Garbage Days Revisited #54: New York Loose - "Year Of The Rat" (1996)

"And it doesn't make me give up my old teenage lament, which now and then holds true..." - New York Loose - Trash The Given Chance

In a way, this week's GDR is pretty much a straight continuation of last week's as New York Loose were formed out of the ashes of the Throbs when their bassist Danny Nordahl hooked up with former Circus of Power guitarist Gary Sunshine to give the whole rock 'n' roll game another go. Bringing in a young blonde punk girl Brijitte West up front, NY Loose (along with others of this era like D Generation) were the sound of New York sleaze moving with the times and adapting to the post-grunge climate.

I vaguely remember NY Loose getting a few mentions in Kerrang! back in the day and they got a lot of comparisons to early Blondie due to Brijitte's image and vocal style but they were a bit of a spikier proposition, owing as much to the tuneful earworms of the Buzzcocks or the Only Ones as they did to Debbie Harry and co. The group put out a number of singles on minor labels before landing a big money deal with a major in Hollywood records. En route, Sunshine would leave the band (he would later end up collaborating with Axl Rose during the sessions for G'n'R's ill-fated Chinese Democracy album) to be replaced by Marc Diamond and after going through a couple of sticksmen the group would settle on drummer Pete Lloyd.

Year Of The Rat would surface in 1996 (hence the name after what that year was in the Chinese calendar) and it presumably must have looked like it had at least an outside chance of being a game changer. By this point, grunge was very much on its last legs with groups like Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice In Chains seeing their chart positions very much worsening and the fact that the dreaded rise of corporate grunge (the likes of the Gin Blossoms and the Crash Test Dummies not to mention the detestable Hootie & The Blowfish) seeing the movement well and truly neutered and becoming a harmless corporate facsimile of what it had started out as under Nirvana, Mudhoney etc. So there was definitely a vacancy at the top of the pile for something new and exciting to come through and New York Loose definitely packed a million times more punky energy and spark than the hackneyed likes of the Spin Doctors etc did.

Unfortunately though, it just didn't happen. Similar to the Throbs' Language of Thieves and Vagabonds, Year Of The Rat just didn't sell anywhere near as many copies as the label were hoping for and New York Loose were gone from their deal in short order. They may have picked up some positive press in Kerrang! but unfortunately this was the era of Britrock (the Wildhearts, Terrorvision, Therapy? etc) and most stuff from the other side of the Atlantic just wasn't making much of an impression on UK rockers when they had a glut of high quality UK bands to enjoy leading to NY Loose sailing under the radar a bit over here as well. You could argue that the ubiquitous presence of Britpop at this point probably torpedoed their chances of getting anywhere with the NME/Melody Maker crowd as well for much the same reason. Bad timing? The very epitome of it my friends.

All of which just leaves us with Year Of The Rat and it's not a bad legacy for the group to have left behind at all. Had this come out some time around 2001-02, there's a good argument that NY Loose would have been well placed to hitch a ride in the massively inferior Strokes' slipstream the way the likes of the D4 and the Donnas did - the likes of the angsty Pretty Suicide and the furious Detonator and Kiss My Wheels bring the punk defiance while the more moody Hide and Song For Margo (not to mention their excellent take on the Velvet Underground's Sunday Morning which I think might be up there with my favourite cover versions ever) show a more melodic side to the group's output. Best of all though is Trash The Given Chance which blends the group's punk and pop sides to come up with a song that really should have been a hit. Instead though they released probably the worst song on the record in the drony six-minute Spit as the lead-off single after it got included on the soundtrack to The Crow which sounded nothing like the rest of the album and probably didn't help them. Twenty twenty hindsight and all that...

Following the break-up of NY Loose, Nordahl and Diamond would move across to LA and go on to form the rather awesome Motochrist who kept the flame for scuzz-rock ne'er-do-wells burning through the noughties and are still out there today. And I'm pretty sure we'll probably cover them in a future Sounds From The Junkshop so keep yer eyes peeled for that. Brijitte meanwhile would move to London, become a mum and resurface at the end of the noughties following the release of the NY Loose rarities compilation Born Too Loose with a new group, the Desperate Hopefuls featuring Richie and Keef from Croydon's awesome scuzz-punk outlaws Kitty Hudson (who've since mutated into the Fiascos) which managed two under-rated albums, their self-titled 2010 debut and 2016's From NY With Love which are both well worth tracking down. I saw said band a few times during my London years and they always had that excellent mix of slung-back cool and snotty venom that I’d imagine NY Loose did back in the day. I was even lucky enough to meet Brijitte briefly at a Hopefuls gig at the sadly missed Gaff venue in Holloway (which was pretty much me and my friends’ second home in 2010-11) where she was nice enough to compliment me on my Johnny Thunders T-shirt which was really cool of her. Apparently she has a new album is due in 2022 so we await that with interest. 

I've often said that the most common curse among groups in both Sounds From The Junkshop and Garbage Days Revisited is that of bad timing and NY Loose really are a case in point. Five years later when the world and its dog were losing their heads over anything from New York wearing a leather jacket, they'd have been almost certain to clean up but Year Of The Rat just turned out to be an awesome album that was released into completely the wrong timeframe as the US music scene was trapped between the dying embers of grunge, the first wave of frat-punk (the Offspring, Green Day et al) and the first stirrings of the nu-metal shitshow. If you missed it at the time then trust me, it's well worth backtracking and giving it a listen - NY Loose may have been a band who inadvertently timed their entrance on to the scene completely wrong but they were certainly diamonds among a lot of the dross that constituted the US rock scene in the mid-'90s.