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ESSENTIAL NEW MUSIC

Essential New Music: Y Pants’ “Y Pants” And “Beat It Down”

Punk promised that anyone could do it, but it was no wave that cashed the check. For a while in the late ’70s, ensembles of unabashed non-musicians got together in lofts and fly-by-night NYC venues to make the bracing, broken sounds that Brian Eno documented on No New York. Photographer Barbara Ess, filmmaker Gail Vachon and painter Virginia “Verge” Piersol were part of the same scene that birthed DNA, Mars and 8-Eyed Spy, but instead of untuned guitars, they played ukulele, toy keyboards and drums. Their sounds may have been rudimentary, but their weaving vocals and incisive songs were anything but. They regarded laundry mishaps, societal social prescriptions and deposed dictators from a skeptically feminist perspective, and set them to music that made virtues of spring-loaded energy and structural simplicity. This LP and 12-inch EP restore their entire catalog to vinyl for the first time since 1982, and it’s about damned time.

—Bill Meyer