Harry Pussy were just about the most abrasive band America has ever seen, and their final shift from something like noise to something like hardcore only made them scrappier. Over the course of their last few months together, the Florida-based trio blazed across the U.S. like a Molotov cocktail, playing the same 10 or so songs over and over and over. Their earlier records had mostly been unrepeatable experiments; this time, their repertoire had reproducible phenomena, and they proved it by cranking out recordings of it. There was an untitled studio record, sometimes simply called Fuck You; there were a handful of singles reprising the same material; there was Live at Salon Zwerge, Live Fuck Love Songs, and finally Live, a blistering document of their final show on May 5, 1997.
This 42-track compilation includes most of those records, which means a lot of the same titles recur. (There are five versions of "Smash the Mirror", for instance; the 18-minute Salon Zwerge is an extended take on "Mandolin", which appears in three other versions.) Perversely enough, that makes it more listenable rather than less. Hear a late-model Harry Pussy song once, and it sounds like a formless blurt-- a blast of noise that everyone somehow manages to stop playing at the same time. Hear it a few times, and you'll start to hear the joints and folds in it, and the way it falls into shape. Hear three or four or five different takes on it, and it usually turns out to be a through-composed structure.
The spurting heart of the band was singer/drummer Adris Hoyos, for whom "singer" and "drummer" aren't really adequate descriptions. Hoyos screeched so hard it's tough to imagine how she ever spoke afterwards, alternating between a roar of pure wronged loathing and a stabbing-victim squeal; her job on the drum kit wasn't to keep a beat, but to flail the living shit out of it until the song was over. Bill Orcutt and Dan Hosker, both hammering at detuned guitars, took their cues from Hoyos's voice-- it's a kick when they suddenly fall into a rhythm at the end of "Sex Problem", as Hoyos's free-form screams about loneliness and ambivalence resolve into a chant of "I like girls, trust me. I like girls, trust me. I like girls, trust me. I like girls, trust me. I like girls, but sex scares me." (It's regrettable that this reissue doesn't include lyrics; they're good, and they're not often intelligible.)
As a sort of conceptual grounding for Harry Pussy's idea of songwriting, there are a handful of apropos covers here: a half-strangled take on O.D.F.X.'s twenty-second ejaculation "Drop the A Bomb on Me", a reasonably faithful version of Teenage Jesus & the Jerks' "Orphans", a Neanderthal reduction of Kraftwerk's "Showroom Dummies". But the core of the album is their own final, distilled, impossibly corrosive songlets, and the bloodthirsty, rageful glee Hoyos brings to them. In the middle of their final show, Hoyos calls for "Chuck!", a song they'd played four minutes earlier. Orcutt and Hosker evidently give her a quizzical look. "CHUCK!", she announces again. And off they go.
