The Necessaries
Big Sky
1981
0:00 - Back to You
4:18 - Driving and Talking at the Same Time
7:56 - Born Yesterday
11:54 - My Baby's Explosive
16:04 - Sahara
18:58 - Europe
The Necessaries were founded in 1978 by Ed Tomney of downtown punk band Harry Toledo and the Rockets. Tomney had received encouraging feedback on a solo demo by John Cale, and he assembled a group that included Jesse Chamberlain (a drummer who had played with Mayo Thompson in his late-1970s UK reboot of the Red Crayola, and also the son of sculptor John Chamberlain) and Modern Lovers bassist Ernie Brooks, already a Russell collaborator in the Flying Hearts. Rounding out the original lineup was singer Randy Gun, who soon departed to work on his own material. After stints with Chris Spedding and as a trio, Brooks recruited Russell.
An initial full-length release with this final lineup, 1981’s Big Sky, was made up of what the band understood to be demos and hustled out by Sire without their final approval. The following year, Event Horizon, a significantly more coherent offering, was released featuring reworked versions of six of the same tracks. The band called it quits not long after Russell’s departure, and this album is the best expression of the short-lived project’s energetic and loose sound, which provides a hinge between the arty leanings of the New York downtown scene and something new that’s both more everyday and more ecstatic.
Songs such as the opener “Rage” and “Like No Other” deliver outright bouncy power-pop, classic in a way that befits teen-movie opening credits or a summer drive through the suburbs with the windows down. But there’s a density of ideas in the way such tracks are built, bright guitar lines fraying at the edge and Russell’s cello winding a somewhat alien texture throughout. The Russell-and-Brooks-penned track “Driving and Talking at the Same Time” is colored in with associative synths that wouldn’t be out of place in one of his disco hits. He and Brooks’ traded vocals meander in and out of conversation; something in their plaintive delivery seems to foreshadow shades of college alt-rock by the likes of R.E.M. (who they played a handful of shows with in 1982). Though they benefit here and there from unruly snarls of punk-rock energy, these songs are also grounded by a willingness to steady themselves, as with the deadpan pacing on “AEIOU” or “Paceways.”
With its self-conscious emulation of radio-friendly sounds and heart-on-its-sleeve emotional bent, Event Horizon is probably not the coolest record of any of these musicians’ careers. Its avant-garde leanings are tucked between earnest moves: side B in particular trades off between straightforward new wave, as with the not-not-goofy geography lesson that is “Europe,” and nostalgic ballads like “Detroit Tonight,” whose all-American guitar licks are complicated by the off-kilter yearning poetics of Russell’s lyrics.
On “More Real,” the best song on Event Horizon, this style provides a structure that makes a specific kind of hopeful vulnerability possible. Over a twangy repeated guitar hook, Russell sings, “She’ll come back I know/Cause our love is more real/I tripped or fell down, but I found myself/In a patch of new grass.” He’s joined by a chorus of his bandmates, and they sing together about experiencing a small, maybe blind faith while looking at the sky from where you’ve fallen to the ground. In that spirit, what makes Event Horizon feel essential is not just the history it collects, but the way one can hear these musicians, wide-ranging as their influences may be, believing in a form. It’s guitar-pop mobilized to its best ends: easy, sweet, and true.
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