the scene is now rocked rock to a new place.
Life is like a body with no bones.
– The Scene Is Now, “Two Spoonfuls”
Like a later-day Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, The Scene Is Now created music that mutated conventional rock song forms into something new.
The group x-rayed the bones of a typical rock song, then manipulated and rearranged, negated and inverted, transmogrified and reshaped the music into a fresh idiom: all herky-jerky and skeletal, jangling and jingling, howling and clattering, fumbling and fraying at the edges.
As founder Philip Dray put it in a Perfect Sound Forever interview from 2001, “The ethos of the band, such as it was, and this was true of The Scene Is Now, was to try and write and perform material that was original and that avoided certain hackneyed rock and roll ideas, both musically and lyrically.”
The results were songs that seemed to have already existed yet had never been noticed: compositions made from wind gusting, gravel kicked up, leaves falling, and garbage dumpster lids creaking in the night.
Image: Perfect Sound Forever