Cop Shoot Cop

Cop Shoot Cop were actually a supergroup, bringing together musicians from various legendary New York bands. Jack Natz (formerly of Undead) on bass and Tod Ashley (formerly of Shithaus with Jon Spencer and formerly of Dig Dat Hole), both on bass; Phil Puleo (formerly of Dig Dat Hole) on percussion; and Jim Coleman on samples first attracted critical attention for their guitar-less lineup and their crude Pussy Galore style attitude, but soon earned a reputation among punks for the most violent and vulgar shows of the era, with a particular penchant for themes of suicide and murder.

They debuted on record in 1989 with two EPs, the first under the name Headkick Facsimile (Supernatural Organization), with a trio lineup (Ashley, Puleo, and David Ouimet on sampling); the second, Piece Man (Vertical), painted with pig s blood (with the addition of Coleman and Natz).

Cop Shoot Cop's first album, Consumer Revolt (Circuit, 1990), again recorded with two bass players and no guitarist, is an album that broke with many of the conventions of popular music. The combo shows little or no motivation to play a regular song. Their mission is rather that of staging a terrifying kammerspiel of the post-industrial age, availing themselves of a virtually unlimited repertory of harsh sounds.
Ashley's recitation (rarely elevated to the status of "singing") has a "Brecht-ian" emphasis, besides lots of punk angst, and his lyrics are hyper-realist. The instruments paint backdrops that are expressionist horror soundtracks full of movement and contrast.
The opening track, Lo.Com.Denom, is the quintessence of their discordant style, Sonic Youth-ian guitars piercing whatever little harmony is attempted while all the instruments act as percussions and the singer unleashes his psychotic rant.
She's Like A Shot would remain one of their masterpieces. Ominous bass lines weave fear against a wall of guitar distortions and lugubrious organ drones. Sudden bursts of noisy, noir-tinged big-band swing a` la Foetus tear apart the melody. The praxis recalls British dark-punk and Big Black.
Several spoken-word tales highlight what is both their forte and their weakness: animating words with atmospheric sounds. Waiting For The Punchline relies on a dramatic crescendo and the depressed tone is worthy of Johnny Lydon of PIL's Flowers coupled with the Doors of The End. But after a while the voice because not only discordant but plainly redundant. The music could live on without the narrative. Burn Your Bridges is a drumming masterpiece by Phil Puleo (ex Dig Dat Hole): the dramatic tension is built by the evolving, organic rhythm, which is virtually dueling with the sampled noises, and the voice is simply floating in the current.
Short avantgarde pieces, such as Disconnected 666, that samples a telephone tone and a recorded message, or psychotic collages such as Smash Retro and Fire In The Hole, show that the voice can detract from the music, rather than add to it. The cubistic de-composition of these instrumental scores achieve a stunning psychological intensity, in a manner similar to a movie soundtrack. Eggs For Rib recycles skeletons of charleston, jump blues and polka in the usual bacchanal of dissonances. System Test is possibly the most daring of these tracks: stormy martial percussions, filtered voices a` la Residents and Helios Creed-ian guitar distortions compose a terrible industrial symphony, albeit (and alas) only two minutes long.
Disgusted and distressed, Ashley keeps barking like a mad dog from track to track, chased in the maze of his nightmare by an echo ever more tenuous of the sound of the industrial metropolis.
This album coined a new form of art, the industrial lied, by fusing lyrics laden with hatred, emphatic delivery, and a percussive soundtrack.
A band that proclaims "This ain't no place for ideals/ this is no time for change" could not be called "promising" but instead it was the future of rock and roll.

