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The Shangs
Sonny Bono Tear Down This Wall of Sound!
Judi Gee! - 2022
Michael Panontin
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"Playing with him you felt like you were in the coolest band in the world...He was truly underground."
That was how Edgar Breau described the early-seventies David Byers in Heavy Metalloid Music, Jesse Locke's indispensable bio of Simply Saucer. Byers was an early member of that band. He didn't last long, however, leaving the group before they recorded their jaw-dropping artifact, Cyborgs Revisited. But he certainly helped steer the Hamilton proto-punks in a more experimental direction, often bringing back some of the cooler records from their Buffalo shopping trips.
"I can remember coming back with a copy of Tago Mago," Byers recalled, not without a touch of hyperbole. "When we were getting ready to listen to it, I was so excited I fainted!"
Fast forward to 1989, when Byers formed the first version of the Shangs with brothers Ed and Pat O'Neil. "We originally wanted to do loud and strange instrumental music in a live setting - think the 'Sister Ray'-era Velvets," he recently told CM. "It quickly morphed into something else when we found our footing." That incarnation released two albums and a seven-inch before packing it in sometime in the late nineties.
The three reconnected in 2005, but by 2010 the O'Neil brothers had called it quits and Byers was left to go it alone. "I started to think about doing something as the Shangs again," he said, "writing new stuff and unearthing some undeveloped material - grooming, tweaking and expanding it with the help of the Simply Saucer crew." His first release as a sort of Shangs 2.0 was 2019's retro-psychedelic Golden Hits of the Shangs, Byers' homage to his early loves of girl groups, Lesley Gore and, especially, the otherworldly soft-psych of Nashville's Feminine Complex.
Sonny Bono Tear Down This Wall of Sound! is a very different animal, with those earlier tendencies giving way to harder-edged extended psych jams. By Byers' admission, it is "a concept album of sorts" that draws heavily from his own well-curated musical past, from German krautrock/kosmische musik to Dutch psych classics like Groep 1850's Agemo's Trip to Mother Earth and Supersister's Present from Nancy ("My mother was Dutch and her sister sent me albums from Holland") and even to the JA's After Bathing at Baxters ("the voracity, ferociousness and surrealism are unmatched").
The fun starts with 'Eleven (Eleven They Will Never Solve)', a near-perfect psychedelic tour de force that weaves grinding guitar licks and dreamlike vocals around a meandering bass line. That deft bass playing is courtesy of Simply Saucer's Kevin Christoff, but credit also goes to Byers for giving him the freedom to flesh things out in the studio. "Kevin's bass was treated as more of a lead instrument than a traditional bottom role, expanding it to an almost call and response position with the lyrics and their meanings."
'Eleven...' may be the obvious showcase track (for which there is indeed an excellent video). But if you dig a little deeper - and ignore some of Byers' singing, a weak point at times - you will find more percussive heavy tracks ('Silk & Ivory', 'Betrayal' ) that evoke the unhinged intensity of those early Godz recordings as well as some lighter, loungier fare that harkens back to Golden Hits.... And for those brave souls of a more industrial bent, a highlight will surely be the harrowing Broadcast/Zoviet France dronefest 'In Shadow of Stars (Part Two)', an extension of an earlier tribute to Japanese singer Kyu Sakamoto, who died tragically aboard Japan Airlines Flight 123 when it crashed into the side of a mountain in 1985. This one will curl the hairs on the back of your neck.
(At present, Sonny Bono Tear Down This Wall of Sound! is available on CD, though Byers has hopes for an amended vinyl version down the road. Stay tuned.)
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The Shangs
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