TAR: THREE FOR THE WORKING STIFF, 1990-1993
SELECT DISCOGRAPHY: Between 1990 and 1993, Chicago's Tar released three LPs in rapid succession. Each as great as the other, and every one a pure example of post-hardcore noise rock. Yum.
The Duchess of York, Leeds, UK: October 27, 1993:
A tiny room above the pub. (Maybe) 50 people have gathered here from all over the north of England. The resulting performance was one of the best of my life. Tar were immense: loud, tight, raw. Toast, their third, triumphant album had been out for two months. It was an awesome evening that I have never forgotten.
Blatant Dissent was an interesting post punk/ hardcore band which featured members of Tar, straight from university. Two singles and a posthumous album, Hold The Fat, on Glitterhouse, was the limit of their catalogue. Seek them out. It’s interesting to hear the formative songwriting of a band who would evolve to become masters of their craft: stripped down, no frills, riff-grinding post-hardcore.
Tar epitomised AmRep, Touch & Go and the mid-west underground of the time. There was the music, of course, but their dour, straight-faced and unpretentious personality presented an attitude that felt stable and reliable. They wouldn’t let you down.
They weren’t sexy, party-hard drug-fiends or fickle, entitled slackers.
They were the designated drivers.
They were here to work and to get the job done.
And that is precisely what they did. Their two full-length albums on AmRep are both flawless examples of the Noise Rock form. Their third album, on Touch and Go, takes that sound and energises it with a tighter recording and a more colourful presence.
Their fourth, farewell album from 1995, Over and Out, also on Touch and Go, is a White Whale for me. I missed it on vinyl at the time and have never spotted one in the wild since. It’s a pricey item, but it won’t elude me for ever.
It is not covered here because it is not an Artifact of the Vault.
For now.
I wish they’d repress the T&G material like they did with all the AmRep stuff in 2021. Tar Box is DEFINITELY worth grabbing if you ever see it for sale - the remasters are amazing.
It’ll cost you, though.
It’s also worth noting that half the band have released a new album as Deep Tunnel Project, this year and it, too, is awesome. I wrote about it here:
So - Tar had a couple things as their shtick, at least as far as lazy journalism was concerned. I only mention them here for completionism’s sake. You couldn’t read a contemporary article about them at the time that didn’t mention “Blue Collar” rock or their Alluminium Guitars. Both are accurate things to say, but feel idle to indulge.
The guitars really do give the band a unique clang, though.
But Tar are too profound to be remembered simply as “those dudes with metal guitars”.
I won’t mention them again.
Their first release on AmRep was the rifft-astic Handsome, complete with striking Spot-UV, black-on-black artwork. Six songs that ignited a genre, in many ways.
The band had already recorded it and created the artwork themselves. It was ready to go. They were about to launch it on No Blow, their own label, when Tom Hazelmyer, who had bought their debut single, Play To Win, got in touch. They swapped the No Blow logo for AmRep’s, and the rest is history.
I talk about Handsome briefly in an article I wrote about six-track EPs:
ROUNDHOUSE
AMPHETAMINE REPTILE RECORDS, 1990.
Roundhouse is Tar’s first full-length, and AmRep had only released a dozen LPs up to that point too, so it was early days for both band and label. Handsome had established what Tar were about, but it was Roundhouse that sealed it in wax.
Straight off the bat, we get the rolling, laid back, monotonous riffing that, in the best way, became their trademark. The bass and guitars were in unison throughout, and Mike Greenlees can genuinely lay claim to being the Noise Rock Phil Rudd, such is his reluctance to introduce a fill on top of his propensity for no fuss, steady back-beats.
It means that there is an immediate groove, philosophically like AC/DC, even if the tunes themselves bore little resemblance to those antipodean rock and roll leches.
Mind you… Tar did cover Hell’s Bells at the tail end of their career… so maybe I’m onto something.
Comparisons to Helmet are lazy but justified, especially on Roundhouse. It has the sway of Strap It On, but Tar’s songwriting is more consistent than their major label destined peers.
Flame on.
Roundhouse opens with two stars of the show; Les Paul Worries and Cold.
As a dual statement of intent, the one-two punch is satisfyingly hard.
There’s a really strong mid-LP stretch with Pick One, Black Track and Bad Bone - all of which continue the thumping theme, but gradually become more awkward, until Mercury Block, Gag Reflex and Thermos - the three tracks that almost finish the vinyl - introduce severe timing signatures - which end up giving Roundhouse its post-absorption identity.
It’s always been “the one with jazzy timing” to me, even though it only really occurs in those three songs to a pronounced effect.
Even so - throughout the album, the listener is cunningly lulled into a false sense of 4/4 security. There’s much more going on than that, across the board, but such is the playing, the swing and the flow of the writing, that you never really get pulled away from a consistent, four to the floor, nod.
Roundhouse is a marvel, and I’d only reluctantly suggest that album closer, Jurbo, is a weaker track than the rest, for the sake of a well-rounded opinion.
But Jurbo is a long, long way from being a dud.
Ian Burgess mixed Albini’s recording of Roundhouse originally, but check out the remaster if you have the chance. It adds power and dynamics to an already beefy recording.
Here’s the remastered version. Keep your nipples under control:
JACKSON
AMPHETAMINE REPTILE RECORDS, 1991.
It’s been hailed as the quintessential AmRep album, and is often considered to be the band’s brutalist masterpiece; Jackson is immense, from start to end. The artwork is rich, the recording is crisp and as meaty as an abattoir. There is no production credit on the album, but other sources suggest Albini had a hand in it. It sounds like he did. Of all the remasters, Jackson is king, though. It sounds huge.
