This was a band that could, and regularly did, put on a hell of a show. Didn’t matter that you were in The Saint or the Brighton at 10PM on some Wednesday or other in 2003 — Lord Sterling were about to rip a hole in the cosmos. The band were based in Long Branch and had a connection to Monster Magnet through bassist Jim Baglino, who also held down low end for the Garden State heavy forerunners at the time, but were their own thing through and through. Frontman Robert Ryan, shouting and madcap in “This Time it’s for Real” or “Tough Times for the Troubadours” but mellow and Floydian in the repetitions of “Thread Will Be Torn” from the band’s third and final LP, 2004’s Today’s Song for Tomorrow, defined no small part of their onstage persona, but guitarist Mike Schweigert (also Moog), Baglino (also also Moog) and drummer Jason Silverio explored psychedelic textures and classic blowout heavy rock in a way that was prescient of a generation of spacey stylizations and managed to do so from a foundation of influence in hardcore and post-hardcore. So it’s been over 20 years and I still don’t know where the organ in “Password” or the ultra-Hawkwindian push of “Hidden Flame” — which feels prescient of Ecstatic Vision to such a degree that I’d advocate the Philly band covering the song because (1:) it’s good and (2:) they could make it their own without it being too obvious — come from, but I do know that Lord Sterling delivered range without pretense, were not afraid of scope, and never harnessed that to the sacrifice of raw energy.

Lord Sterling had two records before Today’s Song for Tomorrow, which rivals Nebula in its out-the-airlock spacey vibe and caps with an of-its-era take on Pink Floyd‘s “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,” which feels at half a solar system’s remove from the barroom rock of “Poison Lips” or the punk it seems to lead toward in the second half of “Evaporate” and “Tough Times for the Troubadours” before the title-track is over everything in a way that feels very Sonic Youth but that could just be the East Coast talking. Along the way, whether it’s the Stooges garage sway into the noisy finish of “Poison Lips” or “Hidden Flame” with Ryan‘s sitar setting the central rhythm, the punking-up of Monster Magnet that coincides with the title line being shouted into the cacophony, the pointedly mellow twist that “Thread Will Be Torn” offers — if we’re talking prescience and “Hidden Flame” anticipates Ecstatic Vision, I would cite “Thread Will Be Torn” as a heads up on Tau and the Drones of Praise for some of its cross-source worldly spirit and the fuzzy drift that winds through its subdued flow, but if you want to say the band called it on neo-psych becoming a thing more generally, I wouldn’t argue — they answer impulses toward structure and freakout in kind. Additional drumming by Keith Ackerman (The Atomic Bitchwax, ex-Solace) and Hammond, piano and strings from Shane M. Green helped flesh out arrangements that already demonstrated the flexibility to withstand them.

I guess maybe Lord Sterling were subject to the perils of being a band somewhat between different styles. New York at the time had a pretty clear divide between who was playing hipster classic garage indie and who wasn’t. Lord Sterling — certainly in either of their first two records, 1997’s Your Ghost Will Walk or the more arc-defining 2002 follow-up, Weapon of Truth, which came out on the Tee Pee-adjacent Rubric Records, run (I believe) by at least some of the crew behind Manhattan’s the Knitting Factory when that was a thing — could veer between the brash and the aggressive, and they weren’t shy about either when they got there. I saw them a bunch during this period and won’t feign impartiality. But of Today’s Song for Tomorrow‘s tracks, cuts like “Pivotal Plane,” “This Time it’s for Real” and “Evaporate” stand out from remembering the band bringing them to life on stage. Since it’s been more than two decades, that feels notable, even if it has little to do with how someone listening for the first time will hear them.

If you are new to Lord Sterling though — if, say, you’re not from New Jersey, which is enough in itself to make you weird where I come from, which is New Jersey — as you take on Today’s Song for Tomorrow there are a couple things to keep in mind. One, this record came out 21 years ago. I’m not saying it’s sounds cutting edge, but if “Password” showed up as a single in my inbox I certainly wouldn’t call it dated. Two, no matter where they go, it’s punk-based. They’re ’90s hardcore kids. That’s true of the tantric psych mediation of “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,” and the grungey shrugoff in “Today’s Song for Tomorrow” itself, and the charged psychedelic rock wrought by “Hidden Flame.” Everywhere Lord Sterling go, they depart from the same place. That will help unite the songs in your mind, but Ryan‘s vocals — like a not-shitty Jim Morrison — play a role there too, wanting nothing for depth or expressive force in mood.

I don’t know what these guys are up to. Ryan, who I think had the nickname Bing (?), was tattooing. Like 15 years ago, I saw Schweigert in his more aggro next band, The Ominous Order of Filthy Mongrels, but I’m not sure if anything ever came of that or what, because life happens and so on. The good news is this record’s still out there. I know CDs of all three Lord Sterling full-lengths still exist, certainly the latter two, but in a time when turn-of-the-century heavy is getting another look, their take feels like it’s communing with a whole bunch of stuff that’s come out since while remaining firm in its own perspective. Maybe recent events have me feeling nostalgic for this era of NJ heavy. Brighton Bar, and such. That’s fine. You could do a lot worse than to listen to something because you like it.

