Written by: Dave Cantrell

1976. Ahh, that mythic year. Pistols exploding out of the desert (almost literally given the UK’s prolonged – to the point of being damned near apocalyptic – drought and subsequent heat wave that summer), the colonies across the pond ‘celebrating’ their 200th birthday even as they’re still dazed in the shadow of a shady, freshly disgraced president deposed two years previous like the fallen king he fancied himself to be, the citizens of the ‘Great Nation’ that, despite being now in the bungling, neutered hands of a VP that had the distinct honor of having served under the actual “vice” president, nonetheless insist on indulging in grand and inevitably vapid declarations of a country that is actually, as ever, trembling in disunited unity, addicted to its own vanity and arrogant sense of its own importance, its populace far more addicted to the avenue named after Madison than the words of the selfsame man whose spirit helped craft the document they’re meant to be celebrating, strutting about with foreign-made American flags like the suburban in-name-only patriots they were (and still are). Ahh, yes, what a time. A time for what, you might ask? Why, for revolution, of course, though not from the masses, far too lost and buried in that abiding wave of self-satisfied indifference but, who else, the youth, and, to be clear, only a relatively daring, particularly disaffected handful at that. Yes indeed, dear reader, we’re talking punk with a capital P-U-N-K exclamation point.

In retrospect almost endearingly naive in many respects, their cries for anarchy being far more based in reflexive frustration for what they felt (not unreasonably) was a vast and intolerable gulf between the rulers and the ruled – a perception, as mentioned, quite a bit more acute in the UK due their persistent and sentimental cling to queens and kings and all their trappings – than what their (as per Mark E. Smith) “circles with A in the middle” actually entailed, the punk movement was nonetheless enough to kick what had become the turgid ass of Styxified rock’n’roll sufficiently toward the curb to create space for all that came tumbling after it post-haste. It was, in short, a wonderful time to be young and freshly obsessed by music whether as a player or an avid fan or both (your correspondent turned 20 in January of that year, just for the, umm, record) and it’s at that crossroads we meet The Scenics, a scruffy eager and utterly earnest trio from the then-relatively exotic outpost of Toronto, Canada (a country where, just for comparison’s sake, the summer Olympics would open in Montreál in July which, along perhaps with the opening of the CN Tower in Toronto a month prior, would constitute that nation’s major events of 1976. So much more solid and civilized, our northern neighbours but, yes, I digress).

Poignantly, pertinently, our story begins the last week of high school in the early summer of that fêted year when the soon-to-graduate guitarist Andy Meyers tacked up a hand-lettered sign that read “Are you tired of being in bands that aren’t doing anything different? Do you want to hear something new?” and, as fate would have it, a 25-year-old bass player named Ken Badger responded and in a flash The Scenics were born and, as per the generative churn of the times, a mere four months later, with one Mike Cusheon behind the kit, they banged out the ten tracks – six by Badger, three from Andy, one by some guy named Tom Verlaine – that now make up this historic recording, a document rife with verve and a nascent, nervy proto-punk mastery. Essentially a live-cut ‘let’s see what we can do’ effort with eight of the nine originals never available in any form before, New Part In Town, released on LP by Supreme Echo Records and CD/digitally via Dream Tower Records in early June, bristles and punches and pushes itself with vigor and temerity toward the forefront of that moment, that movement, to become as crucial a despatch as any of those others that we all know by heart. Right, let’s talk tracks.

Blasting right off into the ionosphere with “Jonathan Richman,” a chipped-tooth tribute to the singular Boston troubadour whose work flummoxed and charmed in equal measure and was thereby an enduring influence on both those then in the embryonic DIY scene hoping to make a mark on their own terms and those who would follow on down the generations, we arrive next at the power-poppish pop of “Tokyo” that, as implied in that just-used descriptor, underlines The Scenics’ broader musical remit vis-a-via the de rigueur brattiness of the punk echelons (which was, irony of ironies, nonetheless based on similarly simple chord progressions and anyway, when it comes to ‘punk snobbery’ could there be a more glaring contradiction of terms and, yes, again I digress). In any case, from there we segue into “Farm Reports & Test Patterns,” a sharp choppy treatise on what could be considered punk’s most pressing concern (ie existential boredom) that is nothing less than ‘avant-naivete’ and we mean that in the most admiring way, then the irrepressibly classic-of-its-form title track which is as irreverent as it is essential and as such rips a new hole in the known punk universe; “This Day” that, as much as any Scenics original here, reflects the influence of that certain legendary NY band, what with its somewhat ominously deliberate pace and its mildly yelping vocal and snaky not-so-punk-really guitar solo, all of which makes it a bit of a highlight. Due that deliberative pace it also points to perhaps the key indicator of this recording’s TV-likeness, displaying throughout that more explorative approach as opposed to the WUNTOOFREEFOE!! dictates of the day. Equally innovative in that regard are both the next-up “O Charlotte” – groove-heavy, moody, a bit Lou Reedy – and the 5-minute, highly lo-fi “I’m Sad” that pretty much defines that post-adolescent, early adult slog through the existential soup, it’s “and I don’t know what to do” that follows the title lyric broken up in varying manners like a mantra of an early-life crisis. Then there’s the throw-off nature of “Garthuson” – that name an in-joke portmanteau as a Google search will confirm – that in its brief duration somehow embodies every snotty-but-sincere garage band that ever was; the jewel that is “In The Summer” that, tellingly, is the only song here that’ll make the cut when debut full-length Underneath The Door hits the streets in 1979 and then the finale, The Scenics faithfully experimental go at the lengthy (and then-current) Television classic “Little Johnny Jewel,” (the video for which we here at SEM are thrilled to premier just below) a lean devotional take swathed in an earnestness that – rather sweetly – defies whatever measure of punky attitude that has preceded it and geez, now we’ve gone and tagged every track here which on the one hand is admittedly overboard but on the other is, by dint of this record’s momentum, rather inevitable.

All said, in the quasi-endearingly naif way of these earliest era-adjacent efforts, there’s something almost uncannily prescient about The Scenics in just about their every aspect, from that classic bulletin board birth through their risky take-no-prisoners determination to the fact they recorded this batch of what are in essence live demos without any sense of them being ‘captured for posterity’ (and certainly not prosperity) yet here they – and therefore we – are, and not least the unabashed bashingness of their sound, all of it truly does rather evince an accidental North Star quality that others with similar intentions could have drawn from had they heard it. Best of all, it all leaps out at you from the speakers in that unmistakable way wherein ambition seems subsumed by fun to a degree that exactly matches it being the other way round. In that sense, like so many of their peers be they soon-to-be or contemporaneous, The Scenics were ahead of their time while in the very same instant they were exactly of their time. New Part In Town, an historic document? Yes. Brilliant in its fearlessness and will? Even more yes. [score your (limited edition) LP here or a CD or purely digital copy here]