Originally released when AmRep was still being distributed through TwinTone, so we’re still in the early-ish days of the label, and Jackson is certainly the most consistent and unskippable release at that point. It was uniquely noisy, dense and uncommercial, but there was something accessible about it too - I personally used it as a conversion tool for many of my peers at the time, to draw them more broadly into the wonders of the AmRep discography.
The bass growl that momentarily introduces Short Trades never fails to raise a smile. The feedback midway through is a beauty to behold. The drop out to just the bass and drums tingles your loins. The distortion on Mohr’s vocals is a perfect balance between abrasion and articulation.
It is the perfect example of Tar.
If you walk away with one thing from this article, let it be to listen to Short Trades.
Please.
Track three, Waking the King, is the next classic Tar song on Jackson - if only for that glorious snare snap on the awkward seventh silent measure of the main riff.
Once mastered on a steering wheel in the car, it’s never forgotten.
But really, any track could be taken from Jackson and used as a great example of Noise Rock songwriting, production or style. Every song has a hook - even if some are buried more deeply than others, and it’s no surprise that the band felt it needed to evolve its career beyond AmRep after it was released by moving to the more local Touch and Go for the follow-up, Toast.
Jackson is a classic. Not just of the genre, but of the format.
It’s a great, great record that punches from start to end.
But don’t take my word for it, listen yourself:
TOAST
TOUCH & GO RECORDS, 1993.
Mohr’s tribute to breath mints, Altoids, Anyone?, slams the band back into the forefront of our minds after nearly two years away. It remains one of my favourite Tar songs and also one of the best song-titles ever. If only I could understand WTF John’s singing, my life would be complete. There’s no lyrics online that I can find.
Let’s hope it really is about sharing those sweet minty confections to combat a heavy breathers’ space invasion.
Barry White follows in spectacular fashion. The sound separation is particularly clear on it; the high tinkling of the rides and hats of Greenlees’ kit elevates the recording and gives it more depth than previous efforts.
Perhaps I’m just subconsciously influenced by the album artwork; sounds always take on the vague colours of their album sleeves for me… Chromesthesia is a thing.
Toast feels clearer, with more treble than the original AmRep releases.
Less beef, more space for sides.
Quieter Fellow shows off this well - the bass tone and core riff is a high end loop with the clang becoming a more apparent focus point than before in the sound spectrum.
Somewhat confusingly, one of the highlights of the album is Clincher, which would go on to be the title of their next release - a seven song EP - none of which were actually Clincher.
The song is interesting for its textures - again the band are employing high end clang on the bass, making it sound somewhere between a bass and a guitar.
There’s still heft to the songs, but there’s more of a “factory floor” feeling to the music, which, I suppose, emphasises that blue-collar thing that so many journos were desperate to talk about at the time. The band sounds industrial in a non-Throbbing Gristle way. All hard-hats, steel toe-caps and high-vis vests against a thrum of lathes, machine cutters, hydraulic presses and union rules.
Giblets is a melodic mid-album highlight:
“Everybody says slow down… relax…”.
I think the secret to Toast is its texture. If Roundhouse is the awkward one and Jackson is the brutal one, Toast is the spacious one that’s happy to different things with the sounds.
This is especially true with album closer, Theme, which is the briefest song on the LP and has a weird simplicity and swing to it that feels unlike anything else on the album. It’s an oddly anti-climactic way to end the record.
Although if you’re willing to wait (or f-fwd) fifteen minutes on the CD and digital formats, you’ll be entertained by the throwaway track, French Horn, which is an even more bizarre song to sign off with and which definitely doesn’t sound like anything else Tar ever recorded.
Tar would go on to record one more album, 1995’s Over and Out, on T&G, before breaking up. A career retrospective, 1988-1995, would follow in 2013 (on Chunklet Industries, with a free Tar matchbook) and the aforementioned, remastered, self-released Tar Box, which contained all the AmRep output, in 2021. Otherwise, the band went sadly quiet.
For me, anyway, they were much missed, so I was especially excited to hear Deep Tunnel Project earlier this year. As time passed, Tar have been a cornerstone band for me. Jackson gets regular spins. It’ll always be my go to of their discography, but the truth is that of all the three LPs covered here, there is no bad album and there are no bad songs.
Tar were unparalleled in the sheer consistent quality of their output compared to their peers.
Perhaps it’s a good thing that there were only ever these records. They didn’t last long enough to release a shitty record, and that’s why I still hold them in such high esteem.
Regardless; if you haven’t yet been exposed to their many meaty, metronomic melodies, it’s never too late to be feathered - and if you haven’t revisited them in a while, get on it; you won’t regret it.
Over and Out.
Ave, Riff Monkeys!
Tar on Touch and Go's Bandcamp
What an incredibly underrated band. I so dearly miss my Clincher poster that adorned my high school and college bedroom walls…
In the mid 90s, whenever I would visit a new record store, one of the gauges that let me know if this was a “serious” store was whether they had Tar’s AmRep releases in stock. (Another was whether they carried Bedhead’s releases, also a super underrated band at the time btw)
Only thing I would add to your excellent article is a shout out to On a Transfer. Just a monster of a song. Blew my mind the first time I heard it.
Thanks for highlighting Deep Tunnel Project, btw. Didn’t know John and Mike were playing together again.
Thank you for the article. It’s a great reason to revisit this truly extraordinary band. I’ve only heard Roundhouse so far. I’ll definitely plan an interesting listening evening.