A friend on a message board I read was recently asking for songs about lizards. Me being who I am, my reaction to the question was "What, all lizards? That's _way_ too broad a question!"
As a result I've narrowed it down to one particular sort of lizard - the skink.
Skinks are lizards belonging to the family Scincidae and the infraorder Scincomorpha. With more than 1,500 described species, the Scincidae are one of the most diverse families of lizards.
Yes, that's just copied and pasted from Wikipedia. I do it because I didn't actually know what a skink was when I started this post. I had it confused with a stoat. I don't know what a stoat is, except that it's smaller than a weasel, and if I looked it up I'd never get to the music and just spend all day talking about animals I should've learned about in school.
Skinks, then. Prior to this recent trawl I had only one skink-related record, "On the Wings of a Skink" by the Reptile Palace Orchestra. There's only one skink-related song title - "Four Skinks". However, the song is not honestly skink-related; like most of the songs on the album, what one has here is a Balkan brass-style cover of a "classic rock" song, in this case "Four Sticks" from Led Zeppelin's untitled fourth album. I'm assuming it's not literally skink-related, at least. "Four Sticks" famously got its name from Bonham's drumming approach on the song - playing with two sticks in each hand. If the drummer here is playing with two skinks in each hand, I strongly disapprove, because that is plain animal cruelty.
That's what I knew in advance. Here's what I've learned from my research in the last week.
Sonic Youth - Skink: The best-known skink-related song is the simply titled "Skink", track 4 of Sonic Youth's "Experimental Jet Set, Trash & No Star". I'm not terribly familiar with Sonic Youth's catalog and so hadn't heard this one before. Going by RYM for the general opinion of this album, it seems to be sort of the "black sheep" of what is an overall very highly rated run of records from 1986's EVOL to 1995's Washing Machine.
Speaking as someone who's not, by and large, a Sonic Youth fan, based on this I'm not sure I can get why this is liked less than the other records they recorded in this era. Sounds like a pleasant enough Kim Gordon tune to me.
Skink - Violence: From here we're going to get way, way more obscure. Of the artists named Skink - there are several of them - the one of most interest to me is the hardcore band behind 1992's "Violence" 7". These are two quality tunes with some nice thudding, chugging bass. Skink went on to release a full-length in 1994's "Deaf to Suggestion", but that record is much less interesting to my ears.
Boilermaker - Five Lined Skink: Next, the post-hardcore/Midwest Emo band Boilermaker. I'm a relative newcomer to the midwest emo/post-hardcore genre, and these folks don't seem to have risen above the pack, though they had their fans. Their last album has one review from Simone_Info in 2009:
"Indie Emo in the vein of Ethel Meserve and Garden Variety. A lot of Math Rock influnces, dissonant but always sweet and melodic. It's a shame that only 5 people rated it. The bass player was one of the best in the whole Emo movement, but unfortunately he died."
I've not heard Ethel Meserve or Garden Variety, and looking up the latter, they seem to be _less_ known than Boilermaker. The album this song is from, 1996's "In Wallace's Shadow", is their least known and least reputed record. They went on to do a split 7" with Three Mile Pilot which has a fairly high reputation.
Anyway, I do like this song a fair bit as well, and yes, the work of the dead bassist is impressive. If it's "indie" it is indie in the '90s sense rather than the 2000's landfill sense.
Mule Train - Tails of Skink: Not to be confused with Midrid's '00s-era Muletrain, the Santa Cruz '00s band, or Tom Russell's first band, the Mule Train Band, which released one single, "Take a Whiff On Me / Strung-Out", about which Russell says:
"It owes a little to Commander Cody's style, and to my working six sets a night in a topless bar on skid row. Financed by a well known "porn king" and put on 500 of his jukeboxes. Promptly removed by Mothers Against Drugs and Drunk Driving. So the 500 copies rotted in a Chinese warehouse. Strung out was released on his rarities CD in 2002 - Take A Whiff is not available anywhere else. Both songs were written by Tom."
Right, here's my point. This is the '00s Japanese ska-rocksteady-calypso revival band. This song honestly sounds almost more dixieland than ska. It's not terrible, but not terribly memorable either. Got some sleazy strip club organ along with the horns. I guess that's about all I can say for it.
Fats Navarro - The Skink: There actually is no such song. The song is called "The Skunk". Someone made a typo somewhere along the line, but you know what, I'm going to declare typos officially canon, even if the song does sound more skunky than skinky. In any event, Fats Navarro circa '48: Classic!
