Marnie – Songs Hurt Me (LP)
Label: Discos Transgenero
Released: RE 2019
Country: Europe
Genre: Experimental/Avantgarde/Ethereal
The otherworldly art rock on Marnie Weber’s Songs Hurt Me makes an apt addition to Discos Transgenero catalogue of strange sounds. As a Visual Arts student at UCLA during the early 1980s Marnie Weber was the prototype of an LA punk rocker. Sure enough in her final year she joined the band ‘Party Boys’ as a bassist, the band was short lived and soon split. Music remained an integral part of Marnie Weber’s artistic practice and in the summer of 1988 she found herself back in the studio to record an art rock album with producer Philip Drucker. Struggling to find a label in the US the record would wash up in Greece and be released on the obscure label Penguin Records, who had previously released Drucker’s band Savage Republic. Weber’s post-punk seminal solo LP is saturated with brooding vocals and industrial bass lines, at times it sounds like a spiritual sequel to Unknown Pleasures. Weber’s lyrics speak to a deep sense of isolation and dislocation, the title track which opens and closes the LP instantiates this idea; its sombre lyrics sung through a walkie-talkie from the other room. Songs Hurt Me remained in the shadows until its recent re-release on Discos Transgenero which sees Weber’s original tapes return meticulously remastered by Mark Wheaton of Catasonic Studios.
Favourite Track: The Passionate One