Today’s Vinyl: 9353

I spent a summer in a study abroad program in the former Yugoslavia back when I made the somewhat misguided decision to minor in Serbo-Croation at Texas. There I met a hardcore nut from D.C. named Bill who wore big black ass-kicking boots and brought a box of tapes of some of the most random shit I’d ever heard. I played him Camper Van Beethoven’s Black Flag cover (Wasted) and he introduced me to the vivid weirdness of 9353, a D.C. band fronted by (so I was told) an emergency room technician named Bruce Merkle (née Bruce Miles Hellington) who had an obsession with murder, paranoia and weird sex which he voiced through vocals that ranged from a deep, low chuff to a horrifying falsetto. A little Misfits (or maybe Nick Cave), a lot of Joy Division and a big dose of black humor.

This record, titled We Are Absolutely Sure There is No God is loaded with revenge fantasies, childhood fear and social anxiety, and sports an over-the-top cover of “Born to be Wild” laced with high-pitched screams and howling. And yet, the whole enterprise is pretty damn hummable, a dark and funny retort to the sparkle of new wave by a bunch of guys who’d clearly spent too much time listening to Unknown Pleasures but preferred whistling past the graveyard to threading their heads through the noose.

I managed to convince a friend traveling to D.C. to go scour a few record stores and he found this for me back around 1990 or so. The cover is a collage assembled, if I recall correctly, by Merkle himself. This was reissued a few years ago by Adult Swim as an expanded CD called Make Your Last Days Loud Days.

You can stream a number of 9353 songs here.