This is one of my favorite post-hardcore albums.
Regulator Watts - ‘Candy Bullet O’ from The Aesthetics of No-Drag (1997)
This is one of the times I regret not having a physical copy of this album, and thus no lyrics sheet*. It’s pretty impossible to work out what Alex Dunham is singing about, from sound alone, so all one is left with is the chorus-y part:
“said fuck her, said fuck her slow
nine to five at a standstill
seven minutes to go”
which isn’t necessarily all that much help. The fact that ‘candy bullet’ is the name of a vibrator makes it fairly clear what the ‘O’ refers to, but beyond that?
It’s far from the best song on the album (that probably has to go to the equally suggestively titled ‘Ballad of St. Tinnitus’, or the simply phenomenal closer ‘Witchduck’**) but it’s, well, pretty forceful - or as I described it before, “hynotic [and] penetrating” - and another example of the post-Hoover aesthetic Dunham pretty relentlessly churned out on this and the Mercury CD; before calming down a little and expanding on the more focused song-writing of Radio Flyer (though the fire definitely came back when he joined former Hoover bandmate Fred T. Erskine’s band Abilene for their second album, Two Guns, Twin Arrows). Great music to wrap yourself in and remember what it’s like to have screaming guitar and pulsing bass rhythms ricocheting around your mind.
*though I think at least a couple of my followers might have it?
**here’s Andrew writing about it, in a way that doesn’t make it sound masturbatory at all (j/k!):
“It’s due to Alex Dunham’s prowess at his instrument that things stay so interesting, and he continually twists and pulls at his guitar strings with his fingers, wringing squeals, screams, and tortured harmonics from it even as he keeps the main riff moving along constantly. It’s amazing to hear him unleashed in such raw, powerful form, especially considering that he’s Regulator Watts’s only guitarist. He didn’t do this much in Hoover, even with Joseph McRedmond’s rhythm guitar available to keep the song grounded. It’s almost as if being locked within the musical constraints that come with being the sole guitarist in a band have somehow freed him, given him license to reach limits on his own that he never tested when he was playing with someone else.”