White Noise (Big Cat, 1991) is the album that established them at the forefront of noise-rock, but in reality Cop Shoot Cop were simply transitioning from the blasphemous cacophony of the first album toward a more musical style.
The second album even experiments with different styles: there is the convulsive funk-metal of Heads I Win Tails You Lose; the thriller-like litany of Traitor Martyr; the overwhelming industrial blues of Feel Good, a concentrate of abrasive sounds, a tense and depraved bacchanal.
There is the wild experimentation of Relief, bordering on musique concr te, complete with Edgar Var se-style sirens, put to best use in Empires Collapse, a post-psychedelic manipulation of samples (a priest reciting his rosary and a contralto choir gurgling like in a Greek drama), one of their peaks.
There are emphatic sermons la Nick Cave, but amplified with the harmonic detonations, nervous tics, and rhythmic storms of Big Black: Coldest Day Of The Year, dedicated to a suicide, set against a backdrop of nerve-racking distortion, percussive guitar chords, and apocalyptic drumming; and Chamaleon Man (another peak of their career), with the singer s barking pushing through Sonic Youth-like guitar modulations and horror-voice samples transformed into marching hordes, before exploding in a catastrophic riff and doubling in intensity. And it is no coincidence that the album opens with Discount Rebellion, which vents its polemical verve in a sermon bolstered by frantic atonal funk.
And finally there is the atmospheric Doors-like song, which flashes through the fatalistic, cadenced psychodrama of If Tomorrow Ever Comes and Hung Again, by far the quietest song on the album, a sort of People Are Strange played with the 50s spirit of the Stray Cats.
The strong rhythmic foundation and the skillful handling of samples (and dissonances in general) elevate Ashley s maniacal narratives. The method employed (and the means employed) is relatively simple, but the result would make Foetus jealous. At least three tracks (Coldest Day, Chamaleon Man and If Tomorrow Ever Comes) are anthology-worthy.

In the summer of 1992 that masterpiece was followed by the EP Suck City (Interscope, 1992), which presents more or less the same components (the funk-metal of Nowhere, the Revolting Cocks-style industrial music of We Shall Be Changed, the Cave-like ballad Days Will Pass) in a more accessible context.

Ask Questions Later (Interscope, 1993) is the album of a band that has learned to play. The group no longer limits itself to staging delirium through absurd sounds: it has also discovered melody and rhythm. The entire ensemble matures, from the singer to the (prodigious) drummer. The result is a work that combines avant-garde rigor with relative ease of listening.
Room 429 even unveils a proper melody, albeit disfigured by the gothic, fatalistic, despairing tone that permeates the entire record. The macabre, suspense-filled atmosphere recalls the Doors, as confirmed by Everybody Loves You, another incredible (for them) melody vented with the anger of an R&B shouter over staccato ska-style guitar. Cut To The Chase is even a Middle-Eastern litany accompanied by a grandiose mellotron.
Nowhere launches into a frantic, syncopated gallop, a kind of voodoobilly punctuated by electronic hisses, always conveying a Morrison-like sense of anguish ( living on the other side of hope ).
An emblematic piece of their apocalyptic, dark, thunderous, emphatic style, Surprise Surprise is a political tirade assembled by interlocking hip hop, funk, hardcore, tribalism, samples, and a grand dissonant finale. Keeping it company are the industrial, ramshackle, wildly percussive blues shaken by Big Black-like charges of Cause And Effect; the vibrant invective of Furnace, another galloping voodoobilly; and the nihilistic rant of Got No Soul, a spoken-word piece in Nick Cave s tone that probes abysses of alienation in a desolate landscape of noises and grotesque big-band-like fanfares.
Blues is the most vital component of the album, even if camouflaged behind Halloween-monster disguises. Tracks like $10 Bill, a spastic blues with a whistle-and-trumpet fanfare, as if Blind Lemon Jefferson were accompanied by a crazy jug band, are among the most important details of this mosaic-like fresco of their wasteland.
The lyrics are frightening, expressing even more fearfully the inner torment of these Nietzsches of rock, the sense of time passing and life continuing always the same squalid, with no escape. The anticipation of death looms incorruptible over this tragedy of slow mental decay. Anything but dissolute in fact, in its own way moralistic; not perverse, but tormented; granite-like yet throbbing it is an art closer to burial and embalming than to life.
With its highly irregular, rapid-fire rhythms, its jagged, spiny melodies, its strident counterpoints played as if each chord were the last chord possible, played to exhaustion, to the point of dismantling the very harmony just painstakingly built this album demonstrates how their cacophonous background can be harnessed in the service of song-form to mint a kind of post-industrial ballad, overflowing with extreme emotions and suicidal impulses.

