“This might be the earliest we’ve ever played, and the most complete as far as songcraft goes,” quipped John Dwyer, frontman of Coachwhips, during one of the band’s reunion shows this March. “So you can really dig in on the nuances of each of these pieces of mastery.” Not that Dwyer needs to be self-deprecating about the music he released with Coachwhips between 2002 and 2005—it's embedded in the music itself—but something happened in the short months between Coachwhips’ 2002 debut album, Hands on the Controls, and their second album, that same year's Get Yer Body Next ta Mine. A band that seemed happy to take the piss out of their own garage-rock shamble suddenly found their swagger.
Hands on the Controls is almost tentatively titled—like a teenager taking the wheel of the family car for the first time—while Get Yer Body Next ta Mine practically screams in its self-assertion. Hands was reissued last year, and now Get Yer Body is following suit; while it still doesn’t fall anywhere near the psychedelic richness of Dwyer’s subsequent band Thee Oh Sees, it works more weirdness into the gloriously lopsided equation. Get Yer Body’s best song, “1000 Years”, is robotic to the point of motorik, a sack of pure slop poured into a glistening, shivering skin. The sci-fi vibe goes deeper on “UFO, Please Take Her Home”, a Frankenstein’s-monster-in-zero-gravity stomper that starts and stops in a frenzy of thwarted, paranoiac inertia.
John Harlow’s drumming is a study in applied stupidity, all busted sticks and busted knuckles, but Mary Ann McNamara’s keyboards truly push Dwyer’s primal sound into other dimensions. Schoolyard taunts are translated into single-fingered organ lines, and they’re always half a hair off the beat and off-pitched, imparting an air of bruised discordance to an already abusive batch of songs. “I Put It In, Way Down South” is Dwyer at his most Billy Childish-ish, employing his hero’s distinctively unhinged, riff-voice-riff-voice pattern like he’s toggling the light switch in a drunk tank full of troglodytes.
Strangely, it’s when Coachwhips eases up that Get Yer Body starts to really rock. “Yes, I’m Down” is the closest the record comes to approaching poignantly emotive fare, and while the song’s beat is frantic, its melody is stretched over a Suicide-like drone that evokes a hollow loneliness. The album’s title track is downright slow and ultimately clairvoyant, evidence that before Dwyer tired of rattling garage rock’s skeleton and began his quest for something more lush in Thee Oh Sees, he was already tinkering with creepy-crawly proto-psych.
The reissue of Get Yer Body has been remixed and remastered, and Dwyer has touted it as “loogie-shined,” but there isn't a vast sonic difference between the original release and this reissue. Mostly, the mud has been scraped off the edges and plopped back into the middle; there’s a heft and jolting clarity to all the fuzz, and the vague murkiness of the original recording has been replaced with a higher resolution. It doesn’t appreciably change the experience of hearing it, but it does signal the fact that Dwyer has started taking Coachwhips’ legacy a little more seriously. Garage rock once reveled in its own vaunted authenticity and organic messiness; everything needed to bleed, and many of the genre’s practitioners and fans still feel that way. But Get Yer Body was a big step toward demonstrating that garage didn’t need to be overly druggy and/or arty to be soulful and peculiar—and that, yes, there may even be room for nuance in these trashy pieces of mastery.
