Fiasco - God Loves Fiasco

New York has been an incredible place to be this summer: an outspoken socialist mayor doing generally great things, a bunch of down-ballot political wins, and an unbridled energy abounding due to World Cup related-tomfoolery and OH YEAH THE KNICKS WINNING A FUCKING RING!!! Anyway it's gotten me thinking about New York and prior New Yorks that have existed, and that seemed as good a time as any to finish the draft I started a bit ago about a Great New York Band that never was.

Any born and raised New Yorker will happily tell you that growing up on Long Island does not count. They would be right, of course; The small, preppy enclave where I was reared was a world away from the city's cultured freneticism. But because of proximity there were pipelines—largely unidirectional—via which the mannerisms and knowledge of city dwellers diffused outward towards us. To wit: my friend took an acting class in lower Manhattan one summer and returned in the fall with both a mammoth crush on a girl from the boroughs and a download of the 23-track opus God Loves Fiasco.

Fiasco was a trio from Park Slope—guitarist and singer Jonathan Edelstein, dummer Julian Bennett-Holmes, and bassist Lucian Buscemi (son of Steve Buscemi, who was a professed fan)—and was the toast of a then-prevalent "kid rock" scene. But as relative elder statesmen they quickly got their cup of coffee and never looked back, leveling up to play in the big leagues of New York DIY. Within a year of being name-checked by the New York Times as juvenile royalty, Fiasco had cobbled together their debut album, a furious revue of punk stylings that spanned decades in its 80-minute runtime.

God Loves Fiasco was recorded in the Buscemis' basement and released on Beautiful Records, the label co-run by Buscemi and Bennett-Holmes, when the band themselves couldn't have been older than 17*. It certainly sounds like a teenage fever dream, which is to say it fucking rules. The mix is fairly muddy, with Edelstein's voice largely blending into the noise around him, and most of the sounds are pushed way into the red. But this is a feature, not a bug; and with it Fiasco channels the unbridled energy of youth rebellion.

*"Debut Full Length! Released on CD. We had NO idea how to record but we did it anyway HAHAAHAAHA!!" goes the bio on the album's Bandcamp.

"Hot House" opens with a light feint, a clean descending guitar lick that dissolves into a Black Flag-style freakout. And from there Fiasco is off to the races, trying on a melange of styles, shaking off ideas like a dog might shake off rain. There's plenty of SST and Dischord in the DNA here. Some of their shaggier passages resemble early Arctic Monkeys; other times I'd liken them to hearing The Rapture as broadcast through a blown out speaker. A song like "Wild Goose Chase Rag" might play as a joke were it not executed so deftly. But remarkably God Loves Fiasco never lands on the wrong side of scattershot; especially for a trio of teenagers, Fiasco were very adept at knowing exactly when to bludgeon a great riff into submission versus when to pivot to something new entirely.

Take the standout "Stargaze" for instance, where they ride the same melodic idea for most of the song's first six minutes, modulating in volume and tone rather than chords. It's almost hypnotic, setting up the best of several "drops" that occur on the album. "You'll see me on our dark nights/High and forlorn/Civilization should never end/It should just be reborn," Edelstein screams. Until suddenly, as the song seems like it should end, Fiasco locks into a brand new neck-snapping groove that builds and builds for the final two minutes. Later on is "Rod Ferrell," a queasy retelling of the true story of a murderous teenager who may have believed himself to be a vampire, which also happens to feature an onslaught of their best musical ideas. The recurrent B-section of the song's first half is infectious enough that most bands would milk that for all it was worth. Fiasco instead switch gears midway through, introducing a Sabbath-esque metal riff that they play around with until they decide to simply blow the whole thing into cacophony. It's complete lizard-brain shit; in short, it's amazing.

Everything comes to a head in the nine minute closer "Don't Mind the Killings," which is so jammed with ideas as to almost be prog rock. It starts with something akin to a horror movie score—replete with a whisper-sung "Chiiiiiildreeeeen"—launches into straightforward post-hardcore, then a free jazz-inspired breakdown, and then what I can only describe as their take on the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It ends with some shrieking noise ("No matter how it turns out in the end/It's the night of the hunter once again") and a long drone of feedback. If God loves a fiasco, then they sure as hell delivered one.

