KNIF demos (-review by Pepsi Sheen)
Guitar star, Deane Clapper, was one of the born to lose, scowling, glitter punks you’d see stompin’ around the Bowery in the last days of the Green Door era when the NY Loose, D-Generation, Fur, Pillbox and Waldos ruled the East Side and you could just tell—even back then, that there was something wrong with that guy, he had a haunted, distant look in his eye, like he was perpetually on a Coney Island High.
‘You ever met one of those dudes who you always just KNEW was gonna end up in a wayward gang of greaser misfits and motorcycle girls, performing his primitive, volatile rocknroll music, for throngs of heavily perspiring junkie strippers and emotionally troubled pin-up dolls? Don’t book KNIF to play your gentrified bistro. They attract a promiscuous, twisting, heavy-drinking crowd—people who like to dress up in beehives and tight leather, the KNIF audiences are notorious for dancing, removing their blouses, and buying a lot of alcohol. They are not welcome in cafe society. Songs like “Get Dorked” and “Whistling Past The Graveyard” appeal to a frenzied class of imprudent Little Richard and Cramps fan who can’t be trusted to stay in their seats. These people are trouble! It’s all fun and games until someone loses a bra!
Lots of us rolled our eyes, collectively, when all those 90’s mama’s boy twenty-nothings grew their fecking sideburns, discovered Crypt Records and Murray’s pomade, and formed ten thousand Fonzarelli hot rod bands in like, ’95. It was just the tiredest shit on Earth–Sha Na Na nostalgia, in the grunge era. We hated all those academic, middle class, Happy Days New Bomb Twerps, with their stupid unbreakable combs and Patsy Cline tattoos. Fortunately, there were still some genuine article rabble rousers keeping things suitably evil, like Electric Frankenstein, the Humpers, the Mummies, Pleasure Fuckers, and Cheater Slicks, while all those insufferable nerds pretended like they’d ever been to a strip joint, or truck stop, in real life. I remember how one college town band of wussy suck-ups, literally, cowered(!!!) along the back wall of the bar, visibly trembling(!!!) because they were so intimidated by the Candy Snatchers, but when the Candys left town, they all promptly rolled cigarette packs up in their plain white t shirts and strutted around like the guy with the acne problems down at Thunder Road. They have since become techno D.J.’s. If Mom is bankrolling the weekend band, while you finish your liberal arts degree at state college, maybe you even have enough disposable income to drive an old car and get some cheesy skin art and loiter all day at the hipster record store, but all the real rockers know you’re a buncha Potsies and Malfs, pretending to be Sharks and Jets. KNIF hates Rydell High lettermen sweaters and Richie Cunningham milkshake suckers.
KNIF are the stinky essence of the hellhounded working class….lowlife hoodlums, grown up all wrong. They are middle aged j.d.’s out for desperate kicks. Reckless, restless, relentless, rollicking, raucous rebels, rotting from the inside out. Bad men with bad habits. Lonesome, ramblin’ balls of fire, rejected by the squares and straights. These are the people your hipster music scene was studiously avoiding when all those nerds were buying Pabst belt buckles and pretending to like Nashville Pussy during their “college phase”. KNIF are the ones you were forbidden from hanging around in high school. You can’t quite make out what ever the blue letters on their knuckles say. Some of these cats are probably still on probation. You ever see that Johnny Depp movie, “Crybaby”? Or “River’s Edge”? These are the drapes, the rakes, the hoods, the stoners. Menacing scoundrels with a faint body odor, masked by like, Old Spice, and like, a feral glint in the eye. Remember Bryan Gregory back when he still wore that chickenbone necklace everyday, and worked at the porn store, having to pour those buckets of bleach on the drain in the peepshow floor? KNIF are scuzzy music for scuzzy people, you dig? You know the way garages and auto-parts stores smell? Keep your phony baloney, pussy record collectors and their milk mustaches. KNIF are dangerous throwbacks to a time that never existed. Cuban heels and sniffin’ poppers. Weird impulses and BAD reputations. Horror hosts and unforgivable tattoos. Don’t get mixed up with people like KNIF. They will get you in trouble. You will wake up on cold rooftops in strange towns with alcohol poisoning and sore bodyparts. Sucked, fucked, and tattooed. Everywhere KNIF goes, a disreputable posse of long legged bombshells with too much make-up and tight sweaters, follow. If you play KNIF at your next house party, don’t be surprised if you wake up to a room full of naked strangers with all your vintage polaroid film used up, and all the popcorn and Bacardi spilled all over the floor. Don’t book them to play your nightclub, either. You’ll only end up having to sweep up a bunch of red lacy brassieres, and leather thongs, and having to reorder a shipment of extra liquor, the next day. Who needs THAT? KNIF are bad seeds, you have been warned. Why aren’t these sexy sons a bitches touring Spain with the Fleshtones right now?
https://www.facebook.com/pages/KNIF/1447801922116795?ref=br_tf
Veglam 