MX-80
Hard Attack/Big Hits
Angel Corpus Christi
A good place to sample the various flavors of MX-80 is on Das Love Boat (Atavistic), which reissues a band-assembled compilation of instrumental tracks recorded between 1975 and 1990. This album is sequenced in reverse chronological order, devolving through several drummers and distinct strata of musical sophistication.
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Less concerned with the generation of good cheer is Bruce Anderson’s Brutality (Atavistic), which collects a variety of material issued on cassette throughout the late 80s. Brutality offers a shavetail version of MX-80’s sound. Stripped to the essential core of Anderson’s guitar (with occasional help from Sophiea), it’s riff thuggery overdubbed, distorted, and shoved right back into its own face. Anderson’s guitar is locked in deadly battle with itself on most of the cuts. Of course there are a couple of aberrations. “Oakland: Beauty” has a lyricism that veers close to Glenn Phillips’s postfusion dipsy-doodles, and “France” has a line tone that reminds me of contemporary work by Henry Kaiser, with whom Anderson was playing at the time. Indeed, throughout Brutality there are places where Anderson’s guitar intersects with things that Kaiser might play but hasn’t (to the best of my knowledge). Listened to as a whole, Brutality offers a somewhat limited, yet engagingly disturbed presentation of Anderson’s instrumental vision.
