Nation of Ulysses
Dischord Records, the storied DC hardcore label, describes the band in a bio that's only half a joke: "a violent separatist political party and terrorist group operating out of Washington DC." Formed in spring 1988 around singer and trumpeter Ian Svenonius, guitarists Steve Kroner and Tim Green, bassist Steve Gamboa, and drummer James Canty, the Nation of Ulysses ran a hardcore show like a coup, matching thrift-store suits, manifestos handed out at the door, songs that rarely cleared two minutes. Svenonius later insisted it wasn't a gimmick: "we had literature, we had theory, we had a lifestyle we all shared" before the band could really play. By fall 1992 they were gone, dissolved rather than folded into what Svenonius dismissed as the new decade's "vacuous" indie rock.
Dale Shaw of the British music site The Quietus, an old friend of Svenonius's, remembers bassist Steve Gamboa finding an MC5 record at a Maryland thrift store as "this huge local, cultural event" for the whole band. Svenonius didn't push back, telling Shaw his generation "had rules, limits, ignorance" that a band with the whole of music history one click away would never have. It's the same discovery critics later heard surface, note for note, in Nation of Ulysses' own records.
listen forKick Out the Jams captures MC5 mid-riot, guitars and vocals shouting past each other before the title lyric even lands, a live document of a band trying to start a fight with its own audience. N-Sub Ulysses compresses that same all-in charge into two minutes, trumpet standing in for the second guitar. Critic Piero Scaruffi called it "an epic MC5-esque fanfare," a debt the band never tried to hide.
Asked where the DC scene's reckless, all-out live shows came from, Svenonius didn't hedge: "It's all the Bad Brains," he told the webzine Spectrum Culture in 2009. "Every band in DC knew the Bad Brains were the most dynamic live band... gnarly, physical, exciting." He called it the shared inheritance of his whole generation of DC bands, something a cooler, more stationary British group would never bother learning.
listen forBanned in D.C. barely runs ninety seconds, H.R.'s voice cracking into a shout over a drumbeat that never eases, built to be screamed back by a room. Ulythium chases the same effect with a different weapon: Scaruffi described it as "a war cry of sorts with a berserk cavalry trumpet," the horn doing the work a gang vocal would do elsewhere, aimed at a crowd already primed to lose it.