Skull Practitioners– Negative Stars
New York’s Skull Practitioners recently released their first full-length album, Negative Stars (In the Red), almost ten years into being a band, and it was well worth the wait. The sludgy-pop-psych-noise trio perfectly teeters between grime and sugar on this latest release, a slightly slicker follow up to their 2019 lower-fi Death Buy EP.
The band itself was born out of a Craig’s List ad and a band idea misfire. All the members were playing in other bands at the time, most notably Jason Victor in The Dream Syndicate, when Kenneth Levine (bass), put out an ad for more members to expand his then current project. “We wanted to go to a five-piece, and needed a drummer and another guitar player,” he says. “We put an ad out on Craigslist and met Jason (Victor, guitar/vocals) and Alex (Baker, drums/vocals) that way. Alex was just two weeks into living in New York. We played together for a while, and then it just sort of dissolved. Jason, Alex, and I actually had more of a shared, common musical perspective, and the three of us decided, ‘Let’s stick together with just us three.’”
So Skull Practitioners was born and they quickly recorded a limited cassette-only debut, st1, which they self-released in 2014 and out of necessity left sole vocal duties to Baker while behind the kit. And thus began their search for someone to front the band to provide the right voice. “We kept looking for a new singer, and that person never came,” says Victor. “None of us wanted to sing at all. After a while, we had been together as a three-piece for so long that we had our thing, and it became difficult for someone to fit into it. So we pulled a Genesis! The best thing about it is that now all three of us will sing, and that takes the pressure off just one of us.” Levine adds, “Whoever writes, sings. It’s their expression, so they should say what they have to say.”
Skull Practitioners (photo by John Bottomley)
The opening track “Dedication,” sung by Levine, is a garagey post-punk masterpiece full of discord and resolve. Its thunderous tom-tom onset, pounds through a wall of noisey guitars and snotty quick vocals, letting you know from jump that this record isn’t fucking around. By the time you get to the lead hook and octave anti-chorus fakeout, it’s the perfect pop overdose. I barely get to expertly syncopated guitar solo 4/5ths of the way through before I gotta start the track over to re-up my fix.
No stranger to long songs (the tracks on 2019’s Death Buy range from two minutes to well over ten), on Negative Stars the band seems to strike balance for the most part somewhere in the middle. You’d think the heftier run times would fall to the instrumental tracks, “Fire Drill” and “Nelson D,” which both allow the trio to really flex their skill over myriad musical landscapes. However, it is in fact the standout slower stripped back groove, “Intruder,” sung by Victor, swirling in X-esque chorus effect for seven and a half minutes that feels like late night driving through the shitty parts of the city in your rusted out Pontiac Firebird.
Skull Practitioners live (photos by Kate Hoos)
From start to finish, Negative Stars is buried in so many catchy melody layers that erode away and crack in all the coolest places, carrying along with it an underlying hint of doom. And while on this LP, the band may have reached their truest form to date on record, nothing beats seeing them shred live. Says Levine, “I think the band is represented at its best in a live setting. That’s where we’re in our element. Playing live, we’re out for blood.” Victor adds, “With the live thing, we just want to destroy, in the nicest, most friendly way—we’re nice people. Someone said about us, ‘These guys look like a bunch of accountants.’ People don’t really know what to expect before they hear us. I think they’re all a little surprised, maybe, and we like having that element of surprise— ‘We’re gonna blow your minds a little.’”
Having opened shows for Lydia Lunch, Hammered Hulls (see our coverage), Live Skull, and In the Red label mates the Wolfmanhattan Project, Skull Practitioners will be playing next with Jon Spencer & The HITmakers and Licks at TV Eye in on February 4th.
Negative Stars is out now via In the Red and available on Bandcamp and all major streamers.