Music to Steal to

Whisk-Hutzel, the indomitable label/collective/whatsit responsible for unleashing a ridiculous amount of bands and an untold number of performances on Knoxville since around 2000, is known (sorta) for its abundance of CD-Rs and cassettes documenting the creative endeavors of the small village-worth of musicians associated with it. And now the W-H crew is releasing its first actual vinyl record, an LP, featuring 12 bands from Knoxville, most who play and record under the W-H banner.

Though W-H impresario Will Fist was involved in the record coming together, the nuts-and-bolts process of assembling the record and shepherding it into existence was taken up by Maggie Brannon and Laura Rogers, two-thirds of W-H band Dirty Knees. (The other third is Knoxville Voice editor Elizabeth Wright, who, in full disclosure, is a member of several W-H bands, including Fistful of Crows and Goddamn City, and plays an active part in keeping the wheels of the W-H machinery greased. So she walks a fine line among us, acknowledging the newsworthiness of some W-H endeavors along with the possible perception of self-interest in its KV coverage.)

“It's been a long time since anyone in Knoxville put a [compilation] record out,”

Brannon says, adding that the abundance of homemade releases by all the bands made “the idea of a record seem more special. When you're young, you dream of being on a record, and you get to a point and realize you're probably not going to be, so we decided it was time to put one out.”

Each participating band was responsible for their own recordings, and the results include 4-track homemade efforts, live recordings, a couple of Jason Boardman-recorded tracks and one song (Speedshifter's) recorded at Don Coffey's Independent Recorderer's studios.

The money to press the records came from the more or less (lately, less) regular Monday W-H nights at Barley's. The performing bands have been saving up for awhile and were finally able to send the recordings off to be pressed this summer. “I'd rather not say how long we've been planning it,” Brannon laughs.

There are 490 copies, which will be available at the release party Dec. 19 at Pilot Light, and a number will also be sent to radio stations and magazines for review.

The artwork for the LP was rendered by man-about-town Bryan Baker, a W-H associate and Yee-Haw employee, and each copy will contain a poster with original artwork by W-H band members and friends.

The compilation is titled “Music to Steal To,” and Brannon says of its origin: “We had a meeting and sat there for hours thinking up names. We came up with a big long list but couldn't decide on one. Then one night after a Dirty Knees show, Will was excited and said, ‘Hell yeah! That sounds like music to steal to!' And there it was, just like that.”

The record is an impressively consistent collection of low-fi garage rock, pop tunes, a ballad, a noise track and, uh, the Damn Creeps. Most of the bands are far from under-documented, but here, less is more as we get 12 concise representations of some of the loudest, craziest, funnest, drunkenest and, yes, best bands to entertain Knoxvillians since the dawn of the millennium. It would be an exaggeration (OK, an outright lie) to say there's something for everyone here, but those with an appetite for rock ‘n' roll — the good, hard stuff – should find themselves in agreeable company here.

I don't want to spoil any surprises, but here's a brief preview of the tracks:

Side one kicks off fittingly with a wild ride from the venerable Black Sarah covering a Will Fist tune, “Liquor Store on Sunday.” The whole of the lyrics are “I went to the liquor store on Sunday. It was closed, but I went anyway,” augmented by the heathen screaming and hollering that such a discovery might elicit. It's over before you know it, and then The Cheat is up with “Weird M.D.,” one of their sharp post-Nuggets surf-punk excursions. The tone shifts as Pete Hoffecker's one-man Girl Party project offers the track with the most indie-rock guitar leanings, a layered 4-track pop tune that shifts gears halfway to deliver an extended coda that could be an entirely different song. The recently reunited (for now) Divorce bring the pain with “Electric Centipedes,” featuring their tight post-punk guitar stabs and Brannon's distinctive, dramatic vocals. From there, the record takes a turn to a live recording of a killer Fat Possum-meets-Tee Pee Records-style rave from Jose P Orchestra, with the vocals submerged under pounding drums, rumbling bass and a pants-on-fire hot shit guitar workout. Ending the side is a blast of sonic detritus from Charlie Finch's noise-drunk Fecal Japan, an aural burn that will make you think your needle has accumulated the desert of dust the first five tracks kicked up. But where's the lock groove?

Side two kicks off with the gone-but-not-forgotten Lobster Lobster Lobster, performing their shoulda-been-a-hit “Down in the Basement,” Mitch Garza'a unhinged vocals riding over a crushing groove worthy of Kyuss. The ladies of Dirty Knees take you down a sonic waterslide with the girl group locked in a haunted house sound of “The Twilight Zone Song.” Up next is a blast of straight-up, pedal-to-the-metal, full-throttle, sleaze rock from Speedshifter. The shortest track is a sonic blitzkrieg from W-H mainstays Fistful of Crows, a one-speed (turbo) yelp about missing the boat and being stranded on Alcatraz. George Miller's witty acoustic ballad “Genius of Gene”  finds him looking for a lover with whom he can watch Star Trek, and is punctuated by stoned, fuzzed-out electric guitar runs, paving the way for the grand finale, a live Damn Creeps track taken from their recent DVD. The Creeps' mellow take on old-time music is a good way to go out, and the record fades with Fist's parting words to an unknown phantom: “Oh shit, you scared the fuck out of me!”

That's it. Time to turn the record over and go again. For fellow travelers and loyal barflies, it will be like skipping around in your memory to revisit favorite nights spent with these songs. For the un- or under-initiated, you might wonder why you haven't been making it out more to hear some of these bands. You still can, as most are still playing out regularly, Divorce is back together and will perform a full set at the release party where even Lobster might come together for a one-off performance. You can also take home a souvenir, a record which will likely stand as a totem of this era in local music history.