Coffin Pricks - Semi-Perfect Crimes LP
For a short time in Chicago in the early 2010s, there was a loud, noisy garage punk group named Coffin Pricks on the prowl. The group (guitarist/bassist Ryan Weinstein, vocalist Chris Thomson, drummer Jeff Rice, and bassist Chay Lawrence) was built up from a bunch of punk veterans, having been in Circus Lupus, Ottawa, Calvary, Red Eyed Legends, Monochord, and Bob Tilton between the four of them. For whatever reason, Coffin Pricks ended not long after conception–they put out their only release, a three song single for Stationary Heart Records, in May of 2012, and they’d played their last show before that year was over. Although half of its members are still fairly active musicians–Weinstein moved to Los Angeles, rechristened himself Coffin Prick, and released an album and EP of experimental rock music last year, while Rice currently drums for Chicago hardcore punk group Consensus Madness–Coffin Pricks never got back together, leaving behind seven songs recorded by the initial trio of Weinstein, Thomson, and Rice in 2011 and a handful of tracks that never even made it that far. After much cajoling, Council Records finally got Weinstein to help piece together a Coffin Pricks full-length out of their output, featuring all seven of their studio recordings (newly remixed and remastered) and augmented by a 2012 live session from Saki Recordings featuring six un-recorded tracks, finally released this year as a vinyl LP called Semi-Perfect Crimes.
The studio tracks on Semi-Perfect Crimes are half of a perfect rock and roll album, as far as I’m concerned. These songs are all exciting, smoking-hot garage punk rippers with a bit of a post-punk tinge to them–yet at the same time, they’re weird recordings, too. Not self-consciously offbeat like a “Devo-core”/”egg punk” group might be, exactly, but in a subtler, more difficult-to-diagnose way– songs like “Group Home Haircut” and “Only Flesh Wound” sound simple and streamlined, but they go on for nearly four minutes and have a surprisingly large arsenal of ideas and bits and pieces strewn about them. The garage rock-y post-punk of the former song reminds me of The Fall, a band that feels relevant to Coffin Pricks, but Thomson’s strained post-hardcore frontperson act is way too all-over-the-place to get bogged down in Mark E. Smith cosplay. The second half of Semi-Perfect Crimes is the Saki Session (all six un-recorded songs plus another version of album opener “TV Detention” make the LP, while the remaining five tracks are digital-only bonuses)–by this point, they’d added Lawrence on bass and, unsurprisingly, sound even louder and chaotic live than in the studio. That being said, Coffin Pricks hadn’t abandoned their “artier”/post-punk side–in fact, “Banana Boat” and “Extinct Language Discussion” are significantly stranger than anything the band had recorded up to that point. It does make one wonder what a band that was capable of making those kinds of songs while still busting out things like the Fall-shuffle of “Hit Kids” and heavy punk like “Worn Out Thunder” might’ve done had they continued–but on the other hand, it does seem right that a band like this is only being preserved via Semi-Perfect Crimes.
Council Records