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Aunt Sally: S/T 12” (original 1977, Vanity Records; reissue 2022, Mesh Key Records)
I pre-ordered this reissue from Mesh Key Records so long ago I had forgotten about it when it arrived on my doorstep last week. The vinyl supply chain issues suck in pretty much every respect, but at least it resulted in a nice little surprise for me.
I hadn’t heard of Aunt Sally when Mesh Key announced their reissue of this 1979 LP. While I think I’m pretty knowledgeable about Japanese hardcore, I know comparatively little about the country’s post-punk scene. When I first listened to Aunt Sally on Bandcamp those many months ago, it sparked a research spree where I learned about a lot of cool stuff, including the Akina Nakamori LP I chose as my staff pick a while back. There are still several records from that research session hanging around on my want list, so if the vinyl gods are with me, this won’t be the last Japanese post-punk LP I write about for one of my staff picks.
Back to Aunt Sally, though. In Bandcamp’s short piece on the group, they wrote about how they were inspired by the Sex Pistols. Aunt Sally’s singer—who later made experimental music under the stage name Phew—flew to London from Japan in 1977 and saw the Sex Pistols live. She was so inspired by the Pistols that, upon returning to Japan, she set about recruiting her own band. It’s crazy how, although Aunt Sally was based thousands of miles from London in Osaka, Japan, their origin story so closely resembles that of so many English post-punk bands.
Like a lot of those English post-punk bands, Aunt Sally sounds nothing like the Pistols. While plenty of second-wave punk bands took a lot of inspiration from the Pistols, it’s fascinating that so many people saw the Pistols as this watershed moment of inspiration, but it never occurred to them to copy what the Pistols were doing. It’s like the Sex Pistols were this bomb that blew open a door, allowing an entire generation of musicians to step through into a kind of Narnia where their innate creativity was unleashed.
And maybe because the Sex Pistols’ roar was so mighty, ratcheting up rock’s loudness, pomposity, and masculinity to absurd levels, it created space for the music Aunt Sally made. It’s similar to the music that Rough Trade put out in its early years, and if you’re a fan of bands like the Raincoats, Kleenex, Essential Logic, and Delta 5, you’ll no doubt love this Aunt Sally album. Like those records (as well as bands like Gang of Four, Wire, and Joy Division), Aunt Sally, in my ways, hearkens back to the pre-punk art rock of bands like Roxy Music, David Bowie, and early Genesis, albeit without the aforementioned pomposity and masculinity that the Pistols made to seem so ridiculous. Aunt Sally’s music strikes me as forward-thinking, cerebral, and unafraid of delicacy, yet still somehow punk in spirit.
It looks like, as of right now, there are still a few copies of the record for sale on Mesh Key’s Bandcamp site. The first pressing comes with a bonus live 7” that won’t come with subsequent pressings, and the songs on that are interesting and worth having. The first pressing was only available through Mesh Key’s Bandcamp site, but I’m hoping that when this gets repressed we can bring in some copies for Sorry State.