Pulsars
Having recently regained the rights to their self-titled debut, 90’s New Wave band Pulsars are now finally able to re-issue it remastered, with the original edgier mixes of a number of tracks and the ominous, original cover artwork. The Pulsars re-release will appear September 13 on CD and for the first time on 12” LP vinyl, digital download and streaming platforms on the Tiny Global Productions label, alongside festival appearances and East Coast tour dates.
We’ve all heard that old yap about how the first Velvet Underground album didn’t sell many records, but everyone who did hand over the cash for a copy ended up starting a band. The emergence of rock’s first legendary cult band gave rise to a new era of popular music in which innovation and originality came quickly – commercial fortune or not – only to be superseded by something newer just as quickly. The startling array of genres and sub-genres from proto-punk to the dominance of ‘alternative rock; in the ’90s was unparalleled . . . until it collapsed.
PULSARS mark the end of that era. Leader Dave Trumfio (vocals, guitar, synths production and most anything else) and his younger brother Harry (drums) grew up playing music in a suburban Chicago basement. While still in his teens, Dave abandoned college-level music production and engineering studies to focus on songwriting and artist endeavors; his native talents soon found him an apprenticeship at Seagrape Studios working with talents as disparate as house music pioneer Mr Fingers, British first-wave stalwarts The Pretty Things and dub plate sessions with the legendary reggae producer / musician Niney The Observer . . . all within months of his first real go behind the mixing desk. Chicago’s past musical glories felt far in the past then, replaced by a sea of skinny tie power pop bands, poofy hair metal combos of some timidity and a few rough-hewn exponents of sub-Buzzcocks punk and Fiorucci-ready new wave. Ignoring it all, Dave ran a small studio in a shared house he rented with friends before taking the risky – and expensive – plunge into opening a ‘real’ studio on the northwest corner of Wicker Park, soon to burst into a degree of infamy due to a small contingent of cult heroes who lived there for cheap rent and cheaper bars – Liz Phair, Eleventh Dream Day, Big Black, Urge Overkill, Tortoise et al.
Dave’s role in all of this was minimal by nature; he preferred to record acts from farther afield – Billy Bragg, then-recent Chicago transplants Wilco, The Mekons, Young Marble Giants guitarist and songwriter Stuart Moxham, Barbara Manning, Captain Beefheart’s main man Gary Lucas, an array of other acts from Iceland, Australia and all corners of the UK. Business was good, and it grew.
A quick writer of odd pop ditties, one day Dave called in his brother Harry and recorded – in a single afternoon session – a set of nine demos known. The story’s been related countless times, but within weeks the band was opening for Oasis and found itself being courted by a dozen labels. Their few local shows were undefinable. Dave played guitar and sang, Harry drummed triggered a reel of additional music, often with video backing . . . which dazzled spectators in that pre-laptop era. After months of negotiations, the band signed a multi-million deal with Almo Sounds, a new label begun by A&M founders Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss and distributed by Geffen. It was – and likely still is – the largest deal ever offered to an emerging Chicago musical act.
The band engaged in numerous tours to support their self-titled debut, playing with Sean Lennon & Cibo Matto, Blur, Supergrass, and many others, as well as seemingly infinite jaunts to Japan, where Dave and Harry were hailed as heroes of subversive minimalist pop – the ecstatic screams of young fans at the first few notes of “Submission To The Master” at first bewildering the brothers. Suddenly, the Almo Sounds deal with Geffen fell apart at the start of a tour supporting then-current sensations Weezer. Promotion was pulled; radio support for the first single from the album collapsed in a mere moment.
Due to contractual vagaries, the band was allowed to complete a second (unreleased) album just before the label folded. And that was it, until the news of the 2021 release of Pulsars’ “Lost Transmissions”, a collection of unheard songs and versions that the band recorded before and during their short-term deal. Rolling Stone offered their self titled debut “Pulsars” as one of the 40 greatest albums ever recorded by an act with one real album:
“One of the gems of the mid-Nineties alt-rock gold rush, the lone album by the brotherly duo the Pulsars is a shimmering collection of blissed-out synth-pop peppered with references to long drives to Wisconsin, pet robots and S&M. Dave and Harry Trumfio had collaborated on music since they were young; and Dave had worked with indie luminaries like the Mekons and the Handsome Family at his Chicago studio Kingsize Soundlabs. Pulsars – which came out on Herb Alpert’s short-lived Almo Sounds label – was a gorgeous love letter to the early New Wave era’s dark side, with tracks like “Suffocation” transcending misery with irresistible choruses and pillowy synths.”
Likewise, Trouser Press:
“The album is one of the singular musical accomplishments of the ’90s — with its combination of indelible melodies and seemingly pre-mature bedroom vulnerability and obsessions, it’s a science fair version of Pet Sounds for the computer age. Pulsars begins with a distorted countdown, a brief entreaty to “the robot” to “come out and play” on an innocuous, albeit inexplicable, note, with “Tunnel Song,” a pulsing, tuneful ode to the underwater traffic tubes of Pittsburgh and New York (“The Holland Tunnel is just like a funnel”). From there, Trumfio compares love to “Suffocation,” urges “submission to the master” and offers a Faustian bargain to a would-be pop star in the lacerating “Owed to a Devil.” On a less ominous plane, he enthuses that “Technology” will never die (so much for rock’n’roll), tells “Tales About Tomorrow,” raves about “My Pet Robot” (whose name is Theodore) and describes “Silicon Teens” (which has an amazing solo stitched together from a swoony slide guitar and crypto-industrial videogame noises), prepares for a rocket ship ride in “Runway” — all set to extraordinarily hook-laden tunes and boppy mixtures of guitars, synthesizers and drum machines that visit various rooms of retro-ness. The sequencing, which connects, even overlaps, tracks furthers the Master Cylinder sensibility of a grandly plotted schematic diagram. “Das Lifeboat,” which compares a self-destructive woman to a sinking escape vehicle, soars the album to a gorgeous cinematic finish on the stringly wings of an orchestra arranged and conducted by Tony Visconti. Technology may never die, Pulsars aver, but the group ultimately concludes that there’s more to music than transistors. And that’s as fine a faretheewell as one needs.”
Of course neither outlet, nor their fans, knew of the band’s many unreleased songs and several nearly-completed albums, which only now are seeing the light of day.
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