Search - Nation of Ulysses :: Plays Pretty for Baby

Pick-ax through the temple

10/21/1998

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This thing is intensely unique. Combining elements of DC's straight-edge scene (Minor Threat, Fugazi et al) and New York's best noise artists (Sonic Youth, Richard Hell) with excessive socio-political diatribes, Nation of Ulysses create an album singular in its urgency. The CD struck me like a letter bomb, tempting me with an ambiguous spoken monologue in the first track, and then blowing up in my face with "A Comment on Ritual" (my vote for standout track). I can only wonder why these guys didn't get more attention. Were they too dangerous? In any case, I think if they continued, they would have spontaeously combusted within a matter of months."

Music to take over the world with!!!

07/15/1998

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Rhetoric beyond compare! Combines Situationist dogma with howling, American noise rock. Any album that has a song title,"The Kingdom of Heaven Must Be Taken By Storm" has got to be good! A must buy! Good punk rock without usual clap-trap."

New Nails

Brian T. Murphy | Austin, tx | 04/11/2008

(3 out of 5 stars)

"An entertaining band that owes its sound to a single song from Mission of Burma --- "New Nails."



Limited and derivative in that sense musically, but still loads of fun. Reviewer below has it when he wonders if this is a self-mocking middle class joke. That's exactly what it is, from the opening in which the listening audience is insulted. But, it's very well done and it represents a certain erudite disrespect among DC suburban kids that I have not heard captured this well anywhere else.



This is not a hardcore album, and it's not immediately obvious why it appears on the Dischord label except that it's a smart album by a bunch of punk kids that probably could have spent their time instead getting into Harvard or solving the Rubick's cube in 20 seconds.



But, this band is not an evolution of anything from the MacKaye circle of music -- it doesn't sound anything like Fugazi, Minor Threat, Rites of Spring, or Bad Brains. As stated above, its musical basis is a single song of Mission of Burma. If you don't know the song "New Nails" by Burma -- you won't believe it when you listen. It approaches facsimile."