A Riot of Colour: Skink (Flexi Version): One of the lesser-known C86 bands. Personally I never much got into C86 except for Stump, who are a C86 band only by virtue of being literally on the C86 comp. Anyway, A Riot of Colour are C86 never-weres, only ever put out the one EP and this isn't even from that EP, it's an alternate flexi version on a later C86 comp. Not sure how they stack up to Lawrence and the Comfortable Society, Benny Profane (as far as I'm concerned a Pynchon reference, not a band), The Noseflutes, or The Enormous Room, but again, one could do worse.
Aydio - Skink: A trip-hop/downtempo group so obscure that this particular release, 2013's "The Second", is not on RYM _or_ Discogs. Is on Spotify and Amazon and Soundcloud tho. If I don't have anything more to say about this than "pleasant, if forgettable, it exists", well, that's all one can really say about most music. I'm hearing lots of interesting music outside my wheelhouse, but one usually doesn't come across hidden gems this way.
Uton - Mauritian Giant Skink Part I and II - Finnish "Free Folk" from an enormous 7 CD box set that apparently has a certain cult reputation. I guess the concept is that all of these underground people perform tributes to extinct species, something between 15 to 20 minutes per artist. The Mauritian Giant Skink is hypothesized to have become extinct sometime around 1600. Wikipedia also says "It may have been somewhat fossorial in nature" and "The Round Island skink is a species capable of caudal autotomy", which are fascinating statements that I don't particularly understand.
Anyway, what we have here are 17 minutes or so of weird Finnish drones. There are a lot of these recordings and it's one of those genres where I can't really tell a good weird Finnish drone from a bad weird Finnish drone. The only other band on this comp I particularly recognize (outside of the heavy hitters like Bardo Pond) is Ashtray Navigations, who I did hear one song that sounded exceptionally good for an alleged "noise" artist. Haven't heard anything else up to that level though.
MC Shy-D - Hit the Skink: Mid '90s Southern hip-hop. Apparently this guy was Afrika Bambaataa's cousin. This is from his last record, a record he released three years _after_ his 1993 record "The Comeback". I guess he gets credit for not calling this record "No, really, comeback for real this time". But then he loses it for having one of the worst '90s hip-hop album covers I've seen. And you know hip-hop album covers in the '90s weren't exactly the epitome of good taste. DJ Smurf's name is as big as his on the cover. Was the presence of DJ Smurf ever actually a selling point? I doubt it somehow. Despite that I don't think this is bad, though again, my familiarity with Miami Bass is approximately zero.
Bivouac- Gecko or Skink: A grunge band apparently nominally related to Dogntank, a '00s piss-taking rock record that nobody but me has heard and which I personally like quite a lot. Anyway this record, 1995's "Full Size Boy" does seem to be quite bad and hated - RYM has an ancient review from a first wave reviewer calling them out as subpar Goo Goo Dolls knockoffs. This track is only 90 seconds and maybe isn't at all representative of their output, but I don't hear that at all in this. It's really nice, actually, a constant rhubarb of voices a la "The Murder Mystery" lending nice tension to a decent grunge instrumental, the only comprehensible words being the words "...gecko or skink" at the end.
Los Tornillos - Skink: Another one of those Bandcamp-only folks, an Edinburgh band what released a couple EPs in 2018. Nominally "surf" but this also has a really nice instrumental post-punk vibe to it. Or, wait, you know what they remind me of? The Cardiacs. Would benefit from some vocals, but nice chords.
Elephant9 - Skink: Oh these folks I know. This is Stale Storlokken's Norwegian jazz-prog trio. He's collaborated extensively with Motorpsycho and Reine Fiske. This is fortunately one of the shorter tracks and so doesn't grate too much.
Quarter Half - Skink and Cherry Blossoms: This is apparently a 2005 Japanese album on the Merry Works label. Some sort of weird underground hip-hop stuff. I don't remotely understand any of it. Weird deconstructed beats.
Charly Steiger / Cornelia Franke - Skink: OK, this looks like it was on a comp CD called Compromize on the Selektion label in 1992. It's straight out noise. Not really very good noise.
Meem - Faeynt Skink: Some Canberra beardo doing funk and disco breaks. Sounds like loading screen music for a vaguely hip 2010 video game.
Caligator - Skink: At last, a song I can give a fairly unequivocal judgement on! This is instrumental rock music. I know rock music alright, and I can say with some degree of confidence that this is not very good. This is some Blueshammer shit right here. I'm sure it makes somebody happy, but I am decidedly not the target audience here.
That's all I got for you! If I hear any other skink-related music in the future, I will make it a priority to let you know.
PS - Fun fact! Blogger's spellchecker appears not to acknowledge the existence of the skink. I smell conspiracy.
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