Immune System - Ambivalence and Spark Plugs // Submerged (Immune System IS001) 1979. We all know that Chicago back in the 1980s was known for loud guitars, industrial style drumming, chanted vocals delivered with a very matter-of-fact, midwestern directness. There were, of course, some outsider bands that maybe didn’t fit this mold like Articles of Faith or Out of Order, but the general idea is that regardless of that, it all happened for Chicago in 1981 with the release of the Immediate Action EP by Strike Under, which set the foundation of the “Chicago Sound”. I sorta discovered when I posted the first Skafish 45 a while back that there is a certain misconception that before 1981, Chicago was a wasteland full of bad bar-bands playing “new wave by numbers”. Certainly there were cases of this but there were also a lot of really obscure new-wave and punk gems from the Windy City prior to 1981. What these bands lacked was the cohesion of vision and approach that the bands after Strike Under had and thus it is is really hard to identify a “scene” in pre-81 Chicago. Instead there were a lot of really unique bands like Immune System and Beluga and the Human Ashtrays releasing oddball 7inches ripe for rediscovery today. Consider Immune System. The A-Side of this is awesome, awesome, awesome in a very Pylon sort of way. The B-Side is a little less stellar. Its a good new wave tune but there is an obvious reason why they made this the B-Side I think. You can read a lot more about Immune System, a band who seem very similar to Boston’s Human Sexual Response, here at the amazing ChicagoPunk Database. In fact, poke around the Database because it is pretty amazing and a good representation of what Chicago was doing before and after the 1980s.
Tags: Chicago