Zero Records, who contacted the ex-members with a
view to obtaining any spare copies of the, by now, scarce vinyl
for resale to his more knowing customers. A small wealth of unreleased
material came to light and with it, the idea of this release, consisting
of the six previously available songs plus the remainder of their
recorded excursions into the studios of the late 70s. Proof, as
with our own Mr Frond and the maverick musical archivist R. Stevie
Moore, that a huge recording budget and multi-tracked digitalized
technology are not essential to producing music of depth and quality.
"Fever Dreams" is very melodically and methodically sixties
in feel, beautifully played and imaginatively recorded. "The Mood
In Me" resonates charm and is underpinned with a lovely harpsichord
sound - lacking the instrument and means of getting one, the band
played it on a 12-string and speeded up the results to achieve the
desired effect. Once again, the leanness of their budget forcing
them to experiment and apply intelligence to the venture. "Crossing
Double Lines" is coated in the fluid guitar playing of Bruce Wagner
and harmony vocals of a Left Banke-ish hue, while "You Bring Me
Magic" is the type of superb melody that the Bevis comes up with
when in his Byrds mode. "The Ceiling To The Lies" is a real classic,
quite overwhelming and yet understated at the same time with again
the 12-string foundation built on high by Wagner's tasty guitar
leads. Nearly all of the 17 tracks are of comparable quality. Let's
just hope that the response to this marvellous collection is as
it should be and, as mentioned in the sleeve notes, acts as a catalyst
to a Skooshny reformation and a new album. In the meantime an immediate
investigation into the treasure trove that Skooshny left behind
last time is highly recommended. This debut release from the collector's shop Minus Zero is suitably obscure - and enticing. Taped between 1975 and 1981, it documents the joint recording career of LA inhabitants Mark Breyer, Bruce Wagner and David Winogrond, who cut one single, one ep and a bunch of demos with the help of friends like singer-songwriter Michael Penn (brother of Sean). Skooshny (Russian for 'boring', so they say) was the successor to Brevity, Breyer and Winogrond's early seventies band, who auditioned for Frank Zappa's Bizarre concern and recorded "Cakewalk", included here amongst the later recordings. And the music? We were quoted REM and American sixties bands like the Byrds as comparisons: The REM similarity is immediately apparent, with Breyer's vocals on the opening cut (from 1977!) recalling Stipe's patented murmur. Otherwise, there's no obvious ancestor for this music, though it sounds ultra-American, in the best possible way - full of interesting melodies with unexpected sharp corners, vocals that range from the raw to the lushly harmonised, with sparky guitar riffs. This isn't power-pop, or folk-rock or new wave, or any simple categorisations like that: it's Skooshny music. Is it a classic? Well I haven't lived long enough with it to find out but it is certainly one of the most intriguing and enjoyable albums I've heard in a long while. - Record Collector |
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Here's what
some people said about their first two self-released records, way
back then... "...a tantalizing element of lyrical and musical mystery...fascinating
songs worthy of multiple playings...the song strength is remarkable..." "...does stand up to repeated listenings...reminiscent of
the folkies-turned rockers of the early SF and Bosstown scenes,
with a touch of Anglo shading as well." "...an incredible fusion of British mod and the rock end of
folk-rock...a follow-up is more than welcome." "...as if the Younger Than Yesterday Byrds met the Kinks Face
To Face..." "...a direction few others are going in at the moment (next
big thing?)...refreshing, make a point to hear this!" |
