HURTFUL LOSS After a decade, the Pain Teens go out with a Beast by Brad Tyer, HOUSTON PRESS November 9, 1995 You could play cub reporter and as Bliss Blood and Scott Ayers a list of musical influences. You could hear a story that trails back a decase to when the two of them used to sit next to each other in anthropology classes at the University of Houston. Or you could ask around Houston and discover that they've been described at various times, more or less accurately, as an industrial noise machine, a moody sex show, an "avant-garde" coalition and a plain old rock and roll band. You could try to invent a niche to contain them, but you'd fail. All you'd really know is that together -- for what looks like the last time -- they're the Pain Teens, whose "Beast of Dreams", released last month on Trance Syndicate, caps a ten-year career as one of the city's most legitimate, if under-acknowledged exports to the contemporary rock world. Five seven-inch singles on as many labels, eight self-released cassettes, six long-players, and countless anthology appearances into the game, the Pain Teens have grown up, and decided to move on. This month, Blood, relocateds to New York, where she has plans to hire a stride pianist, since jazz classics, and release a cd of "reefer" songs fom the 1930's -- a cd she's already completed in collaboration with the rhythm section of New York's metal-thrash unit Brutal Truth. She's been listening to Middle Eastern vocal music, watching Fellini's "Satyricon", and reading feminist film theory. Ayers is staying in Houston, revitalizing his semi-dormant Anomie Records label, playing guitar in Truth Decay and preparing the debut cd of the Walking Timebombs, his one-man studio band. He spent a good part of the last year teaching himself violin by playing along to Tuvan throat singing music. If you were watching, you could see all this coming. The Pain Teens played their last live date on Halloween night in 1993, sandwiched into the middle slot of a Fudge Tunnel/Season to Risk bill. The rhythm section was canned afterward, and Blood and Ayers retreated to the womb of the studio. Blood was "tired of slogging through the same old rock and roll kind of songs" night after night, she says, and Ayers could never overcome the logistics of what he describes as "trying to do different music using rock instruments in rock clubs with soundmen who don't care and an audience full of drunks." After 1993's "Destroy Me, Lover" major labels came knocking, long-term contracts in hand, but, says Ayers, they "couldn't in good conscience go into a six-album deal feeling the kind of frustration that we were feeling." And so the Pain Teens -- who began life as a pure recording project -- evolved back into just that for one final shot before going their separate ways. And that shot's not a bad one. "Beast of Dreams" mya be the most subtle Pain Teens release yet, with Ayers' studio-built bed of sound (he's credited with guitars, drums, bass, violin, sitar, loops, noises, etc.) acting as plush, menacing support for Blood's newly focused (and newly emphasized) vocals. "I think I went from analyizing other people's emotional states, or weird case histories of killers or abused children, to analyzing my own emotional states, my own desires," says Blood. "Before, I'd always displaced them, the characters in my songs were more like somebody else." Blood's new directness is everywhere from "Coral Kiss" (it's "about Tantric sex play," she says, leaving bite marks on people,") to the cd cover itself -- a sultry shot of Blood in bed gazing straight into the camera's eye. "A lot of the lyrics," she says, "are about really strong obsessive desire, or lack thereof. The whole packages is just a vortex of obsession." One advance review described that package as "domineering feminine evil" and since Blood's been reading her feminist theory, she believes she knows the origin of that judgement. "When women are depicted in films of the 1940's as having excessive desire, they're seen as being really evil, the ultimate taboo. Their characters are always shown looking at men and women aren't supposed to look at men, they're supposed to be the object to be looked at." If Blood's theory-propped revelations ae given more conspicuous sway in "Beast of Dreams" mix than on any prior Pain Teens releases, it's still Ayers' studio trickery that lends the band its aural signature of subdued threat. "My main thing has always been the studio -- ever since I was a kid, playing with tape recorders and weird sounds, changing speed on things and playing backwards," he says. "For me, it's all just been a learning process of how to record, and at the same time how to compose. Me, personally, I'd be lost without it. It's what gives me some semblance of sanity." It's also what gives "Beast of Dreams" what Blood calls its "psychedelic repercussions, the distorted sounds that make you feel like you're tripping, or something." Somewhere on the record, Ayers has sampled the sound of Blood's creaky car door slamming and looped it as the rhythm track. Good luck finding it. And good luck recognizing Artie Shaw's "Moonray" or the cocktail jazz standard "Invitation" -- both present, but sonically transformed with squalling sitars and Paleolithic rhythms into atmospheric mood pieces. Created in the studio, free from considerations of touring, "Beast of Dreams" cuts loose the rock and roll anchors that tied albums such as 1993's "Destroy Me, Lover" to earth, and it floats into an ethereal plane that would be all but impossible to recreate in the kinds of venues a "rock" band normally plays. So in the spirit of transformation that underpins everything the Pain Teens have ever released, Blood and Ayers have chosen to transform themselves right out of being a band at all. What's left hanging, like a dark cloud somewhere between heaven and hell, is a substantial body of work that is by turns ecstatic and unlistenable, always admirable in its reach, and often admirable enough in its grasp. One one hand, it's too bad it's over. And on the other, something -- or a whole new world of somethings -- is just beginning. BEAST OF DREAMS New York Press, October 25, 1995 David Grad For more music with a nasty sexual edge, try Pain Teens' "Beast of Dreams" (Trance Syndicate). Vocalist Bliss Blood earned her kickass reputation the hard way, by actually whipping members of the audience onstage. But that was always a silly excess, her voice dripping with a domineering feminine evil that was only sullied by those stage antics. Working with tape loop/guitar maestro Scott Ayers, Blood cut her original chops on unspeakable tales of murder, rape, and mutiliation, as well as soundscapes evoking enough genuine trauma to put them miles ahead of the celebrations of sadism so popular these days. Beast is a break from that past, though Ayers does check in with some cuts of pretty unsettling noise, the album is dominated by Blood's erotic tunes, with nary a mention of bodily fluid spilled in anger. Conjuring passions that might be better left unexplored, these love songs of the damned (some given an Eastern flavor by Ayers sitar work) are far creepier than their previous explorations. It would have been interesting to see where the duo took this more nuanced demonic approach next, but we'll never find out: their label isn't admitting it yet, but Pain Teens have broken up. The good news is that Blood is moving to New York, and should be, um, harnessing all that bad energy to good effect in no time.