damaged bug hubba bubba album download Hubba Bubba. Imagining a world where This Heat and Can developed their sound in the Bay Area rather than Europe, John Dwyer puts down the guitar in favor of an arsenal of synthesizers on Hubba Bubba, the debut album of his Damaged Bug solo project. While the sound is more electronic, with churning synths weaving their way around ramshackle beats, the album has an analog, handmade feeling that places it far from the lockstep polish of dance music. Free from the shackles of digital sequencing, with elements moving in and out of time with one another, the album feels distinctly broken. In the hands of Dwyer, however, what could be perceived as the album's weak point proves to be its greatest strength, providing an element of rhythmic uncertainty to the predictability we've come to expect from things like drum machines. In a lot of ways, the album makes a strong case for Dwyer as an auteur. Whether he's tackling garage rock, psych pop, or post-punk, Dwyer has a way of taking a sound and infusing it with a veneer of sweat and sunshine, allowing his music to shine through despite its grimy, lo-fi patina. So, is Hubba Bubba a messy album? Of course it is. Is that a bad thing? Quite the opposite, actually. Damaged Bug is a celebration of the strange and often unstable world of analog electronics, and while there's considerably less "crash and bang" to the project than Dwyer's work with Coachwhips and Thee Oh Sees, it has a scuzziness that fans of the prolific noisemaker's other work will appreciate. Damaged Bug - Hubba Bubba. Damaged Bug is John Dwyer's new project, all home-cooked synthesiser-based tunes, but with the same attention to snap, crackle and pop that we've grown so accustomed to with Thee Oh Sees . Amid sputtering drum machines, analog throb and whistle, a dash of early Kraftwerkian whimsy, and just the right amount of loner menace, this record is essential listening and will get stuck in your teeth like taffy. Half Tarred Edition is only available here and is limited to 2 per customer. Damaged Bug Hubba Bubba. There’s a crude portrait of Brian Eno resting atop a console in a spaceship and a modest pot leaf hanging in the black sky like an air freshener. A visual horde of buttons and lights compose each wall, suggesting some purpose. As the first pulsars of sound whir at the start of Hubba Bubba , the song Gloves For Garbage artful and dry in its observations and tonality, it’s difficult not to apply this scene as some visual component to John Dwyer’s synthesizer experiment known as Damaged Bug, its close quarters a modernized home away from home. A recent transplant to Los Angeles after being a fixture in San Francisco for many years, the ever prolific head of Castle Face Records and creative drive behind Thee Oh Sees, Dwyer’s Damaged Bug follows a proposed halt with touring (though Thee Oh Sees will be releasing a new album in April). Simply motivated by a want to explore the possibilities of electronic music, Dwyer’s twelve-song opus is an odd and often loose attempt at creating something other than his usual guitar-intensive output. With a sound propagated by a Realistic MG-1, (a small factoid I’d gleaned from Dwyer’s recent appearance on Henry Rollins’s radio show on KCRW ), he dares to outline his own Eno’ish plot within an unfamiliar framework. Ultimately, he succeeds. Though mostly removed from his Oh Sees work, live instruments occasionally make appearances throughout Hubba Bubba . The aforementioned Gloves For Garbage almost betrays the album’s intentions, suggesting a mere modification to Dwyer’s sound than an actual creative leap. The same could also be said about SS Cassidinea , psychedelic embellishments arbitrarily applied though the song moves with a persistence similar to Neu !’s Negativland . And then the fluctuating low end that shifts like a mouthful of water rushing from one check to the other throughout the naturally percussive Sic Bay Surprise is as familiar vocally as it is instrumentally, guitar sounds aplenty and a rock n’ roll pulse that contradicts any notion of electronic-centric composition. Rope Burn , however, with its factorial cycle crunching beneath some playful threads from his right hand, establishes a better understanding of how Damaged Bug functions. There’s an inconsistency that sounds purposeful and an overt lack of polish that could be taken as charmingly quaint or 80s modern. The high-tempo Eggs At Night , with disco taps on the hi-hat and Dwyer’s defeated delivery (“What kind of fool am I?”), is tightly wound next to the free form spasms of sound in Catastrophobia and