Of Quasi-Men and Vinyl

If you’ve ever listened to a lo-fi band or musician, it’s the lesser quality that adds to the music’s charm. There’s something endearing about feedback or fuzz, something that is lost when the music is smoothed out, de-loused and returned from the dry-cleaners.

However, CDs don’t suck.

Personally, I prefer digital music. I like CDs because they’re easier to bring home after a show. I also like mp3s that are encoded at a proper bitrate. I like having fifty available albums in my coat pocket. But I can see why people like Vinyl. I understand when someone says that a vinyl release “sounds better,” or “sounds warmer” than digital. The positives of vinyl that people extol are actually the medium’s flaws, how the warm sound is the inferior sound quality.

Records don’t suck. In fact, there’s something ceremonial to playing a record, to having a physical presence of music. It takes a greater amount of consciousness to play a record (not that much than throwing a CD into a player, granted.) The whole act of playing vinyl also anchors you, since turntables aren’t known for their mobility. It also is a communal process, unless you happen to have a pair of headphones. However, I can picture a room full of people listening to their own mp3 players in dead silence. I can’t see the same with individual record players, both for logistic and logical reasons.

I get how vinyl is more appropriate for Lo Fi artists. I also am glad that I have The Creeping Horror of The Quasi-Men cd because damn, is it a great collection of music.

The Quasi-Men came into my consciousness when I bought the two demos off of Max Reverb after a Crimson Ghosts show at 4th Street in Troy, New York. Both demos— ‘Cemetery Girl’ and ‘I Wanna Knock Up Elvira’ —make their way onto this album, both a debut album and a retrospective collection. The Quasi-Men are currently in a state of undeath, coming back to life when the planets and elements are aligned (i.e. when the three members are in the same place at the same time. Max has gone down to Florida to start up the band Gigi and the Cretins, another one you should check out.)

The Quasi-Men is horror punk at its finest. The Devil lives in suburbia and the Quasi-Men use his garage as practice space. Songs like “Message from Space,” “Possess Me” and “Werewolves Hate You” are the nitty-gritty of all things scary and spooky. This is reverb-surf-horror. This is groovy and gory.

 

If you can track down the every growingly rare supply of this CD, buy it.

1 comment

    • Arpa Gio on November 21, 2011 at 11:54 pm
    • Reply

    So glad to hear that you dug the cd. I am the bass player of The Quasi-Men… be prepared. More is on the way in the future, I am sure of it.

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