08.04.12

No Humans Allowed

Posted in Rock 'n' Roll at 9:18 am by George Smith

Last night I broke out the original vinyl Chrome box set on Subterranean Records. Quite an original piece, a six album set issued by a band hardly anyone knew. With almost no distribution, it is now old and totally unique, forbidding looking as ever and in mint condition, fruit of doing a fanzine in ’82 at Lehigh University in Bethlehem.

We did a lot of neat things that year. In addition to science.

After three decades, between just No Humans Allowed, Blood on the Moon, Half Machine Lip Moves and Alien Soundtracks, Chrome’s box set still shows the band’s good idiosyncratic sci-fi take on what, underneath all the clatter and funny noises, is fairly conventional hard rock.

Much better recorded than given credit for, special effects and tape snippets were what threw people, making it seem … alien. The rhythm tracks are excellent. Even today most would not know it’s a drum machine on the majority unless told.

Remember, this was before the Linn drum and ubiquitous sampled drums on the pop hit records of the Eighties, so I’m thinking it was directly a response to someone being a fan of the obscure — Arthur Brown’s Kingdom Come and an old machine called the Bentley Rhythm Ace.

All analog, the vocals go through fuzzes, everything gets piped through something like an old Seamoon Funk Machine or flanged, and it’s mixed warm but sinister, a personal interpretation of American war technology and the space age — Insect Human/Slip It to the Android/A Cold Clammy Bombing/You’ve Been Duplicated — in the post Vietnam disillusionment. (Seamoon was in Berkeley and Chrome was basically two guys in San Francisco, so they could have easily had one.)

The Chrome title that got the most focus was Half Machine Lip Moves and it’s the most memorable, but Blood On the Moon and the others are all of a piece. And they never did it live although they sure sounded like they could.

For the Village Voice, more than a decade ago, I wrote:

I used to think of Chrome as a kind of stilted sci-fi concept combo that masqueraded as an arty hard rock band in the late ’70s, mostly to ill effect, on much lauded things like Half-Machine Lip Moves. At one point, I had even hypnotized myself into believing that Chrome’s inherent difficulty made them listenable. Moving to the West Coast made busted matchwood of that when I had to decide what to keep for the moving van and what to throw out.

“During the 1970s Chrome’s music did not fit into any particular music scene in America,” reads a Wikipedia entry, with unintentional dry hilarity. Ya think?

A couple years back I discovered that while my mother had thrown out all the original Chrome records I’d bought separately prior to getting the box as a review copy, I’d apparently stashed the latter away in a case that made it to Pasadena.

Little surprises! Now it sells for 150 bucks, cash money.

And I re-hypnotized myself into admiration for the material. Stilted? Sci-fi? Guilty. Hard rock. Definitely. Long re-listening when you’ve nothing to do will have that effect.

Some Chrome titles are available at Amazon.

The Chrome box is not the same. Some things, one guesses, still can’t be duplicated without more hard work than the age of digital theft will accommodate. That would be a good thing.

If you’re conventional and still curious, I’d say start with Third from the Sun. or Half Machine Lip Moves. Great title, that.

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