Bay Area gutter-dwelling slime rockers
Icky Boyfriends
were part of an unfathomably small subset of late-'80s and early-'90s independent music, invisible even to many hyper-obscurist music geeks. Playing traditionally structured songs but not even technically proficient on the level of punk,
the Icky Boyfriends
teetered on the edge of noise rock, sharing the same fascination with all things absurd, obscene, and crude as the band's more experimental contemporaries but presenting them with all the shambling excellence of a less wholesome, more strung-out
Half Japanese
. The group scraped by locally for over a decade, leaving behind a piecemeal discography and even a mystifying documentary film before quietly disbanding sometime in the early 2000s. Time and trends would catch up with
eventually, and by the end of 2010 their cult status had grown to include enthusiastic fans as world-renowned as
John Dwyer
, prolific songwriter of garage psych darlings
Thee Oh Sees
and label head at
Castle Face Records
. The band got back together, playing some of its first reunion shows in 2013, the recordings on
Live in San Francisco
coming from a gig that year at the Eagle. The decade spent dormant doesn't show even a little bit, with old songs like "Frank's Mom" and "I'm Not Fascinating" sounding every bit as depraved and feral as they did 20 years prior. Newer songs blur into the old, with vocalist
Jonathan Swift
's neurotic hollering no less strange and no more refined than they ever were. Instrumentation of ungovernable drumming from
Anthony Bedard
and bug-eyed guitar hysterics from
Shea Bond
sound explosive and empty at once, the band coagulating and falling apart intermittently throughout its tweaked-out, almost cartoonish songs of hard drug use, fighting the cops, and scenes of general madness. It's impossible to say if
were ahead of their time during their run in the '90s, or if the newly reunited 2010s version of the band was still ahead of some weird curve, but it really doesn't matter.
captures them in all their abrasive, ungodly, and sometimes unlistenable greatness, there for those who can dig it even when the rest of the world may never catch up. ~ Fred Thomas