"brechtian punk" in boston: isolated incident? or ignorant observer...

My all time favorite record in this genre is Dagmar Kraus's Tank Battles

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagmar_Krause

And Agnes Bernelle's "Father's Lying Dead on the Ironing Board"

http://oook.info/xliberty/bernelle.html

The best recent practitionors are Tiger Lilies, who's site seems to be down now.

At any rate, these artists really get down the subversive humor a lot better. They don't get as hung up on the faux-Weinmar pose. They just treat the music as a starting point, not a retro affectation.

i think musically the main jumping off points are bowie and tom waits, though bands as disparate as the dolls, man man, devotcka, barbez and world inferno don't really sound all that much like one another. i'm not sure "goth" is really appropriate, though there's a tendency to assume that anyone wearing black with black eye makeup is somehow goth. maybe it would be better so say "bored art students", eh?

either way, there's a growing subculture of sorts that like to wear victorian dresses, paint their faces white, and sometimes blow fire and walk on stilts. there's the whole carnival/freakshow element in there as well. i think it's subsersive in it's own fun way - it's nice to see a cadre of bizarre looking individuals walking down the street amidst people with highlighted hair and polo shirts.

which has v. little to do with the stylistic "ooh, carnival!" stylistic quirks that seem to unite the larger "crowd" -- and more to do with a sort of attempt to reconcile the cult of the sad singer songwriter with the songwriter as WRITER tradition of, rilly, musical theatre more generally (and in which "brechtian" is just a sort of signifier of y'know more three-penny opera than of, say, mother courage or something)

i saw glasseye once though, yeah, and they were not very good.

they are being called a Vaudeville-Anarcho Punk band.
They say thay are "Post-Apocalypitic Theatre with a socio-Political Tongue" when people ask them what they sound like.
All holly sings about is politics, social politics and songs for a revolution...they remind me of...well if mary poppins grew up listening to CRASS.
i'm going to see them tonight. they're headlining at TT the Bear's place with the beat circus and Guignol.

You should check them out.
http://www.humanwine.org and i think their Myspace page is run by a fan in Italy but it's always up to date.
http://www.myspace.com/humanwine.

that's all.
-j

http://www.jilltracy.com/

One of those semi-random internet finds. Couple of CDs so far, never far from my player

Right, because the one club that attempted a minimal techno night (Klik) lasted all of six weeks...