Continuing down that road, Release (Interscope, 1994) arrives at a style rooted in tradition rather than revolution, but still unwilling to abandon its destabilization via industrial sounds. Thus the visceral blues-rock of It Only Hurts When I Breathe is scored by a minimalist piano figure; the funky-jazz fanfare of Last Legs (with David Ouimet on trombone) is pounded by a hammering rhythm; but only Ambulance Song, reviving a driving rhythm from the roaring years and sprinkling it with electronic touches, fully exploits the alienating power of contrast. More often (Slackjaw, One Of These Days) only the traditional base remains, so derivative of the classics as to be worthy of the Black Crowes. The Cop Shoot Cop of Interference have been accepted into the new ranks of mainstream music, alongside Spin Doctors and Stone Temple Pilots. The addition of a guitar (Steve McMillen), raw and scorching as fashion dictates, contributes to the normalization.

Out of the ashes of Cop Shoot Cop two bands would arise: Firewater (Ashley and assorted New York intellectuals) and the Red Expendables (Phil Puleo on drums, Jim Coleman on keyboards and sampling, Jack Natz on bass, and Michael K on guitar). Coleman, who already had several soundtracks and even an opera to his credit (presented in Austria in August 1998), then recorded Brooklyn Bank (CI, 1998) with Mauro Teho Teardo, credited to Here, and later launched the Phylr project with the instrumental album Contra La Puerta (Invisible, 1998), dominated by keyboards and inspired by ambient gothic and trip-hop.

Cop Shoot Cop s sonic encyclopedism, which includes practically every violent jargon in the history of rock, aims to supply the soundtrack of the ongoing technocratic holocaust. Unlike so many groups that try to mimic the cadences and anemia of the machine-man and to subliminally convey his psychological traumas, Cop Shoot Cop tackle the matter head-on: they shout revolutionary proclamations, indulge in gruesome reportage, and provoke traumas even greater than those they are supposed to heal. But their mission is not to heal: it is to make you sick.

Ashley is the Nick Cave of the situation: his sarcastic grunt, overflowing with anguish and psychosis, is one of the most representative voices of his generation.

Phylr's first album, Contra La Puerta (Invisible, 1998), is an exquisite essay of keyboard-driven industrial, ambient and gothic music in an avantgarde setting. Cop Shoot Cop's keyboardist Jim Coleman pens disquieting vignettes of wordless horror. The manifesto of his method is I Was Born, a composition that weds cocktail-lounge blues, bebop piano, industrial beats, drum & bass frenzy and macabre synthesizers, all in the space of four minutes.
An ethnic undercurrent surfaces in The Field. The slow, hypnotic breathing of a Tibetan mantra is pierced by a loud distortion and crushed by pounding percussion in what sounds like an exoteric ceremony. Chapter II is an more cryptic kind of ethnic trance, bordering on psychedelic shoegazing but with a bombastic coda.
Whether toying with minimalist patterns (Home), free-form noise (Intervention) or dissonant drones (Away), Coleman always displays a penchant for "developing" the music. No matter how simple the beginning, by the end of the track so much has happened that a complex pattern has taken shape.
The sense of drama that underlies all tracks is particularly strong in Distance, a piano tinkling tenuously in a storm of voodoo polyrhythm and gasty synth winds. On the other hand, Thistle is the "romantic" terminal of the album, with its mourning piano, cello and soprano.
The intensity and the grandeur of these instrumental tracks makes Phylr's music a closer relative of Foetus' industrial symphonies and of Swans' wasted soundscapes than of Lycia's baroque ballads.

Phylr's second album, Halflife (Invisible, 2000), is slightly more subdued. Trip-hop and drum & bass prevail over industrial and gothic. The arrangement has the feeling of a haze rather than of a landscape.