or better or worse, we here at Stylus, in all of our autocratic consumer-crit greed, are slaves to timeliness. A record over six months old is often discarded, deemed too old for publication, a relic in the internet age. That's why each week at Stylus, one writer takes a look at an album with the benefit of time. Whether it has been unjustly ignored, unfairly lauded, or misunderstood in some fundamental way, we aim with On Second Thought to provide a fresh look at albums that need it.

The output of some bands contain, for better or for worse, what may be viewed in retrospect as clues to their (let us say) final destinies. Maybe it’s the time the Mould/Hart songwriting ratio tipped the scale in one’s favor, or the time the Beatles or Can first let George or Damo sing; maybe it’s the buoyant, beat-laced evanescence of My Bloody Valentine’s “Soon” that now seems to foreshadow a great quizzical hereafter of silence. If we’re talking about The VSS—whose name, by the way, is an acronym for absolutely nothing whatsoever (we may as well get past that now; also, now that this release actually clocks in at 21:54)—one first has to look back to Angel Hair, the former band of VSS frontman Sonny Kay and guitarist Josh Hughes. That band, to the legendary delight or horror of some (this being perhaps the ne plus ultra of a depends-on-who-you-ask conundrum), recorded a grisly cover of Bauhaus’ “Stigmata Martyr,” which all but formulates the question, well, VSS, full-blown goth? Goth reinterpreted through the lens of blistering, nihilistic art-hardcore? Well, yes and no.

Keyboards are the missing element of the equation, which The VSS employed to a great degree on their now all-but-impossible-to-come-by 1997 LP Nervous Circuits. But before the oscillating horrors of that album, the band gradually metamorphosed into what has been described as a bizarre hybrid of early PiL (but not that watered-down, polished Radio 4 stuff; we’re talking an attempt at the monstrous qualities of the band that recorded “Theme” and “Religion II”), Christian Death, and one can only imagine what else—for my money, there’s more than a little Chrome tossed in, and maybe what Cabaret Voltaire’s “Nag Nag Nag” would sound like if it’d been mastered properly. This has been documented on the band’s first three 7”s, nicely compiled by Sonny’s own (and itself rather infamous) GSL label. From the liner notes of the 2000 pressing, Sonny says (in a mildly baroque writing style not dissimilar to my own): “At the time it was originally released, this CD was necessitated (in part) as a way of correcting what was becoming The VSS’ chronic poor judgment with respect to the labels who issued our records,” and the tale of an underrated yet fascinating band relegated to the margins of history in much the same way, say, Swell Maps or The Hated were in the past adds to the mysterious they-sure-were-forward-thinking-weren’t-they allure of this material. I tried to dredge up some information on their origins via Google’s Usenet search, but all I discovered was that they played what must have been a very, very cramped in-store at a record store not thirty paces from my current apartment five years ago. Alas, lacking a Wayback Machine, etc., etc., all I can do is review this document.

Things start off, on the band’s self-titled 7”, as sounding like a somewhat more subdued take on Angel Hair’s stylings, though whether that note of subtlety comes from restraint, fatigue, or a will to represent an aesthetic chilliness is anyone’s guess. The delicate guitar chime that opens “The Flesh Inside” is soon replaced with a somewhat muted thunder, some mid-period-Fugazi-esque fretboard-scraping dynamics, and things develop into a midtempo stomp where Sonny, we’re somewhat startled to find, has evolved his painful, limits-of-the-human-voice shout into a note-perfect imitation of John Lydon’s reverbed bile-spew in, yes, the early days of PiL. The vicissitudes of the band’s meaty guitar work—one form of distortion blending into a roughly melodic line—are the main focus here, and “Indian-sick” (easily the most melodic blast of vitriol this record has to offer) follows suit, though by this time, the band’s somewhat pitiless reluctance to follow up on the promise of any slight relief from guitar noise (when things seem like they could be taking a turn for the less claustrophobic, i.e. by the entrance of a slight break from the fury, you’re proven wrong) is becoming clear. Sounding like a snottier take on Fugazi’s “Smallpox Champion,” this track leads directly into the fiercer “Evolution” and “Silt, etc.”, which boast perplexing-yet-distressing lines like “The color of blood in me / Between a sex shop and a coral reef” and “The exit exorcised the gums and left the teeth.”

By the next two tracks (from a split release with T. Tauri), Sonny is singing through a barrage of vocal effects that produce the frankly amazing sensation of being yelled at via speaker-phone by a congested man on PCP; the hums and drones of mangled synthesizers are also abetting the band’s pounding attack. The guitar line of “Muscle” is given a choral accompaniment from something in the Juno family, while the drums pound as mercilessly as ever. Song structure also takes a turn for the stranger in this neck of the woods: the song boasts at least three discernible false endings, laced with atonal keyboard-through-a-guitar-amp shrieks, while “The Fist and Fingers” feints and twists, with a downright funky drum break, some confusing silences, and no shortage of naked hostility in the form of tortured-Amiga sequencer runs; the guitars, hardly recognizable this time around, only abet the warped and twisted vocal attacks, and a tribal pulse near the end of things only adds to the visceral unease.

The band’s final 7” on Gravity Records (to followers of this site: this should give you an advance warning as to how I feel about it) perfects the assault, equal parts punk rock and post-whatever laceration; “I Cut My Teeth” races and recoils against its own obnoxious vocal blasts, boasting the unexpected surprise of a (yes) mellow midsection immediately followed by a goosebump-inducing full-on assault. “The Flesh Inside” begins with an ominous toll, then revs up into an unrelenting, panoramic thrash nightmare that nevertheless manages to remain fiendishly catchy, spitted cadences, whiplashes of keyboard-orchestra and all. (Presumably for the fans, Sonny lets out more than a few no-larynx-holds-barred shrieks.) The slow and merciless multi-part suite of “Crawling in Place” finally seems to perfect the dirge Angel Hair tried to create with “The Wax Museum,” complete with moments of effects-pedal overload, drum-machine pulse, and steely guitar trickle.

Continued interest in The VSS has largely been attributed to the band’s influential status, but I can’t exactly think of who they have influenced, or rather who took that influence in a positive direction: The Locust and the Faint are obvious latter-day references, but the former seems like—I wanted to use a horror-film-director analogy, honest, but this will have to do—the sub-Koonsian conceptual artist to this group’s De Kooning, and the latter’s token slow number only sounds like a dim replica of this band’s, and despite their atmosphere of general debauched evil, rarely sound like they intend this stance to be anything beyond an extended pick-up line or statement of cool (this is not to say that they aren’t a powerful presence live), let alone mean it in quite the way Sonny Kay, who by this time I absolutely have to agree with, and reiterate, Jess Harvell, who bestowed him the mantle of “best screamer of the ‘90s.” With that in mind, I wouldn’t hasten to recommend this record to Angel Hair fans who couldn’t get enough of that unique terror the first time around.