DISCOGRAPHY DEEP DIVE: Cop Shoot Cop

Nine years, four albums, two basses, so many samples: Cop Shoot Cop remain unique.

There’s no fixed criteria for me to pick the bands for the discography deep dive feature. For the band of the week, for instance, while it’s also not a 100% sure thing, I will always tend to aim for smaller/more underground bands who have a recent/upcoming release at the time of the feature. But here, I suspect that this will fluctuate according to my current kicks, and man, can those be absolutely random. The very first deep dive made some sense, as Royal Thunder had announced a return to activity recently, I had done a podcast episode with Mlny, and unbeknownst to you guys at the time, she had also just sent me her incredible participation for the episode #100 celebrations of the show. So it was natural that I was revisiting those records a bit more during that period. But now, anything can kick in at any moment, and for the last couple of weeks, nothing else has blared from the inside of my car but the sounds of yet another journey down the Cop Shoot Cop rabbit hole. So here we go.

COP SHOOT COP

Formed in 1987, Cop Shoot Cop are one of the first purveyors of that rather vague and loose genre that’s become known as noise rock. In my view, at least, I think of Sonic Youth, Swans and Big Black as the sort of first wave noise rock, the Venom/Bathory/Hellhammer equivalents of this genre, for the more black metal-oriented among you, or just as a funny analogy. And like most decisive and inspiring bands of every movement, they don’t really sound like any of their peers, or anyone else really, and were actually classified as industrial and things like that throughout their rather short career (they broke up in 1996). As with so many other visionaries, their guitar-less (mostly - we’ll get to that in a minute), angular, aggressive and very cynical sonic attack didn’t bring the masses running to them, go figure, despite a couple of big tours, like opening for Iggy Pop and stuff like that. Though very far from a household name, with time a lot of people realised the timeless impact of these records, and if you a couple of first editions to spare nowadays, you might have just enough to pay your mortgage and your student debt, or whatever shit you’re neck-deep into like all the rest of us.

So their career lasted from when I was nine years old to when I was eighteen. A perfect time to discover bands, you might say, and I did my best to discover as many as I could during that period, but it was only a year after their demise, and through the good taste of another outside-the-box musician, that I was turned onto Cop Shoot Cop. As if to illustrate the immense power you wield when you cover a lesser known artist, a certain Devin Townsend, on a little earth-shattering record called ‘City’ with his band at the time, Strapping Young Lad, decided to do a version of ‘Room 429’, off Cop Shoot Cop’s 1993 masterpiece ‘Ask Questions Later’, which remains one of my favourite tunes of theirs. On the liner notes, Devin recommended “purchase their albums”. Purchase I did, based on the sinister, poetic yet menacing vibe of that song (which is only greater in the Cop Shoot Cop version) and an instant new favourite appeared. So thank you, Mr. Townsend, and here’s that awesome cover, very faithful in spirit to the original while also fitting the rest of ‘City’ perfectly, to kick things off:

‘Ask Questions Later’, however, is Cop Shoot Cop’s third album. To really get things going, we have to dial back time to the ending of the previous decade, 1989, when this happened:

HEADKICK FACSIMILE (EP)
(1989, Supernatural Organization)
Can you imagine how it felt, at the time when hair metal was still a thing, and when grunge was starting to be the next big thing, what it felt like to hear a band with no guitar, just bass (just one, for now - this was still their line-up reshuffle phase with the original trio) and harrowing samples to drive things along, and a very urban, gritty, grey and almost hard-boiled vibe to it? Each song featuring characters that you’d not only cross the street, but probably cross zip codes if you ever ran into them in the street, with Tod A. (aka Tod Ashley) and his sneering, gruff vocals as vehicles of a master storyteller, and that fat, giant groove of it all swinging things along, as much blues and jazz as it is rock and punk and metal? As I mentioned, little teen-me wasn’t a listener at the time, but I can imagine how polarising it must have been. It’s the sort of thing you either completely fall in love with or hate immediately. Though the founding trio of Tod A., David Ouimet and Phil Puleo (yup, the very same Swans drummer a couple of decades after) would later add, crucially, another bassist (Jack Natz), and also a replacement for the in-and-out Ouimet (Jim Coleman), thus settling on what’s more or less the “classic” Cop Shoot Cop line-up, these seventeen minutes offer much more than just a glimpse, they already show all the ideas and characteristics that would make the band so unique for the years to come, seemingly all fleshed out from the very beginning. Like, for example, on the triumphant, erm, ‘Triumphant Theme’, where the name of the band is shamelessly shouted in the lyrics, which manages to be symphonic and hard-as-nails raw at the same time, in all the glory of its 2:47 minutes. How often do you run into a 30+ year old debut EP that can still kick you in the teeth as hard as 'Headkick Facsimile’ can?

