Ian Adams fell into his new band, the Submarine Races, ass-backward. First he got a record deal, then he joined somebody else’s group, and then he wound up being its front man and chief songwriter. Now, about a year and a half since the process started, the Submarine Races are set to release their self-titled debut, a disc of keening, spiky pop that displays Adams’s love for literate UK postpunk as well as the simple but sublime songs of Chuck Berry and 60s girl groups.
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There was a silver lining, though. Larry Hardy, owner of the Ponys’ label, LA-based In the Red, told Adams that he’d release his next project. “I said, ‘If you ever do anything else you better let me put it out,’” Hardy says. “If it’s a solo album, whatever it is, I’ll do it. And there aren’t many people I’d say that to.”
Shortly after quitting the Ponys Adams returned to his day job at a commercial photo lab, where one of his coworkers was Jeremiah McIntyre, former front man for the Afflictions. McIntyre had recently started rehearsing with drummer Paul John Higgins and bassist Steve Denekas. The three had first played together in the 90s in the Omaha-based outfit Radio Berlin, then moved to Chicago, where McIntyre and Denekas formed the Entertainment. After a disastrous tour in 2001, the band broke up and for three years the two didn’t even speak. In the meantime Denekas and Higgins formed Murdered, then joined DC punk vet Chris Thomson in the Red Eyed Legends. Denekas later quit that band to focus on the Countdown, a noise-pop duo with his wife, Tamar Berk.
The songs on The Submarine Races are powered by Adams’s serpentine melodies, Rickenbacker leads, and adenoidal vocals, which blend the elegantly wasted plaints of the Only Ones’ Peter Perrett and the nervy quaver of the Violent Femmes’ Gordon Gano. Denekas and Higgins give a jolt to Adams’s originals, which are marked by his lovelorn lyrics, though Denekas chips in with a lacerating garage free-for-all, “Six Foot Two,” and the disc includes a cover of the Neil Diamond chestnut “The Boat I Row.” As a snapshot of a band in its infancy it’s a good, if not great, first effort. Though the album opens with an odd five-minute instrumental, “Theme,” that’s a moody wash of watery sounds, the remaining 24 minutes are engaging and suggest better things to come.
When: Thu 6/8, 9:30 PM
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jim Newberry.
