Thin White Rope

Thin White Rope was an American rock band fronted by Guy Kyser that critics have associated with the No Depression, desert rock, psychocountry, and paisley underground movements. While certain of the band's aeasthetic aspects do bear slight resemblance to these movements, Thin White Rope has been notoriously difficult to pigeonhole. This difficulty, strictly speaking, derives mainly from the fact that Thin White Rope's overall sound also includes elements of psychedelic metal, country punk, bluegrass, and prog. The Stooges and Hawkwind are as much a part of Thin White Rope's lineage as Pentangle, Can, and The Replacements. The band was formed in Davis, California in 1984, and released five albums to critical acclaim. In its continuity it featured singer/songwriter/guitarist Guy Kyser and guitarist Roger Kunkel, with an evolving line-up of drummers (Frank French, Jozef Becker, Matthew Abourezk) and bass guitarists (John von Feldt, Steven Tesluk, Stuart Odom). Thin White Rope was noted for its twin guitar attack (compare Television), innovative use of feedback structures and oblique, poetic lyrics. Thin White Rope's final studio album, Ruby Sea, featured a ferocious, hyperproduced sound that enveloped a psychoemotional core of angst, heartbreak, and memory. The album's songwriting and song structures, while at times teetering on the brink of dissolution and confusion, are especially notable for the way in which they approach "moving forward" experimentally, which is to say, artistic development seems clearly to have been prized more than marketplace success. Thin White Rope disbanded in 1992. The double live LP The One That Got Away chronicles its epic last show in Ghent, Belgium, on June 28 of that year. The band's influence may be felt in a range of artists as disparate as Nirvana, Popealopes, The Drones, Son Volt, and Band of Horses. Tom Waits was reputedly enthralled with Thin White Rope when preparing material for his album Bone Machine. "Thin White Rope" is William S. Burroughs' metaphor for semen. * "Like Eleventh Dream Day, Thin White Rope is part of a tough new breed of guitar bands with roots that extend through smart, crunching Seventies renegades like Crazy Horse and Television to the bedrock of the Velvet Underground. These bands use six strings, rather than lyrics or vocal melodies, to construct hooks and bring home the often sour emotions in their songs. On Sack Full of Silver, Thin White Rope's fourth album and strong major-label debut, that tactic is taken even further. Only four tunes—the title cut, 'Americana,' 'Yoo Doo Right' (a Can cover) and 'On the Floe'—have sung choruses. The rest depend on the tightly twined guitars of Roger Kunkel and Guy Kyser to create compact, memorable segues between verses. 'Diesel Man,' which portrays a homeless man's descent into psychosis in fourteen spare lines, uses a filthy, tremolo-saturated rhythm guitar to establish a feeling of imbalance. When Kyser's not singing, an electric lead sails into the mix, howling and gnashing with pent-up rage and lonely desperation. 'Whirling Dervish' gets its exotic, creepy feel from an Eastern-sounding guitar that blasts into country-rock accompaniment for Kyser's hoarse voice with the force and acceleration of a sand-bearing windstorm. Not that Thin White Rope uses its grungy virtuosity as a crutch; the band is also interested in writing rawboned poetry. And the combination creates songs as open and elemental as the rural landscape near the Rope's home in Davis, California." —from Rolling Stone, 1990 "Tension pulsed through the songs, pulling between beauty and terror, dank claustrophobia and limitless space, the coiled, trapped energy of the man's voice and the hurtling freefall of guitars. God, they were good." —Melody Maker