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[This week's feature piece on Chris Newman and Napalm Beach can be found here.]
Napalm Beach
By the time punk hit, Chris Newman was
already in his 20s. Instead of disregarding the music of his youth, he
filtered it through the velocity of the time, and laid the groundwork
for punkâs next evolutionary step. Heck, you can hear grungeâs birth
pangs in his crunchy, mud-caked guitar tone alone.
Snow Bud and the Flower People
Stoner rock in both its riffs and lyrical
content, the band began as a joke for the amusement of Newmanâs pot
dealerâsong titles include âBong Hit,â âGrass Is Groovyâ and âSeeds for
Thoughtââbut in certain circles is perhaps better known than Napalm
Beach. It even scored Newman an illustrated review in a 1991 issue of High Times.
Divining Rods
When Newman first returned to the land of
the living in the mid-2000s, he cataloged his time perched on the edge
of oblivion through hard-driving, psychedelic garage-punk tunes that
sound something like the Doors paying tribute to the Gun Club.
Chris Newman Experiment
More an extended therapy session than a
project built to last, Newman, fresh from rehab, recruited a father-son
rhythm section from his hometown of Longview, Wash., to record an album
processing his short-lived second marriage. Nine months later, the band
dissolved.
Boo Frog
Coming together around a memorial show
for the Crampsâ Lux Interior, the bassless trioâs stripped-raw
blues-punk is designed to restrain Newmanâs compulsive genre hopping.
But the band gets its power from hearing him battle against those
self-imposed constraints.
WWeek 2015