Then the three members went off to college, around which time they cut a much shorter, all-instrumental sophomore LP Native Canadians, applying their knobs-to-11 distortion to zanier rhythms and time signatures. They told Gothamist in 2009 that they had already finished a follow up, one that would reintegrate vocals into this new math-ier sound, but it never materialized. The last official Fiasco offering was a one-off single, released after they broke up in 2012. It's the closest they ever pushed their sound towards Sonic Youth, with a slinky harmonics-led verse**. Naturally, they offset the comparison with a bright, frantically tapped guitar riff on the chorus.

**An aside: Jonathan Edelstein is the only man I've ever really noticed emulating Kim more than Thurston or Lee on vocals when doing a Sonic Youth type thing. Not necessarily meaningful... but interesting.

While they were active Fiasco played alongside (or, via the wild cross-pollination of the DIY scene at the time, in) a litany of other local bands: Turbosleaze, No One and the Somebodies, Michael Jordan, Le Rug, and of course Old Table, the long-running project of Westchester's Will Moloney, which existed as a kind of ground zero for tri-state underground rock that has spanned generations and birthed multiple household names. These shows occurred in a patchwork of Brooklyn venues now-shuttered (the infamous Death By Audio, the less infamous Old Stone House in Park Slope) and still active (Market Hotel, a solid 15 years before "Recession Pop"-themed parties became a necessary source of revenue). These bands are products of a bygone New York underground, a scuzzy rock-and-roll scene that bridged the tail end of Meet Me in the Bathroom-era Williamsburg and the more bedroom-inflected scenes that coalesced around Double Double Whammy and Orchid Tapes.

Fiasco also shared stages with early incarnations of Deerhunter, No Age, and U.S. Girls, bands who gestated in similar primordial muck and would go on to much greater national success after rising in parallel through their own local scenes. But neither Fiasco nor their ilk meaningfully broke containment. In announcing their breakup on Blogspot, they promised the eventual free release of their third album "The Front," which had been languishing in purgatory for about four years. As you can probably guess, that never happened. Five demos from "The Front" were ultimately dropped in a compilation on Jonathan Edelstein's personal bandcamp years later. Fiasco's breakup announcement concludes: "For the record, we were a noise-pop-math-punk band. Don't you forget it."

Now time for a fun anecdote. The friend who put me on to Fiasco was the singer of my old emo band, and in 2018 we caught wind that they were going to reunite to open for Le Rug*** at Sunnyvale. After the show we introduced ourselves to Jonathan Edelstein and ended up asking if there were any world where Fiasco would headline a show with us if we booked it. He said that the band couldn't, but that he would be happy to play solo under any of his aliases if that worked, and we were over the moon to maybe get to play with a personal hero and said yes.

So we exchanged emails and set up at a show at El Cortez, a Mexican restaurant off the Morgan L stop, with a solo guitarist we knew from high school, and a group called The Missing Suns (basically the only band that would reliably return our emails). Jonathan confirmed the week of that he was still free for the show and then never showed up or responded to any subsequent communication. This was for the best: we had a handful of good songs, but a lot more bad songs, and we weren't very competent on stage. We played to an audience of seven assorted siblings and roommates. We took a lot of tequila shots afterwards (and, let's be honest, we took a few before our set as well).

According to Bandcamp, Jonathan now lives in Massachussetts. I don't hold this experience against him at all; like a fellow rock star once said, "You do what you want when you're poppin." Our band broke up two months later, after a fight that basically ended my friendship with the guy who first played me Fiasco. But in January of the next year, against all odds, my best friend took a girl to El Cortez on a first date and they've been together since. DIY doesn't die: everyone just turns 30.

Recommendation Corner:

READ:

Sheila Heti, Motherhood - my roommate strongly recommended How Should a Person Be to me earlier this year and I didn't really care for it, but I enjoyed this a lot. Probably because, as mentioned earlier, I'm in my 30s now

Chris Good "Not Your Keys, Not Your Songs" - I'm enough of a Luddite that I saw Nina Protocol and said, "seems cool I guess," before navigating straight back to Bandcamp. This article does a good job of breaking down The-Crypto-of-It-All in a way computer dummies (like me) can understand

WATCH:

Between the NBA playoffs, the World Cup, and just general business with work and various music-related obligations, I've been pretty tapped on the movie front lately. But I've heard that season 4 of "Southern Hospitality" rips and I'm very excited to dig into that when I have a free moment