2 out of 5

Label: Touch and Go

Produced by: Jon Schmersal (mixed by)

So, uh, I was one of ten people who wasn’t all that in to Electro-Shock for President. I mean, as part of the Brainiac story, it’s interesting, and even if I wasn’t exactly keen on the direction the band seemed to be taking – an ahead-of-the-curve new wave electro punk that would have a flash of popularity in the early 00s – Timmy Taylor was a unique talent, and that combined with the other talents in the group produced something still, to this day, progressive as all hell on the whole. I mean, Smack Bunny Baby was Nirvana and ESP was on to something, but I don’t know that it was fully there yet; to me, these bookend releases aren’t as strong as the inbetweens, but still, when you take them in combination with the rest, you can see how much identity the band injected into them, and in the case of Electro-Shock, that injection came with a promise of something more wholly realized. (And I say this doing my best to hear it with ears from the time, that wouldn’t have been inundated with bands who were influenced by Brainiac and tried/try to imitate aspects of their sound.)

With the Attic Tapes, it’s clear how much of a treasure trove of ideas Taylor was, but you do get the benefit of hearing a sort of larger scope of such ideas across that wealth of material, which is also sequenced to make some of the sketches hit with equal impact to the more fleshed out songs.

But Predator Dominate, while its tracks may’ve been the best capture of what the group was toying with right after ESP, is almost all sketches, and they’re somehow further down the diluted road of that “not fully there yet” feeling. Indirectly, this is interesting: the material is pretty quiet, and minimal: perhaps Taylor was pursuing a more stripped down, less aggressive take on the Brainiac sound. And it’s not all electro-geared, though maybe that would’ve come back when this made its way to a studio. But it’s conceptually interesting to think of Electro-Shock as maybe an experiment in tone rather than style, and that’s a POV Predator Dominate provides. As to the actual content, though, I can vibe with Schmersal’s liner notes that compare elements of these songs to others, and you’ll hear some Hissing Prigs elements; some Bonsai noise elements; but these comparisons don’t make the music substantial.

Had this not been presented as an EP, perhaps I’d be more charitable towards it. It just feels weird to analyze this differently than the Attic Tapes stuff, and then if you only had a small handful of those songs to sift through, they’d be more of a “for fans only” affair – while I actually feel that set holds up incredibly well in general. Furthermore that there’s nothing that really stands out here – again, they are sketches; ideas – that makes me think I’ll actively want to put this on, and it amounts to a release that just kind of bums me out.