Song Of The Day 3/25/2015: Artery - "Who's Afraid of David Lynch"

Sheffield, Courteous But Firm: Artery started their career under the name “The.” If you thought The The was being alphabetically contrarian, imagine how irritated just plain The made precarious indexers. Artery was part of the inextinguishably robust Sheffield post-punk scene which included Cabaret Voltaire, Clock DVA, The Human League, the earliest incarnation of Pulp and, for the electro-shocked crowd who picked up the wrong message from Roxy Music, ABC.

Slicing and emboldened, Artery covered a lot of ground. They had harsh synth-and-sledge numbers, some lightly traipsing piano pop and standard reductive grind-outs. All the genre exercises they went through make them sound like completely separate bands, to the point where I had to check to make sure there weren’t duplicate Artery’s. Turns out there is, but the other Artery plays house music, so I think we have the right one. I suppose we won’t know until tomorrow morning’s usual hung-over fact-checking.

Artery severed themselves from the pop music scene in 1985 and one of them went into hairdressing. But they were encouraged back into the limelight in 2007 by Jarvis Cocker, who lately is to Sheffield what John Mellencamp is to Bloomington, Indiana. (That sentence practically guarantees I’ll never interview Jarvis Cocker.) So they got back together, and I’ve seen no evidence that they’re not still that way. Today’s song is from their 2011 album Civilisation. The David Lynch face masks over the instrumentalists in the band are a nice touch, if a little squat-shaped.