arc013: "CIAO, WE'VE BEEN CONSTANT MONGREL" (unfinished review, 2021)
+++a sample chapter from the BARELY HUMAN book out now___
This is unfinished review is printed in the just released BARELY HUMAN book. There are seventeen copies left of the individually numbered first edition (get it here before it’s gone!) A second edition will be coming soon, but a heads up for those who enjoy the artefacts. If anyone would like to distro these books outside of Australia, hit me up and I can send you a box when I get the new lot back (or if you’d like to print them I can send you the files!) I’m headed to Italy in October too and will bring copies with me so shout out if you’re in the region and need anything brought over via punk post… but back to the task at hand! This was a review/essay I tried to write first in 2018 when Living in Excellence was released, and again some time in 2021 when CONSTANT MONGREL announced the end of their activities. I could never figure out how to finish it, nor what I was really trying to say, but in the spirit of this ongoing project, please enjoy this retrospective review of one of my favourite bands, and excuse the stitches and seams.
Even in their less-than-ideal origins as a scuzzy two-piece in 2009, CONSTANT MONGREL have always been an interesting band; it’s just been hard to figure out how seriously they should be taken. At some point, their name (a play on obscure slang for a persistent partial erection) and earlier recordings (that paired minimal arrangements with heavy-handed joke lyrics) betrayed the band’s music as it grew increasingly complex. Developing through 2013’s Everything Goes Wrong and 2014’s Heavy Breathing LPs, CONSTANT MONGREL developed a sound deeper and more detailed: adding a bass player (Amy Hill) and later, backed with a saxophone. 2018’s Living in Excellence confuses interpretations further by beginning the record with a quick geopolitical analysis (“saw the television today / ISIS they say […] The right is on the rise / And my interest is too”), and ending with ‘Puffy,’ an earnest seeming song with the absurd fashion-conscious questioning of: “do you know what a puffy jacket is? / do you know what a pillow feels like?”
When a record like Living in Excellence is released I take strange pleasure in watching attempts to categorise it. I’m genuinely curious about how someone could define this record in the contemporary underground, with its unclear boundaries and blurred genre signifiers, all coming from this photocopy-of-a-photocopy type reach back to inspirations from at least half a century ago. In the accompanying blurb on their Northern Hemisphere label La Vida Es Un Mus (the record was released in Australia on Victorian label Anti-Fade), CONSTANT MONGREL were compared to both proto-punk acts like ELECTRIC EELS, and post-punk acts like WIRE. Which isn’t that interesting on it’s own, but something made me dwell on the distinction: how can you sound as much like proto-punk as you do post-punk, and yet nothing like the punk music that we knew then, nor knew today? And does that mean anything???
This isn’t CONSTANT MONGREL’s exclusive problem, but they are one of many bands in recent years who are running into issues regarding their categorisation. The problem with the vocabulary we have on board is that we seem doomed to reach back to disconnected historical ideas to define an ever-changing present. We try to isolate sounds using categories that described moments in time: in ‘proto-punk’ and ‘post-punk’, terms that describe a type of music that rippled a few years either side of the punk explosion of 1976-77. For CONSTANT MONGREL, coming out of a world that has re-appropriated the sounds of punk and hardcore history, it feels like their sounds have incidentally grabbed all these warring sonic elements, and delivered something that feels entirely fresh only in context with its surrounds (see also, arc008: “MINING MEMORY”).
Relatedly, it’s important to note that the band came packaged with a kind of bent post-modernist imagery designed by James Vinciguerra of TOTAL CONTROL: see the Living in Excellence cover, the band’s t-shirts (featuring such mantras as: 'heavy breathing' in reference to the locked groove that closes out their second LP of the same name; 'opening a cafe' as possible comment on their Melbourne contemporaries); or the 7” cover for The Law which featured an affected screenshot of a nasty forum comment about their friend, and RIP Society label head, that read: “Nic Warnock is a cunt”. All of this feels like an ode to anti-art, or an attempt to subvert the record cover, the band shirt, etc. But it’s not so easy for me to declare whether they’re subversive artists on some level, or if I’m just looking for meaning in irony-poisoned 21st century millennial punk aesthetics.
