Ten tracks released on CD May 2024 by a NYC band of poets, a group that adapted its name from a poetry and performance show that ran a few years back, under the stewardship of poet and performance legend Brant Lyon (d 2012), itself named for Allen Ginsberg’s term Hydrogen Jukebox (the best minds of my generation… who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox – Howl, 1955).
Powerful alternating currents of nouveau-dada mayhem and soul-bearing introspective confessional lyricism that accomplish an uneasy balance and offer up a richly performative tapestry.
David Lawton, Aimee Herman and Eric Alter deliver the goods with raw underground stage energy and chaotic power. This assemblage takes full advantage of their individual poetic talents and willingness to lay it on the line, offering their fans a rough-cut diamond that sparkles all the more fully with repeated hearing.
Some fave tracks:
PIXIE DUST
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIvDvW4F99c
The album’s first track introduces the inherent playfulness and camaraderie of the group, an upbeat jug band/ukulele number delivered with biting melodic confidence by David Lawton. There’s a syncopated near-Calypso flare at work here, with Lawton hinting irresistibly at David Byrne and Jim Kweskin, devolving at the end into more than a few growls, quasi-yodels and gutturals to spice things up. A musically playful hippy-flophouse dada yawp.
Off-beat transmissions from a planetary object/High pitched squealing like a children’s show clown/Drove my car all along the parkway/Lost myself so I could be found
What’s that floating in the water? Every Chevy is a slave
Broke in the zoo to free the cages/Tracked pixie dust through monkey chow/Took three days to celebrate Cinco de Mayo/Told the choir rehearsal they were much too loud
They say men are apes
so if God made man
chances are the missing link
sits at his right hand
HESITANTLY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_v5md-mako
Utterly convincing emotionally introspective ballad with some fine written lines (it doesn’t matter what I wear today/nothing matches anyhow), vocalized by Aimee Herman in a manner that is just yearning enough without going emo.
I open the door hesitantly walk out/I’m not sure why it takes me all day/ the sirens the screaming throw me to the ground/I can’t inhale, there’s too much around
I am hesitantly in this, gathering courage to speak up
It doesn’t matter what I wear today/ nothing matches how I feel inside/there is a flood of inconsistencies in me/ I can’t seem to follow how you want me to be
KATHY ACKER
www.youtube.com/watch?v=uetiCVYCXB8
If he could hear this song from the netherworld, I’m betting Tuli Kupferberg would be applauding. As Fugs-ian as a song can get, this track – an over the top portrait/caricature of an icon of Lower East Side NYC underculture – plants Hydrogen Jukebox’ feet firmly on the pavement from which they have sprung. Playful, sardonic and piercing – this is pure playground singsong ribaldry, you can almost skip rope to it – the band depicts a transgressive, avante garde novelist whose name is now memorialized in the annual Acker Awards, intended for nonconformist and risk-taking achievement in the arts.
‘1 6 12 8’ Kathy Acker hopscotch genius/mouth of fire/have you seen this…
… Pornographic bloodstains schizophrenic/ oscillating query/ are you fainting yet?
. Shredding up her guts now essential demonology
Erudite pussy she wants to put her tongue in you.
Kathy Acker empirical feminist dripping revolution reactionary politic
Kathy Acker goes to Haiti spreads her legs like dic-tionaries
POLYESTER
www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl9yfmKvRHk
This deft portrait of a suburban father set in a mire of Thoreau-like ‘quiet desparation’ is a masterful composition, and pinnacle of the album. Musical substance, superior harmonization, and a seriousness of lyrical purpose that juxtaposes a hint of Breaking Bad menace with Eleanor Rigby-esque social critique, all delivered with a gestural tenderness that catapults the track to the highest levels of songsmanship. Not a shred of schtick or glibness to be had here, a truly memorable composition.
He was a gentleman and he was a gentle man/ suburban drummer in briefcase and tie/soft of body sweaty with beatitude
Blue gray polyester simple civil servant shuffling along funeral row
US postal worker mailroute walking punchline/ everybody be prepared to hit the ground if you hear a grinding sound, bolt action
This one a Vietnam vet more damaged by drugs than war
Steps up to my mother his eyes start to shine/ my mother giving awkward comfort/ as her tears roll in beads off his blue-gray polyester
HERE COMES THE RAIN AGAIN
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXAV0Tp9gwk
Move over Annie Lennox. Aimee Herman’s vocal treatment brings new emotional power to the familiar, played-to-death Eurythmics song, slowing things down and delivering the lyrics with a restrained contemplative tone that brings out their underlying plaintiveness. The originality of the Hydrogen Junkbox version is made that much more intimate through a powerfully delivered spoken word segment delivered by Herman:
Is it easier to pretend we are nothing more
than puddles we step over
As though our lips never morse coded
creating cures with our tongues
And now we’re simply hearts eroded
floating farther and farther away
Okay it’s a cover song, but the simple open-hearted delivery of the lyrics is winning, underscored with a musical authenticity which relies for its effect on a palpably indigenous resonance. Think Violeta Parra playing an Andean harp.
Here comes the rain again/raining in my head like a tragedy/tearing me apart like a new emotion
I want to breathe in the open wind/I want to kiss like lovers do/ I want to dive into your ocean
Is it raining with you
RADIO POET!QUE: A Spoken Word Radio Review 