Electrical Storm - Ed Kuepper (1985)

When I was in college in the early 90s, I got into live tape trading. I’d hang out on email lists or bulletin boards (no web yet, you see) and people would post their lists of what bands and what shows they had for trade, in what sound quality, and the die-hards would list how many generations off of master their copy was (since a cassette was markedly lower quality the more often it had been copied and recopied). Then you could work a trade, and send copies of yours for copies of theirs (a few kind souls got people started in the scene by trading a shipment of blank cassettes and returning some of them with the requested shows). Nobody on this scene was interested in bypassing record shops, so there wasn’t usually much available that was just a copy of an album. But some people would fill the space at the end of their tapes with whatever they were into. That’s how I first heard Ed Kuepper and some tracks from this album.

Kuepper had been in The Saints, who made noisy and snotty Stooges-style garage punk with the best of their generation. After that he was in a post punk band called Laughing Clowns, which I’m dimly aware of but they definitely had a following.

These tracks were recorded as demos after that second band was done and Kuepper thought he might be done with the music biz entirely. They’re lean and honest and personal songs, played with his tightly wound guitar lines and his unpolished but urgent vocals.

Rather than going to the studio to re-record everything, he ended up overdubbing drums and a little piano on top of the original demos and releasing that still very raw product.

The result is not a sonic masterpiece, but it is an excellent little post punk pipe bomb. It borders on the idyllic and pretty in places, but also has plenty of the acerbic wit and guy-who-grew-up-in-a-punk-band chaotic energy that has always made the guy stand out of the crowd.

Tracks I Liked

Master Of Two Servants - The first Kuepper song that grabbed me and still my favorite of his.

When the Sweet Turns Sour - a bluesy shuffle that stays in its minor-key punk rock lane and steals a little melodically from the old Spider-Man cartoon theme song

Palace Of Sin - a jangly and hard-driving anthem that sounds a bit like he might have been infatuated with U2’s War album