Ruins
w/Nervewheel, Oxygen Thieves
Fri July 18, Chop Suey, 9 pm, $10 adv.
"I didn't imagine it," replies Tatsuya Yoshida, drummer-mastermind of Japanese bass-and-drums duo Ruins, when asked if he ever imagined his band would still be at it--nearly 20 years after forming in 1985. With typical brevity, he adds, "I just couldn't stop."
Yoshida is a man of few words, but many notes. He can toss off a song with 15 different riffs in 10 different time signatures, yet make it come out so catchy that certain parts spend days lodged in your brain. But he's not one to toot his own horn, so we leave that to other folks.
"Yoshida is one of the true originals," proclaims Mark Fischer, whose Skin Graft label released the early-Ruins best-of/rarities compilation 1986-1992 last year. "His influences are rooted more in progressive [rock] acts like Genesis, Gentle Giant, and Magma than punk or noise. Somehow he took those influences, came up with Ruins, and set a gold standard for what innovative hard rock can be."
Yoshida's innovation was to take the discordant harmonies and 12-sided rhythms of prog, subtract the flutes and fairies, and replace them with a speaker-rattling punk energy. Early Ruins albums like Stonehenge and Burning Stone contort prog, punk, metal, funk, and modern classical influences into jarring blasts of controlled, fuzz-bass-driven chaos, predating the current wave of spazzcore duos like Lightning Bolt, Hella, and Orthrelm by a decade.
Yet as unmistakable as Ruins are--especially when their love-'em-or-hate-'em operatic vocals and imaginary language lyrics are in full effect--their sound has rubbed off on a surprising range of acts and fans, from John Zorn's Naked City and Mike Patton's Fantômas to the Locust and the Flying Luttenbachers. As Fischer notes, "I think it's telling that you can play Ruins for a hardcore punk, a metalhead, a jazz enthusiast, and the most uptight of avant-garde listeners, and they'll all go, 'YES!'"
The question now is how much further Yoshida and his current bassist, Hisashi Sasaki, can take things with such a seemingly limited setup--especially since he already stretched it beyond the breaking point about 10 years ago. "I think I almost run out of ideas," he admits, "but I don't want [to] give up yet."
