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.

Caught between an embryo and a death scene,” sneers Sonny Kay as this album begins. It seems a more apt opening line than most, but maybe that’s because I’m thinking of the band’s place in the post-hardcore (and post-several other things, and, by the same logic, pre-several more). This was the VSS’ chance to assert itself as anything other than a half-formed offshoot of Kay’s Angel Hair, truly one of the more powerful and idiosyncratic demolition agents of the early 1990s. At the same time, this would be the band’s final statement before admitting failure and imploding. And then, to tie up this metaphor, there’s the matter of the keyboard.

With the exception of bands such as the by-now-departed Antioch Arrow and the by-now-active Locust and downright unclassifiable Men’s Recovery Project, The VSS were just about the only hardcore band to integrate the synthesizer into its sonic architecture; functioning not just as a garnish but something more, which gave the music an ineffable, piercing quality that could be likened to the late-70s work of the Screamers. Of course, it’s debatable whether any punk band since—despite copying their innovations—ever did anything equally interesting or new with the presence of the keyboard, despite raising it aloft as an emblem of sleek, nihilistic glamour. (Further dots could be connected to bring up, yes, electroclash, but this really isn’t the time.) So perhaps this album is a stillborn artifact of promise unfulfilled, but that doesn’t in any way dilute its status as a wonderful artifact that, like a forgotten sci-fi film, manages to thrill with its vision of an unrealized future by the very nature of this oddball dream. It is this, I predict, that will keep the album from sounding dated; it simply contains something that very few of its kind do.

I’m not just talking about mind-boggling aggression on the level of a Big Black (only, let’s say, one that continued developing along the same lines as their first, synth-buzz-laden release), but it’s certainly here. “Death Scene” starts with a mangled engine-like drone and staggering tom hits. Kay is in rare form this time around, screeching and slobbering through an array of vocal effects that make him sound like Public-Image-era John Lydon struggling to tear free from a one-man space capsule destined for obliteration. Guitar and keyboard alike go through cyclical overloads until everything suddenly halts in midsentence with lines about eating a baby and drinking its blood. From there, it’s the mesmerizing “In Minature,” with its robotic man-or-machine beat and trawling-the-depths organ chords interrupted briefly by a tinny ColecoVision-like sonic freak-out which would be humorous were it not followed by a headlong rush into the gaping maw of more warped electronics. “Sibling Ascending” allows a bit more breathing room for the listener, a majestic assault of buildups and breakdowns that recall the labyrinthine assault of Angel Hair at their harshest. Fretboard or knob-twiddling abuse? Is the whole band being run through the same distortion pedal? You make the call. (The epic title track turns whatever guess you might have made on its head, managing to harness this technology for the purpose of great beauty along the way.)

“Effigy” may be a downtempo instrumental and something of a misstep, but the meticulously constructed “Lunar Weight” allows the band to come back swinging, this time adding no shortage of warped poppiness to the band’s formula. Primitivist drum machine and keyboard alike provide memorable hooks while Kay’s go-for-the-throat approach continues in short spurts. Another quietly throbbing instrumental passes, lulling the listener into a false sense of security before the one-two assault of “What Kind of Ticks?” and “Chemical in Chemistry” that forms the record’s breathless high point. Pounding and streamlined, the band provides no shortage of angular bursts of guitar, doomed reverb-rich vocals (listen closely for another of the record’s few decipherable lines, this one about masturbation) in these two songs. It’s the latter, however, that suddenly stops on a dime and explodes into descending blasts of miasmatic noise for a minute or so, then instantly kicks back into rampaging futuristic psychedelia, that always wins me over.

Unfortunately, GSL, Kay’s current label, hasn’t said anything about reissuing this sadly out-of-print album as of late. They did the same for a VSS singles compilation in 2001 (and alluded to a possible rerelease of this record in that one’s liner notes), but, given the recent fire at Honey Bear records that destroyed many bands’ master tapes, it now seems unlikely that it will be brought to daylight. Then again, something makes me think that this music is perhaps best heard through vinyl crackle on hand-labeled CD-Rs and yellowed cassettes of college radio broadcasts; there’s a very good chance it’ll join in reputation the sought-after work of the last twenty-five years. After all, listening to or looking at the equally out-of-focus low-budget records and photographs of obscure L.A. synth-punk bands or Midwest noise-merchants, I get the same feeling I do from this record, from thinking that the VSS played what must have been an extremely cramped in-store (that’s assuming a low turnout) three blocks from my current apartment six years ago: a mixture of awe and bewilderment.