This
easily gets a place in my top-15 records from the 80s, and I was
surprised to find out that, although Antietam are still active, their
early recordings have never been reissued, not even posted in the
music-blogland.
Antietam came from Louisville, KY, where Tara Key
and Tim Harris were in Babylon Dance Band and Wolf Knapp in Your Food.
In 1984 the three of themrelocated to New Jersey and formed Antietam
with Mike Weinert on drums. Their first (self-titled) LP came out in
1985 on Homestead records, as well as Music Form Elba in 1986. Today
they live in NYC. In some reviews they have been described as
"Hoboken-sound" (i.e. like the Feelies or Yo La Tengo), but to my ears,
their first two LPs always sounded equally east and west coast. There
is something in Tara Key's guitar playing and voclas that leads me
straight to San Francisco acid. You can add to this the very tight and
inspired rhythm section of Wolf Knapp and Sean Mulhall (joined after
the first LP), and the enthusiastic playing of the quartet (and the
guest Dana Pentes on violin), and you have a band that certainly were
kicking at their shows (according to recent reviews Tara Key is still
playing as in her 20s at her performances).
Although Antietam
was from Louisville, KY, their second album really should have been
titled "Music from Hoboken." Music from Elba slots so perfectly into
the mid-'80s Hoboken scene of moody, guitar-based indie rock (think
Feelies and/or early Yo La Tengo) that it wasn't surprising in the
least that frontwoman Tara Key and bassist Tim Harris moved to the New
Jersey city later in the decade to reestablish Antietam. On this album,
however, Key and Harris share the compositional and vocal spotlight
with second bassist Wolf Knapp, which gives the album an odd but
productive tension; Knapp's tunes, like "Concord" and "War Is the
Health of the State," show a distinct influence from earlier bands like
the Gang of Four and Pylon; the rubbery interplay of the two basses and
the looser rhythms jar interestingly with Key and Harris' more intense
and guitar-oriented songs, like the powerful "In a Glass House," one of
the band's all-time high points. Other highlights include the
atypically poppy opener "San Diego" and a Harris-penned instrumental,
"Fontaine Ferry," that really betrays the Feelies influence. Music from
Elba still has its flaws, most notably Albert Garzon's substandard,
tinny production, but it's a tremendous improvement over the group's
lackluster self-titled debut. ~ Stewart Mason, All Music Guide
A
school was being born in Kentucky that would be influential throughout
the 1990s. Its early leaders were bands at the crossroads between
roots-rock and noise-rock, and Tara Key's Antietam were the most
typical in bridging those two styles, i.e. the South and Sonic Youth,
the rural and the urban sound, tradition and modernism. (Scaruffi)
ANTIETAM
brought its furiously intricate rock to Speakeasy on Wednesday night,
tearing into songs in which so much happens so fast that they threaten
to fly apart.
Tim Harris and Wolf Knapp play two independent
bass parts, which are kicked along by Steve Crowley's drumming and
collide or tangle with Tara Key's rapid-fire strumming or
psychedelic-tinged lead guitar. Songs stop and restart, shift key or
tempo, abruptly mutate; when guitar and basses shared one passage in
octaves, the sudden absence of counterpoint was startling. Antietam
also juggles three singers, with Ms. Key taking most of the melodies,
Mr. Harris on harmonies and countermelodies and Mr. Knapp delivering
deadpan near-spoken lyrics. Sometimes it sounds as if the band is
playing two or three songs crumpled together. But it's passion, not
complexity, that makes Antietam's music so impressive. The clinical
precision of old-fashioned progressive-rock bands (who often played
simpler music) isn't for Antietam; band members pick and strum and sing
as if caught in a whirlwind. The lyrics on Antietam's new album,
''Music From Elba,'' are about surviving while structures collapse; the
music builds new structures from fragments and clings to them with
desperate urgency. (By Jon Pareles - New York Times December 14, 1986)
You can find their Rope-A-Dope album from 1994 here
Thanks to douglas maxson for the corrections (Antietam actually formed in Hoboken) and the following information
"Something
that might be of interest is that the small Noise Pollution label in
Louisville has just released a monster CD of the early Louisville punk
scene which includes 3 previously unreleased studio tracks by the
Babylon Dance Band, 3 previously unreleased tracks by No Fun (Tara's
first band), as well as 3 tracks from Your Food's '83 LP "Poke It With
A Stick"...29 songs by 10 bands plus a 16 page booklet, all for 12
bucks. It's pretty fucking awesomo. You can get details/previews at Bold Beginnings.
If you're curious what this early Louisville scene looked like, there's a massive--and still growing--archive up at louisvillepunk.awardspace.com "
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