Friday, November 05, 2004

Proto punk aquatic lifeforms

A band I've been curious about for at least ten years are the Electric Eels. They were an obscure early to mid 70's Cleveland proto punk band that were supposed to be unbeliveable. I first read about them in Jon Savage's excellent, England's Dreaming. I never found anything by them, nor did I ever make any huge effort to look.

Anyway, yesterday out of the blue, I decided to look online and found out there's an official Electric Eels site with photos, a history of the band, and even an album for sale. Suddenly they didn't seem so mysterious. They also have .mp3's of "Cyclotron" and "Aggitated". "Cyclotron" is glorious, genuine punk before there was such a thing. "Aggitated" sort of reminds me of a slowed down version of Black Flag's "Wasted" circa 1978. (Oddly, these two songs were released on a 45 in 1978, three years after the Eels had broken up.)

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