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CONSUMER REVOLT
(1990, Circuit Records)
So after the aforementiones line-up changes, the proper debut album appeared a year later, and yeah, it’s a goddamn disturbing listen. The cover sucks, I know, but at least the one from the reissues is much better. NOW 15% MORE HATE! The music, though. Tod A. bellows and howls like a prophet of the endtimes, the relentless low-end rumble chugs along, the samples are used like your local projectionist cut bits off his favourite reels and is just firing them off in a cocaine-fueled binge, and percussion hits like a deranged inmate hitting trash cans as if they owed him five packs of cigarettes. The greatest thing about it is, surprisingly enough given these elements, the tight restraint of the songwriting. The prophet, the bassmonsters, the high projectionist and the thrashman actually carve songs out of their madness, songs that never descend into random chaos, and worse/better still, songs that have hooks. Steve Albini had used Big Black to show the world that you could do unpleasant psycho music while still giving people a catchy tune, and Cop Shoot Cop took that to its logical extreme with ‘Consumer Revolt’. Tellingly, some of the most notable highlights include the weirdly sparse ‘Eggs For Rib’, the staccato nightmare of ‘Burn Your Bridges’ (you’ll be yelling “behind you / look out!” for days) or the pounding aggression of ‘Pity The Bastard’ - three of the longest songs on the record.

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WHITE NOISE
(1991, Big Cat)
One of the best things about doing The Devil’s Mouth podcast is that I (and everyone else who listens, of course!) get to hear a lot of different opinions and perspectives on a lot of different music. See, ‘White Noise’ had always been for me the “skip it” record of this discography - not that I entirely, literally skipped it, but it was by far the one I put on the least amount of times, I had an image of it being the “lighter” of the bunch, more atmospheric, less of that dirty street-blues, baseball-bat-to-the-teeth kind of feeling. In a way it is, but because it works out that aggression in another way. It took until the very first episode of the podcast where I had a guest, the lovely Michael McKeegan, bassist for Therapy?, a man of exquisite music taste which totally equals his own talent as a musician, for me to look at this record in the proper way. Michael picked the song ‘Empires Collapse’ from it, as one of his Ten Rounds in that episode, a mini-epic of discordancy and unease, and he spoke precisely of that atmosphere, of how there’s something off about it that adds to the menace and the grimy vibes - “like the samples are slightly tuned wrong or something”, is how he jokingly puts it, also arguing that with technology as it is today, Cop Shoot Cop might not have been able to do something so creepy as what they did with this. And that’s true - while it’s clearer and cleaner, including in the vocals, than the others, more obviously bluesy and groovy (hinting a lot at what Tod would do with his post-Cop Shoot Cop band, Firewater), it is perhaps the one with the bleakest and most cynical output, especially lyrically, placing you, the common (wo)man, at the centre of a whole system designed to take advantage of you from birth till death. “Poverty, real as it gets / Don't think I won't skin you when your skin is all that's left / The tension mounts, but the drama's pretty cheap / This ain't an ultimatum, but, baby, I know where you sleep”. Yikes, right?

