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| Cop Shades strut, shit ponies. Nick Cameron photo. |
AUDIO: Cop Shades - I Shit Ponies
Joe Strummer's pre-Clash squat boogie outfit The 101ers were the game to beat in London in their day. As Joe and co. were sat watching their opening act on this particular night, reactions in the band were polarized. Most of the group saw something brutish, a yowling distortion of pub rock, an amateurish Stones pastiche at best. What Joe saw though was the writing on the wall, the numbered days for the old guard, and an exciting redefinition of rock & roll counterculture set to a brazenly unrefined caterwaul.
They were watching the Sex Pistols, and take a wild guess at which camp in the 101ers had the prescience of foresight?*
In any event, these are the types of paradigm shifting experiences I have had repeatedly seeing Moncton's Peter Parkers, who are belatedly represented here by preponderant frontman Remi Cormier, though Remi comes to us sporting Cop Shades these days.
The Parkers were transformative for me each and every time. They were a multi-headed beast, arguably a whole group of front-people, a synergous outfit in the classic sense with Remi as ringleader. They were absolutely epic, constructing squalling obelisks and impermeable walls, and often vacating those rapturous electric confines to explore vast serenities and almost silent soundscapes. Best of all, they were local, so no big city mythos required. My new pals from Moncton were the alchemists who concocted this collision of rock and the avant-garde, delivered as though every moment impossibly meant more than the last.
Most importantly, what in the world would ever keep anybody, myself included, from wanting to be in a band this fucking good? Any willing person can do this.
Today The Peter Parkers are a more ephemeral property, their split atomic structure survived by a sort of separation of Ego and Id, or more specifically, of Colonial Quarrels and Cop Shades respectively. Where Colonial Quarrels carry on the Parkers watercolour and delicacy however, Cop Shades are the stuff of their distilled dark, bodily chaos factor and sonic thrust.
This is essentially what I was telling Remi in the pic to your right, but I have no doubt it was something more along the slurry lines of, "I love your bands man. Man, I love your bands."
But I really do.
Remi and the Parkers were of a caliber that establishes a high water mark. You could carry on as you were and be good and fine and that's just plain nice, or you could aspire to taking your own music, and whatever form or function that music occupied, to the level. The only thing to restrict you in this is your own thinking, and if you failed, it was only because you failed, simply put.
The army does not own Be All You Can Be, you do. When you want to be better, you just have to do better. The Parkers were that good by execution alone, and I'll be damned if you'll ever find a better doom boogie dance party than Cop Shades. Enjoy this exclusive live track, I Shit Ponies, compliments of Corey Bonnevie. Buy their Hamburger Tapes live album if you dare.
Destroy the dancefloors of shortsightedness and bust the fecundating moves of freedom. It's always your turn, citizens. Can you do any less?
*Similar sea changing stories abound, like the time The Beatles removed the upstart Kinks from a revue tour for upstaging them, only to replace them with another young Shepherd's Bush R&B band, The High Numbers (soon after rechristened as the even worse 'Orrible 'Oo, or The Who, for those not in the nicknamey know).
