What I am listening to: The Make Up

The late 90s were not a good time for me but there is always a bright side and for me it was music. I would read the British magazine Uncut and the American CMJ New Music Monthly and listen to their CDs which I could find at a traditional local small town newsstand. A fun musical question is what bands did you not like at first but grew to love. For me, the Smiths and the Dead Kennedys stand out as my answer. I must admit these are teenage choices and I don’t do a fair job of going back to reappraise a band. The Arctic Monkeys are a band that could fall in this category of enjoying, but surely I have shut out dozens of worthy bands. One band that was near the top of critics lists in the late 90s was The Make Up. They were not a band that I was interested in 20 some years later, I have come around. It’s possible that the band was before their time. Listening to them now, they sound an awful lot like the Swedish hardcore band Refused spin-off The International Noise Conspiracy who popped up slightly after the Make Up broke up. That’s the first comes to mind, but there’s a whole list of bands who fit that description that pulled the same influences appearing after the Make Up- bands like At the Drive In, the Detroit Cobras, The Dirtbombs, the Black Heart Procession, the Mooney Suzuki, King Khan’s various projects and then of course, the more well known bands of the Garage Rock Revival explosion around the corner from that. I wouldn’t have my eye on the band in the first place. I am not very familiar with Nation of Ulysses - from which 3/4s of the Make up came. Nor am I usually a huge fan of Dischord Records- the noisy DC hard core punk record label. With plenty of hindsight now, it’s clear that the band’s nearest contemporary comparison was probably the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. There is an obvious debt to James Brown and gospel music, and a clear MC5 influence, and there were few bands that could accomplish mixing those styles. The sound of the Make Up was also surely influenced by the sound of Spencer’s previous band Pussy Galore and other raucous noisemakers like Royal Trux and the Laughing Hyenas. (There also was a political element like the International Noise Conspiracy which somehow adds even more artistic flair). I’m mostly drawn to the bands 4th studio (and final) album 1999’s Make Up, which I think is the cleanest version of the band’s work. Critics everywhere called it a “party album”, but somehow I feel like that is a slight to how multi faceted is. A knee jerk reaction is to compare them to Beck- one of the rare artists who were doing what they were attempting- but otherwise, I don’t really find much similarities sonically. Anyway, there you go- that’s a recent discovery. Maybe it will hit your ears like mine back like it hit mine back then and you won’t like it, but maybe it will hit your ears in 2022 like mine did as something still fresh two decades later.