the rhythmic looseness of the album’s title track. And then Photograph brings funk into the dynamic, an electrified moan dragging behind the groove, which seems to change its speed in subtle enthusiastic bursts. Following the vocally minimal and tepid Hot Swells , 1-2 An Airplane is an industrialized trudge that sounds too big next to the rest of the album. While Damaged Bug seems to revel in its quirks, flaws and the continual analysis of humanity and mortality, 1-2 An Airplane is noticeably serious and relatively smooth, so much so that it doesn’t really fit. The oddity of Metal Hand , which seemed curated stylistically from the likes of DEVO or The Normal, thankfully lightens the tone before Wasteland , a heavy handed drum sound and a pee-pee dance of synthesizer gibberish, closes the album. While lyrically ponderous and sometimes grim, (“Am I a waste of life?/I ask the night”), Hubba Bubba satisfies an impulse pleasantly. As a side project, Damaged Bug has/had the potential to only be an exercise in self-indulgence, a resultant whim based in curiosity that fans of Dwyer’s would happily consume only to be disappointed later. To some extent, Dwyer’s endeavor takes a turn or two that sound incomplete but, as he tests the waters, Dwyer has fun with it. Hubba Bubba is playful, engaging. It’s easy enough to trace this work to artists that inspired Dwyer, but not so far removed from his comfort zone that he’s given himself up completely. Modernized home away from home or not, he still checks in from time to time. Damaged Bug – “Photograph” With Thee Oh Sees on hiatus, at least for now, frontman John Dwyer is busying himself with a new weirdo-synth solo project that he’s calling Damaged Bug. His debut Damaged Bug album is called Hubba Bubba and due later this month, and we’ve already posted the deeply strange early track “Eggs At Night.” “Photograph,” the next track Dwyer has shared, isn’t a whole lot easier to process; it’s like a particularly demented take on early Devo. (Also, I know what you’re thinking, and no, it’s not a Nickelback cover.) Download the track below. Hubba Bubba. Thee Oh Sees' John Dwyer recently decided, after years of making primarily guitar-centric music, to track down a synthesizer he remembered from his childhood. The result is his debut as Damaged Bug, a release defined by blaring, primitive sonics. Featured Tracks: As a guest DJ on Henry Rollins' KCRW show, John Dwyer recently offered a glimpse into where his record collector inclinations have taken him lately: into the world of early electronic experimentation. He shared a playlist of material featuring musicians fascinated by the capabilities of synthesizers—Paul McCartney's "Temporary Secretary", Wendy Carlos' Switched on Bach , Chrome, Eno, Kraftwerk (from Ralf & Florian ), early Depeche Mode, Les Rallizes Dénudés, and a handful of compilation-based oddities. Some of the artists in his playlist couldn't easily perform those songs live due to technical complications. For them, fiddling with a Moog meant, in many cases, experimenting in solitude. McCartney, for example, has discussed his initial fascination with synthesizers, when he walked away from Wings' recent breakup and made the one-man album II . "I just wanted to see what it was all about, and have a go, and see what I could do with it," he said. McCartney's story feels like an applicable parallel to Dwyer's new album, released under the name Damaged Bug. (Thee Oh Sees aren't breaking up, though—they're taking a break and have a new album coming this spring.) Dwyer recently decided, after years of making primarily guitar- centric music, to track down a synthesizer he remembered from his childhood, one that was sold by RadioShack in the early 1980s: the Realistic MG-1. "A buddy of mine had it as a kid and I always coveted it," he told Rollins. Through the span of an entire month just before he moved from San Francisco to L.A., he had a go with his new machine. He wrote and recorded Hubba Bubba , an album where he largely set his guitar aside in favor of his newly acquired early 1980s Moog, in solitude. As the album's central piece of equipment likely suggests, no, these aren't the slick, sophisticated, polished synth sounds from the last Classixx record. They're songs largely defined by blaring, primitive sonics—fried electronic bleats that suit the name "Damaged Bug." And if you go in expecting to hear the microphone swallowing, tongue dangling maniac who made the kinetic burners from Floating Coffin and Carrion Crawler/The Dream , adjust your expectations; Hubba Bubba 's songs take their time. Occasionally, they trudge.