Time Capsule: Swirlies, Blonder Tongue Audio Baton
For every shoegaze, post-punk, or experimental rock enthusiast, there’s a pre-Swirlies world and a post-Swirlies world. 32 years later, the Boston band's debut album still feels like lightning caught in a bottle.
Stumbling upon Swirlies for the first time felt like striking gold. They’re a band that begs to be discovered by digging through the dollar bin of your favorite record store and stumbling upon a worn cassette, or overhearing some conversation deep in the bowels of a friend of a friend’s house party where the acts are paid in beer. I wish I could say that’s how I discovered Swirlies, but like everyone else these days, I’m a victim to my streaming algorithm, which miraculously fed me Blonder Tongue Audio Baton, Swirlies’ full-length debut album. For once, I’m a little grateful for the virtual Big Brother looking over my shoulder.
The band was formed in Boston in 1990, an American response to the British shoegaze scene fostered by Cocteau Twins, my bloody valentine, and Slowdive. Guitarists Seana Carmody and Damon Tutunjian were introduced by their mutual friend Rusty Nails, who wanted to start a Go-Go’s cover band—an effort that, tragically (for me, at least), never panned out. Eventually, they dropped the concept, enlisted Tutunjian’s high school friend, Andy Bernick, to play bass and MIT student Ben Drucker to drum, and became a band all their own. The group signed to punk label Taaang! in 1992 and, with the help of producer Rich Costey (Fiona Apple, Foo Fighters, Muse), put out Blonder Tongue Audio Baton the following year.
Call it an eye for aesthetics, call it a shallow judgment of a book by its cover—but, admittedly, the reason I initially clicked on the album was my fascination with its cover art. The image, created by the band’s frequent collaborator, Ron Rege Jr., is an esoteric collage compiled from what seems like a half-filled medical form, grainy photographs, and thick-drawn permanent marker. The use of collage is a conscious acknowledgement of the band’s tendency towards patchwork arrangements; most songs are strung together from extensive samples, bits of muffled dialogue, and whatever random equipment the band could get their hands on. Most notably, Swirlies wore down an audio graphic equalizer from Blonder Tongue Labs while tracking each song—hence the album’s name.
Blonder Tongue only produced that EQ for three years (1959-1961), making it still feel serendipitous that the band even got their hands on it to begin with. But it’s a good thing they did: the record’s vast array of frequencies results in a unique sound that is at once deeply roomy and woefully tinny. The tried-and-true shoegaze sound of “Jeremy Parker,” for instance, takes a meandering journey from its start as a coarse distortion vehicle. The song’s third act finds the lead guitar fading out and gasping for breath, with Carmody whispering, “one, two, three” in a hushed cue for the subsequent strums to follow her lead.
Swirlies seems to live in between the analog skew of ‘90s DIY and the impending electronic surge of the dawning digital age. They haven’t yet hit the online fame of their shoegaze counterparts a la my bloody valentine or Slowdive, but it feels like the youth might just be ready for Blonder Tongue Audio Baton. I have an ally in Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman to support this hypothesis, as she recently toldPitchfork that the album was her selection for the site’s Perfect 10 series. She noted that Swirlies is not a lyrics band; oftentimes, a given song’s distortion strips words of their consonants, making the lyrics feel more like a collection of sounds. It’s a common shoegaze phenomenon, with bands like Cocteau Twins even being known to make up words in their songs.
I agree with Hartzman on some level—Swirlies’ arrangements are the draw of their music, yes—but their lyrics are not to be scoffed at, either. They’re fresh and freaky and sometimes arcane, yet always deceptively great. “His Love Just Washed Away” houses some of the band’s most colorful storytelling. Tutunjian intones visceral lines like “The daughter’s head keeps spinning like a spiral shell” over a jangly guitar that rings like a cracked bell. The track is shaped like an upside-down parabola, rising in energy as the stakes heighten—“He found her body on the seashore”—then breaking like a wave on the sleepy outro. Carmody’s final refrain of “washed away” feels itself washed away into oblivion, as if she herself is the girl on the shore lamenting her fate.
The vocabulary of Swirlies is vast and evocative, populated with imagery and references. The track “Park the Car by the Side of the Road” takes its title from the Smiths’ “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore,” and while the tracks are sonically worlds away, Swirlies pull from The Smiths’ self-effacing oeuvre. Tutunjian bluntly sings, “Hey, it would be so good to die here with you” as if rephrasing the chorus of “There is a Light that Never Goes Out”—albeit with a darker spin, considering the lines “She’s got a gun in her drawer that’s meant for me.” Other lyrics are less overt in their allusions, instead housing a collection of erratic imagery. The whirlwind track “Vigilant Always,” begins with the line, “pneuma has left me,” referring to the ancient Greek term for breath, spirit, or soul. The song’s narrator is as troubled as its subject, a girl with “a noise in her heart / and it’s fucking her up.” I can’t help but feel Swirlies’ goal is to push you to that same place; the rapidity with which they change tempos, add and subtract noise, and linger in silence is enough to induce a kind of musical whiplash. Swirlies ride on the synergy between the percussion and guitar, both of which seem to operate completely on their own time. Each time I near the end of the song, which bounces back from a quiet period into a rowdy, intense jam, I feel delightfully fucked up, devoid of my own supply of pneuma.
Blonder Tongue Audio Baton truly feels like lightning caught in a bottle. For several reasons, the group never made another project like it—most notably, it was Carmody’s last full-length with the band before forming her own group, Syrup USA. While Swirlies surely took inspiration from the thrumming, distorted sounds of British shoegaze, I’m always amazed at how fresh they sound. Their take on the genre never feels sludgy or lethargic, but constantly alight with frenetic energy. That vitality comes from the buzzing excitement of discovery, from the band’s pleasure in twiddling with a Minimoog for the first time or toying with a Casio VL-5. Their enthusiasm is contagious—I can’t count the number of times I’ve played a song from Blonder Tongue in the car and seen a friend’s face light up with surprised interest. For every shoegaze, post-punk, or experimental rock enthusiast, there’s a pre-Swirlies world and a post-Swirlies world. I’m delighted to live in the latter.