Thanks for reading.

—

It snowed here last Sunday night. There was no school Monday, which was also the presidential inauguration, because of MLK Day. We went sledding with two other families from The Pecan’s first grade class, folks we know from school pickup and being around the school generally, blah blah. Normal suburban bourgeois shit. You get the picture.

We were there for maybe an hour and got some good sledding in before The Pecan took a borrowed sled face-first into a metal fencepole, opening a gash in her forehead wide enough that her skull could be seen by anyone who managed to bring themselves to look. I ran down the hill and picked her up — no loss of consciousness or responsiveness; we’ve done head trauma in the past, remember; you look immediately for these things — and her face was of course covered in blood because it’s a headwound. There were a bunch of families on the sledding hill behind the high school, and it turned out that included two moms who were RNs. Fucking women, man. Dudes are clueless. Do you know how wrecked society would be if men actually ran it? I mean, how wrecked it is anyway?

Anyhow, these moms were great and got my kid in a useful position and started to clean her up, ask her questions, tell me what to do, while we waited for the ambulance to come. The cop came first, obviously. Not like he was doing anything. Another dumb boy to get in the way of Competent Moms sorting shit out. Mom #2 had a roll of paper towels, for crying out loud. Officer Mehoff could never hope to compete with that.

The EMT worker in the back of the ambulance, it turned out, liked Zelda, so we chatted about Echoes of Wisdom on the way to the emergency room, which was good for keeping The Pecan (and me, in the interest of honesty), calm. Once we saw the cleaned up wound — featuring, again, her actual fucking skull — we knew the tenor of the day had changed. The Patient Mrs. showed up at the ER, having run home to grab clothes and such (my pants were still wet from sitting on the ground, kid was covered in blood, and so on) and we sat for about an hour and waited in the pediatric ER. A nurse had come through and stuck some gauze in the hole in her forehead, wrapped it up, and she watched Zelda fan-theory YouTube videos on my phone while we waited. The Patient Mrs. read on her iPad. I nodded off in the chair.

A couple rounds of talking to the doctor and like two earth hours later, we ended up driving east on Rt. 80 — The Patient Mrs. drove there, I drove home; a little unnerving being in the car with a major open wound on board — to the office of every plastic surgeon you’ve ever seen in a movie, who would finally close her up and send us on our way for ice cream, confident the dent in her face wasn’t permanent and that, indeed, all would be well by his next teetime, surely within 24 hours. Place was a riot, unless you thought of it as an example of the horrors that stem from mixing capital and medicine. But what fun is that? Or use?

To that end, it was almost fortunate that my seven-year-old daughter broke open her face early in the sunny afternoon, because it offered an excellent chance to not watch, or listen to, or read about, the inauguration. Something better to focus on? Much appreciated, even if the ‘something’ in question is a different kind of terrible.

But she’s doing well, is this Pecan. Both the ER doctor and the plastic surgeon assured The Patient Mrs. and I of her toughness, both saying “I don’t always say this, but…” and then I guess telling us she should go try out for Jackass: TNG or something. Yeah, she’s tough. I know. Try sharing a house.

I don’t know how much of a scar she’ll have. When I was six, I cut my leg open and, like her, it was deep enough to need stitches inside (for muscle) and outside (for the fleshy flesh). I have a six-inch scar on the inside of my right thigh that’s been there calling me stupid for basically my entire life. I’d prefer she have neither the scar nor the self-blame.

We’ve been gooping her head with Neosporin every couple hours, and she’s got antibiotics that are disgusting but that she’s taking anyway, because tough, and “limiting her activity” basically just means The Patient Mrs. and I get stressed out when she runs across the living room furniture, so apart from that — because usually we don’t care — it’s business as usual. She’ll heal up and we’ll be onto the next thing before you know it. What I wonder is whether she’ll remember this long-term. She doesn’t at this point remember falling down the basement stairs and cracking her skull in March 2021 — and fair enough, she was three — but that was a worse trauma than this. For everybody. It’s funny to think this might end up as some defining moment in her life and both her mother and I are like, “Meh, we’ve seen worse. Suck it up, stitchy!”

In any case, if there’s a parenting decision, really any kind of decision about any kind of thing, I’m sure I’m fucking it up. Turns out that the magic someday-I’ll-be-a-grown-up-with-my-shit-together day that I always dreamed was on the horizon is in fact a myth perpetuated to sell hair growth formula and pricey shirts. I’m 43 years old, and given my family history, lifestyle and demographics, there’s just about no feasible way my life isn’t more than halfway over. Some part of me is always going to be that same kid who sat on a glass fishbowl and sliced a hole in his leg big enough to stick your arm through.

My father, hateful and disdainful though he was, applied so much pressure on my bleeding-out leg that I had bruises for weeks after. The doctor said he saved my life, and I believe he did. We didn’t even like each other, ever, and he was for sure no paragon of having his shit together, but that was a thing he did for me. I could barely make it up the sledding hill with my kid without falling down. What a wreck.

