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Suspect Devices >> Montreal's "best kept secretion" or just a band that never "was"? by RUPERT BOTTENBERG
One sees this in his comics, such as the self-immolating smear job he delivered to the Mirror for our all-comix issue in January. One also sees it in his films and performances, as anyone who has witnessed his horrifically honest slideshow How Did I Get So Anal can attest. His latest project continues the trend. Trembles is compiling an exhaustive book documenting the two-decade career of his band, the American Devices. He sums up his motivation rather concisely: "No one else seems to give a shit." "What I hope to do with this whole book idea is bring out something that's so painfully subjective that no one else could have done it. So that it will almost come off as a parody. Because in the end, we're a band that nobody knows." The working title is Snub: The Secret History of the American Devices. Of note, though, is the subtitle: The Band That Never "Was." "It's kind of a pun," explains Trembles, "because for one thing we never really got anywhere with this band. When you think that we've been around for nearly 20 years, and what have we got to show for it?" This writer was first subjected to the Devices a lifetime ago, as a scrawny 13-year-old punk rock neophyte. My quest for an introduction to the bold new concept of "the local scene" had led me to purchase Primitive Air Raid, a compilation of Montreal's sonic underground. Squeezed in among the parade of carbon-copy hardcore bands, Genetic Control and such, was a track called "Spontaneous Combustion." The song was as complex and nuanced as the rest was blunt and simplistic. For lack of a better term, it was the album's token 'post-punk' track. "Back at that time," Trembles recalls, "we weren't welcomed into the punk scene with open arms. I remember a specific review of that album that raved about all the stuff that sounded hardcore and dismissed everything else, including us, as 'the other stuff.' I got a kick out of being categorized that way." But categorizing the Devices is complicated. Cryptic ramblings, clever wordplay, convoluted rhythmic shifts. Intricate guitar lines squirming around each other like snakes in a basket. Fragments of country twang and bubblegum pop genius collapse into autistic idiocy, only to ricochet back seconds later as something else entirely. "We've always tried to play fast and convoluted, loud and distorted. A lot of people, on first impression, find it unintelligible." But frustrated listeners were only one of the tribulations the Devices faced, coming of age in the P.C. dark ages of the '80s. In their music and in attendant artwork (the cover of their sole LP Decensortized, the short film The Abortion That Lived) the band wallowed unflinchingly in themes of alienation, bodily functions and sexual violence. Thus they found themselves at odds with what Trembles, in the book's early draft, calls "a bizarre, humourless, hypocritical, generic, neurotic political correctness mania that would sweep anglophone Montreal's so-called 'alternative' media in the mid- to late-'80s." Plagued by misinterpretation, compounded by a staunch refusal to clean up the messes they've made, the American Devices would graduate into the '90s with their enemies substantially outnumbering their friends. All things considered, it's possible that the Devices are their own worst enemies. If only for their unwillingness to "play the game," court the record labels, aggressively work the media. How else do you explain a band as original as American Devices touting a discography that would fit on a cocktail napkin? "In the eyes of most I'm a complete failure--I've got nothing to show for any of this shit," says Trembles. "But the word failure is in the eyes of the beholder. Sometimes I don't consider myself a failure and sometimes I do." One can almost hear the intestines tightening around his neck as he says this. American Devices launch their Nineties Demos cassette at Barfly on Saturday, April 18, 9pm, $3. Colonel Dink Bumwar open
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I've always admired Rick Trembles for a particular fakiresque skill he has. As a cartoonist, filmmaker and guitarist, Trembles is capable of tearing his own guts out and promptly strangling himself with them, his pretty puss registering complete deadpan all the while.