MODEL CITIZENS - NYC 1978-1979 LP (colour vinyl)

Limited edition red colour vinyl.

Highly recommended.

The John Cale produced '79 Model Citizens EP is finally available again, and with it comes unheard live recordings from Hurrah, Max's, and CBGB! "Model Citizens, attacking their instruments with poetic yet strangely ironic frenzy, reflect the frightened, scattered, painful (yet edge-of-ecstatic) world of the moment." (NY Rocker)

There were four Model Citizens – Steve Alexander, Eugenie Diserio, Tomek Lamprecht and Gloria Richards. Like so many dedicated New Yorkers, they had all come from away – Poland (Tomek), Oregon and Japan (Gloria), West Texas (Steve) and what sometimes seemed the most thoroughly distanced place of all, the comfortable New York suburbs (Eugenie). They were young, bright, beautiful, and hungry; they were (and remain) very good at their multifarious endeavors, whether painting, fashion design, graphics, conceptual art, environmental exploration, writing or simply christening something Art and then making it worthy of the term. By 1978, they were friends, matriculants at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Fine Arts, and living together in a loft building just above 125th Street in West Harlem.

Model Citizens was conceived as a collective art project not only to make rock music but to be about rock music as well.

The music was dissonant, aggressive and succinct. A song might start with a standard boogie-woogie riff only to be drowned immediately in a chaos of percussive rat-tat-tats, carnival organ, electric violin, mallet instruments, and anxious stabs to the guts of the guitars. There were no solos, no jam sessions and, while there was hard lyricism aplenty in Model Citizens songs, you had to seek it out, as you did in the city itself.