Timing is everything, they say. Of course, when you’re ahead of the curve, timing can also throw a wrench in the works. Give enough passage, however, and others eventually catch-up, understand… even emulate.
Such is the case for self-proclaimed micro-legendary weirdoz The Prefab Messiahs. Originally together from 1981-1983, they played basement and club shows fairly often. Armed with borrowed guitars, puny amps and a mission to confound the status quo, the Clark U. undergrads began a unique post-punk musical trajectory through the burgeoning-yet-insular “Wormtown” (Worcester, MA) underground. Aside from the 1983 cassette Flex Your Mind, though, no recorded material was available from them until 1998’s Devolver CD-R – an anthology of their recordings from the early ’80s. Several songs on the album were produced by their friend and outsider psychedelic singer-songwriter Bobb Trimble.
Fast-forward three decades later with the official remastered release of Devolver via Burger Records, followed by a well-received eight-song maxi-EP of new material entitled Keep Your Stupid Dreams Alive (2015), and it seems the stars have finally aligned for this art-damaged psych-pop collective. These two releases witnessed not only a new appreciation from a younger fan base (not much older than the original one the band first started out with over 35 years ago), but also rave reviews from media, who traced the lineage from the Prefab Messiahs to many of today’s garage-psych scuzz-pups, such as Oh Sees, King Tuff, White Fence, Ty Segall, et al.
Now The Prefab Messiahs are set to release their latest full-length platter of new material, Psychsploitation Today. On it, the fuzzed-out foursome of Xerox Feinberg, Trip Thompson, Doc Michaud and Mattyboy Horn have cooked-up, arguably, their most far-out and fantastical effort to date. The new record continues the path of melding timely social commentary with equal measures of jangle, left-field garage-pop and hooks aplenty.
Prefabs’ front dude Xerox Feinberg, a self-described “Lost Generation Wanna-be Spokesperson,” describes the the band’s approach on Psychsploitation Today thusly, “The new album is really a mental and sonic continuation of the things we were obsessed about from the beginning — mashing up the sounds and attitudes of ’60s garage-psychedelia with post-punk ’80s stuff and dragging all that into whatever ‘today’ is — while generally trying to poke people in the ribs and skewer some of the Big Shams behind all the Shiny Facades. We still don’t do songs about girls’ names or feeling good. We’re still trying to toss everything into the mix including the kitchen sink. We’re still bemused and shocked and disgusted with The State of Things — and also in love with the noises in our heads and guitars. We like to think that The Prefab Messiahs’ work is never done.”
Micro-legendary DIY Garage-Pop-Psych provocateurs! Evolutionary genre grinders practicing art-damaged power pop, rock, crunch, jangle and general mind-infiltration.
released January 18, 2019
The Prefab Messiahs:
Xerox Feinberg, Doc Michaud, Trip Thompson, Mattyboi Horn
