Circle C - "Honey" 7"

Circle C – “Honey” 7”

Trackshun Industries, 1988
Acquired: Love Garden Shotgun Room, Used, 2008
Price: $.25

“Honey” is a fucking WEIRD track, and I kind of like it because it is such a blatant mishmash of genres and styles it’s admiral, even if the end result is a totally incoherent mess. It’s piano rock and college rock and Jerry Lee Lewis and then there’s some gospel-esque background singers and the song melts down and trucks along for two minutes before collapsing in a heap on the floor. Naturally, given the ubiquity of the band’s name, it’s been impossible to track down any information about them. Which is sad because the B-side cut “Odette” is a quiet and lovely mess that sounds like it was recorded in a shipping container on a cargo liner but the core of the song shines through and it is quite nice. Upon further investigation, I learned that this band went by the name Circle C (though the artwork says “written and performed by Copyright”). The Canadian band was formed by Thomas Anselmi, the frontman of the punk band Slow they had a released a self-titled CD on Geffen in 1991 that sold poorly and were consequently dropped. Slow are most famous for stripping at the Festival of Independent Recording Artists at the World’s Fair’s Expo 86 in Vancouver and leading to a bunch of stuff to get cancelled and the band getting arrested. The negative publicity led the band to split, and shortly after that Anselmi formed Circle C. I love the small histories of bands.