Added to the uncanny feeling that follows CONSTANT MONGREL's resistance of classification, is the fact that they also resist the weak attempts at the new categories that surround them. They have no sonic touchstones of the rejected / celebrated / accepted genre signifier of ‘dolewave’, even though their members have flirted with that world in other projects: Tom Ridgewell playing in WOOLLEN KITS and Amy Hill a part of SCHOOL OF RADIANT LIVING (both bands of which, if you want to be cheeky, could be considered proto-dolewave). Hill now plays in TERRY (post-dolewave???) and in her brief folk project THE BACKSTABBERS with DICK DIVER’s Rupe Edwards, coined herself the ‘Queen of Dolerave’. That the word itself is met with little more than an eye roll now betrays the fact that it was (for a time) the only new label I’d seen thrown around in the 2010’s. That is until the meme-derived advent of the egg-punk / chain-punk spectrum in 2018.
Like dolewave, the egg-punk to chain-punk spectrum was joke-derived, based upon a back-of-the-napkin diagram featuring contemporary North American punk and hardcore bands running from ‘chain’ (KROMOSOM, INMATES, OMEGAS) to ‘egg’ (CONEHEADS, LUMPY & THE DUMPERS, MYSTIC INANE), with special provision given to DAWN OF HUMANS as “the egg punk band for chain punks” and HOAX as “the chain punk band for egg punks.” Like all memes circulating a subculture, it was initially embraced, and a flurry of shit-posters re-created the meme with a spectrum of bands for their own cities. The characteristics of egg punk seemed to be agreed upon almost immediately: fun-loving, quick and quirky with a costume of colour and something bordering on art school pretensions (c.f. DEVO). Meanwhile, chain punk was of the studded leather jacket variety, all black costuming and short, precise, stylistically consistent aggressions (c.f. DISCHARGE). That the meme was then mocked and derided didn’t matter, because members of both worlds seemed to know exactly where they stood whether they rejected the descriptor or not. In came ideas like ‘egg-leaning chain punk,’ ‘chain-leaning egg punk’ and an expanded meme diagram with a secondary axis of good vs evil (good egg, bad egg), and more ridiculously, fried and scrambled; but this is distraction. Love it or hate it, this is the only attempt at re-categorising contemporary punk music that I've seen in many years, and it's annoyingly hard to ignore the fact that it actually works in practice (‘egg punk’, like ‘dolewave’, has since become a [MUSIC STREAMING SERVICE] playlist category).
Still unclassifiable, I’m not sure if CONSTANT MONGREL would find a stamp of approval as egg punks (even though they once wore a set of matching white shirts and blue sweaters tied in a knot around their shoulders to mock the act of playing the Sydney Opera House during an RIP Society showcase). Their art-leaning intentions and eternal sense of humour deny them chain privileges, even when they’re making the most ‘serious’ song on their most ‘serious’ record. Eternally without classification then, CONSTANT MONGREL’s final release was a 7” that seemed to be a stripped double B-side from the Living in Excellence sessions, with ‘Experts in Skin’ sounding somewhere between CRISIS, ZOUNDS or CONFLICT: of the chin-scratching UK anarcho-punk tradition more closely associated with the chain punks among us. Shortly after this 7”, in the early years of the pandemic, CONSTANT MONGREL announced their break up...more or less by reissuing their many t-shirt designs with “ciao, we've been CONSTANT MONGREL” printed on the sleeve.
+++other updates___
___this is a sample chapter from a new book called ‘BARELY HUMAN: DISPATCHES FROM AN UNDERGROUND MUSIC ANTI-HISTORY (2014-2024)’. The book collects all the writing from the BARELY HUMAN project including all zines (long and short form), podcast scripts, and some lost/deleted reviews, notes, blog posts, etc (including the above). hit me up at max@barelyhuman.info if you’d like to stock them or distro them in bulk, otherwise you can nab via the BH bandcamp.
___ciao.