SSM, CoCoComa, Screaming Yellow Zonkers
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CoCoComa are garage punk in the best sense of both words. They excel at garage’s three-chord bomp, sweetening it with a hint of pop, but they tear through their songs at punk’s immoderate speeds. In the past year they’ve put out four singles, two of them splits, on four different labels, including Chicago upstart Shit Sandwich and Memphis trash-rock mainstay Goner Records, and sometime in 2007 Goner plans to release the full-length they just finished. The Empty Bottle, by no means the easiest place to get a foot in the door, has been unusually supportive of the band. Over the past ten months CoCoComa has landed a string of plum opening slots on shows the club has booked–for the Oblivians at the final Horizontal Action Blackout, for the Black Lips at the Logan Square Auditorium, for the Reigning Sound at the Bottle–and they’ve got another one next Friday, opening for SSM. But they aren’t about to let their success so far tempt them onto the rock-star treadmill. If they have anything like a motto, it’s “Fuck it.”
They became a trio soon afterward with the addition of keyboardist Mike Fitzpatrick, one of Lisa’s bandmates in Headache City. That band is definitely their main gig–Mike’s the front man and Lisa plays drums–but the quantity and quality of CoCoComa’s vinyl output has done a lot to convince people that they’re more than a side project. “For a while the reviews would compare us to Headache City,” Lisa says, “but I don’t feel like there’s a reason to compare them. I don’t think that it’s crazy to think that you’d be into different types of music.”
One result has been the proliferation of a wide range of takes on the genre’s sonic hedonism–Headache City and CoCoComa are just two points on that spectrum. “It’s great because it’s not a cookie-cutter 60s garage sound,” Bill says. “I can’t speak for anyone in Detroit, but it seems like a lot of the garage bands from Detroit sort of take that and ape it or mimic it. It’s more of a pure sound, whereas I think a lot of bands in Chicago take that and filter it through the other things that they listen to. I think it’s a really refreshing attitude, especially towards that kind of music, because it can get so stale and boring.” There’s not much point in taking all of this too seriously, anyway. “We’re not trying to change the world.”
