The Herms

I'm not going to pretend I knew about the Herms when they were tearing it up in the Bay Area about a decade ago...I didn't. But John Dwyer from the Ohsees sure did, and now he's reissuing all their recordings on the retrospective Drop Out Volume 1...and it's amazing. Really. Sort of a cross between 39 Clocks and the Dirtbombs. I was listening to it a lot in Chicago, but I still don't have anything half as good to say about as Dwyer, who writes:

No one sounds like The Herms.

No one sounds like Matthew Lutz.

The Herms are a smudged window into a neighboring dimension to ours, Berkeley. Even though it’s right next door to Oakland and San Francisco, it may as well be a million musical-miles away. Back when they were playing around town, it felt to me like not too many in my scene “got” this band. I thought people should have been going crazy for these guys. The local rag gave them accolades (a curse perhaps?), and even a cursory listen to this collection should clue you in to how great they were. This may be one of the few times that I have to concur with a music writer – this band is amazing. They are sun, heartbreak, pop and fried-static all in one master package, evolving from song to song, and I think they’re fantastic.

The Herms did have a proper release years ago, but on CD only (gasp!) and frankly I’ve always been in love with these earlier, rawer 8 track Tascam demos. They sound like the band did when you were standing in front of them. I love The Herms and have been waiting a looooong time to do a proper release for them. Sorry it took exhuming their songs from the grave before I was ready. Please listen loudly with the windows open, so maybe that music writer may pass by, hear it and think, “Finally! I told you so, you assholes”.

John Dwyer 7-10-13

Fresh and Onlys interview

Part one of my epic survey of the SF garage rock scene ran yesterday, a piece on the Fresh & Onlys up at Blurt online. (It'll also be in print, though shorter.)

OUTTA THE GARAGE AND INTO THE FIRE Fresh & Onlys
Sep 11, 2012

Or, how the beloved San Fran band evolved and learned how to love the bomb.

BY JENNIFER KELLY

"We never really did identify as a garage band," says Tim Cohen, the singer and main songwriter behind San Francisco's shambolic Fresh & Onlys, a jangly, melody-obsessed outfit whose latest album Long Slow Dance (Mexican Summer) is anything but lo-fi.

The band's fourth full-length was recorded with TransAm's Phil Manley on a mixing board once used for Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London." It is noticeably cleaner sounding than anything the band has done to date. "Part of it is maturing as a band and asking, ‘How are we going to become the band that we want to be?' says Cohen. "We came together to say, let's not put limitations on ourselves. Let's not hide behind layers of reverb and distortion. Let's let the lyrics stand out for once."

"There was really no concerted effort to make a clean sounding record," he adds, "but we did get money to record. We had time to record. We were like, ‘Let's make this sound like an actual record sounds.'"

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