And it’s sad, and I know it’s sad, but there’s also a certain kind of freedom in letting go of the expectation that it’s ever going to get better. That there will come a point at which it will all click and I’ll always know where my phone is, or I’ll finally be caught up on vacuuming, or I’ll get in shape in some kind of “once and for all” permanent way that doesn’t even exist in the first place.

I’m not that guy. I never could be. Maybe I’m a loser. Fine. I look around at who’s winning these days and I think maybe I’m better off not.

Thanks for reading and have a great and safe weekend. I’m back Monday with more and I’m in Vegas next week to cover Planet Desert Rock Weekend, which will be a hoot. Much appreciated if you keep up.

FRM.

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Time was limited. It was Monday morning and I was supposed to go to work after all, but as I was in New England anyway, a quick run to Armageddon Shop in Providence didn’t seem all that unreasonable. I’ve never come out of there feeling less than satisfied, and even back in December at the Boston store, I was able to pick up a few winners. Plus, Armageddon‘s been on my mind lately with their handling the repress of Elder‘s Spires Burn EP and the release of Magic Circle‘s self-titled, for which I have a review pending. All that, coupled with my general desire to crane my neck before a CD rack, made the stop a necessity. Turned out work was still there when I finally showed up anyway. Go figure.

On the wall of my office is a post-it with albums I’ve been meaning to pick up — mostly review stuff that labels won’t send out physical copies of anymore that I’ll grudgingly buy and devalue the effort I put into writing about them while also diminishing my appreciation for the record out of the pervasive annoyance. It’s a vicious cycle. Anyway, most of what’s on it I couldn’t remember, but it was fine. I managed to find enough and then some, as you can see in the stack above. The new Bedemon (track stream here) and Seremonia (track stream here) records were a must, and I hadn’t actually gotten a CD of the last Enslaved (review here), so I figured if I was going to give someone the cash for it, at least I could feel good about it going to Armageddon. The rest was gravy.

The first Hooded Menace full-length, Fulfill the Curse, Orodruin‘s Claw Tower and Other Tales of Terror and the repress of Life Beyond‘s Ancient Worlds were cool finds, but I was even more stoked on the 2003 Cream Abdul Babar/Kylesa split on At a Loss. I think they came by their progression honestly and I think Spiral Shadow (review here) bears that out, but it’s easy to forget how blisteringly heavy that band was at one point, all noise and fury and potential. With the unbridled weirdness of Cream Abdul Babar to complement, that split was a killer. The punkish War and Wine by the UK’s The Dukes of Nothing was something I had my eye on for a while, with Orange Goblin‘s Chris Turner on drums, bassist Doug Dalziel (ex-Iron Monkey) and Stuart O’Hara (ex-Acrimony, current Sigiriya) as one of two guitars, and more on the hardcore end, the self-titled collection from Hard to Swallow was a pleasant surprise, spanning the short tenure of the outfit that featured Jim Rushby (Iron Monkey) on guitar and Justin Greaves (Iron Monkey and even later of Crippled Black Phoenix) on drums and a host of others from that sphere ripping out primitive, violent bursts in rapid succession.

With 13 tracks in 27 minutes, there’s little room for screwing around, so Hard to Swallow get right to it, blending raw riffage with extreme punk fuckall. The compilation was released on Armageddon‘s own label, and though it’s more hardcore than what I’ll generally grab, it’s a solid, intense listen. A secret track incorporating Sabbath‘s “Under the Sun” into a grind medley made a decent, meaner answer to The Dukes of Nothing‘s album on Tortuga, and the metallic outing from Enslaved and Seremonia‘s distinctly Finnish weirdness. More local to home, I grabbed Halfway to Gone‘s split with Alabama Thunderpussy, which I already own but figured for six bucks I’d take a double, and the 1997 debut from underrated Jersey-based psychedelic rockers, Lord Sterling.

Your Ghost Will Walk was one of those albums I figured I’d probably never happen upon, perhaps even less so in Rhode Island. I haven’t been chasing it down for years and years or anything like that — a preliminary search can find copies out there — but neither was I going to pass up the chance to get a new one. The pressing is on Chainsaw Safety Records, may or may not be original, and for anyone who heard Lord Sterling‘s Weapon of Truth (2002, Rubric) or Today’s Song for Tomorrow (2004, Small Stone), the first one is a little more jagged, a little more post-hardcore, somewhat less psychedelic, though the ethereal garage via The Doors vibes of the later albums are definitely present in some nascent form. I always dug those guys, so it was cool to hear where they came from a little bit.

Because I can’t resist a CD on Man’s Ruin and because I’m forever a sucker for NYC noise, I impulse grabbed The Cuttroats 9‘s self-titled. The band had Chris Spencer and Dave Curran from Unsane in it, so I figured I couldn’t go wrong and I was right. It was a last-minute thing as I was looking through, but I’ve done way worse. All told, the haul was well-rounded and with a cup of coffee from the bakery down the street, I felt like the win was even more complete. About five hours later, I strolled into my office like I owned the place.