Review Summary: There are no waves, only the ocean.
As one of the bands included on Brian Eno’s legendary
No New York, a compilation that documented the upstarts of the No Wave scene that grew in prominence within the artsier circles of New York, Mars took kindly to an abandon not seen in their no-wave peers. Each without proper musical training or talent to speak of, Mars violently took to atonal and dissonant performances in their incredibly short lifespan – they only performed two dozen times, all in Manhattan, from January 1977 at CBGB’s, to their final performance on December 10th, 1978 at Max’s Kansas City.
NYC 1977-1978 performs the easy task of documenting the complete history of Mars into an 11-track, 32-minute album that perfectly captures the no wave act quickly descending into hellish incoherence and defying melody for piercing guitar lines, a barbaric rhythmic pulse, and the closest thing modern man could possibly conceive as disjointed babbling coupled with crazed vulgarity that is essentially a litmus test for the unwilling, and a cacophonously bizarre good time for the rest. It doesn’t make sense, hell, I don’t think it was supposed to. It shocks, awes, disgusts and then some in such a short time that it leaves me absolutely bewildered and annoyed simultaneously; what else could Mars really do?