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ASK QUESTIONS LATER
(1993, Big Cat/Interscope)
So this is by far my favourite of the bunch, and not just because of the power of having been the first one I bought and listened to (it’s got ‘Room 429’ on it, you see). It’s also the one where I feel all the different sides of the band converged in one big fucking trash fire that spirals out of control and consumes the entire city. As soon as that jangly chunky melody off ‘Surprise Surprise’ begins, you’re in for a hell of a rollercoaster. ‘Room 429’ follows and hooks you in forever, as you might have guessed, but every song is a highlight in its own way. Few other percussion-driven songs will feel not only as catchy but actually as engaging and motivational to get off your ass and do something meaningful as ‘$10 Bill’ (which got a fair amount of MTV air time back then, can you imagine that today?) does, and I can’t think of many other bile and bitterness-ridden records like this that will nevertheless burrow straight into your heart so much. A lot of it also has to do with the poetic undertones of Tod’s lyricisms - we are firmly in the gutter here, yes, even nursing a couple of gaping bullet wounds, but our aim is firmly, Oscar Wildely in the stars for sure. Taking ‘Room 429’ alone as an example, Tod goes from quiet beauty (“City breathes so softly, everything is sleeping”) to creeping menace (“I am at the window silently watching”) within the same sentence, and he offers you wisdom that, if you’re of a certain disposition, your brain will chew on forever, like “Don't look to the ocean, restless in its dreaming / Don't look to the heavens for they will tell you nothing”. From politics (“surprise surprise - the government lies!” on the opener is one of the simplest and most powerful statements on the whole album) to your darkest feelings and obsessions (“And we'll get to know our guts / If we have to tear them out“), to the utter pointlessness of everything around us (“Yer war on drugs got no soul, yer hired thugs got no soul / You hippy trash got no soul. Yer yuppie cash got no soul / Yer video clips, yer beauty tips, remote control / It's a big black hole. Got no soul. Got no soul”), everything seems laid bare on ‘Ask Questions Later’, and almost 30 years later, its potency not only remains the same, but sometimes feels like it’s even been amplified by these “interesting times” we find ourselves living in.

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RELEASE
(1994, Interscope)
What the fuck is that, a guitar? On a Cop Shoot Cop record? Those might have been some of the most common first words by fans upon hearing ‘Release’ for the first time, as it indeed featured a new member, Steven McMillen, on guitar (and trumpet), not to mention a more conventional approach by Jim Coleman, who had actually become more of a keyboardist than a sampler, as he had been before with the awesome results we all know and have praised. Coupled with the fact that ‘Release’ was the first album released exclusively on a major label, it has all the ingredients to make up that one shitty compromise record before the band breaks up, right? Well, while indeed it was the last one before the break up, the biggest compliment you can pay to Cop Shoot Cop is that none of these aspects made it a lesser album in any way, even comparing it to their best moments of their past catalogue. The guitar is just another texture, the rough and tumble of the bass still being the main driving force, and the overall more polished sound is still full of greasy spots and grimy stains dripped from the songwriting and the sneering sarcasm that is the mark of the band. So yes, maybe it’s a good one to show your Cop Shoot Cop-less friends before throwing them the earlier stuff, but it still demands a certain kind of brain to enjoy. It’s almost a feverish celebration of failure when you inevitably sing along “it only hurts when I breathe!” with Tod on the song of the same name, or when you swing along with the morose ‘Two At A Time’ mumbling “you’ve been using up your lucky days two at a time” with all the self-punishing glee you can muster. The soul of the band is absolutely intact and it is truly a shame they couldn’t go on any longer.

It’s great to hear Phil Puleo in Swans, Jim Coleman (and Phil too, though it’s not clear if he’s still in the line-up) in Human Impact, and of course Tod’s trajectory with the amazing Firewater, even if that’s been relatively quiet for a few years now (he does have a novel out!), but Cop Shoot Cop were, and remain, truly unique. I’m not one to wish for reunions, but this is one of the very few that I believe would be worth it to give it a shot. Fingers crossed? After all, “all the clocks are broken / every door is open”.

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