New England’s Perennial just released their new album Art History on Ernest Jenning Record Co, and it’s another fiery blend of dance-punk and post-hardcore from a band who are consistently very good at this kind of thing. It sounds like something that could’ve come out during the early/mid 2000s era of bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Blood Brothers, The Rapture, Death From Above 1979, etc, but it’s also got a very strong mid ’60s influence, and to celebrate that side of it, band member Chad Jewett made us a list of 10 albums from 1966 that influenced Art History.
“Mid-60s pop, soul, and garage rock were a defining influence on our new album Art History, so much so that we decided to cook up a list of records from 1966 (an unbelievable year for British mod, the Motown Sound, Stax soul, and American garage rock) that directly inspired us as we wrote, recorded, and mixed our newest LP,” Chad tells us. Read on for the full list, with intriguing commentary on each pick.
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10 Albums from 1966 That Influenced Perennial’s Art History
Wilson Pickett – The Exciting Wilson Pickett
30 of the most exciting minutes ever recorded. Check out that intro, Side 1 Track 1: “1-2-3!” BOOM “1-2-3!” BOOM. “Land of 1000 Dances” contains everything we wanted to do with Art History; Maximum R&B played with maximum electricity. Wilson’s voice is unreal throughout the LP, a live-wire match for the speaker-rattling bass and kick that make The Exciting Wilson Pickett so dynamic and thrilling a listen. It is genuinely one of those records that you finish and then flip right back over and play again. The title of our last LP, In The Midnight Hour was an affectionate nod to Wilson Pickett, but Art History is even more indebted to Pickett’s kinetic approach to soul music: two minute pop songs where every note, riff and shout are entirely and joyously maxed-out.
The Who – A Quick One
A true story: the initial idea for what would become Art History and the way we would explore mod, soul, and garage rock sounds came from driving around listening to The Who, right around the time we were finishing work on our last LP. The fuse was lit with Pete Townshend’s innovative use of feedback and pickup selector switch chatter on “Out In The Street”, but the band’s 1966 LP A Quick One was the favorite, and one of the definitive in-studio patterns as we started outlining Art History. “Run, Run, Run”, “I Need You”, “So Sad About Us” — psychedelic pop inflected with punk’s sharp teeth. A Quick One is aggressively overdriven, soundboard needles pushed way into the red, the low-end often totally distorted. You could tell the band favored energy first, even (or especially) when that meant sonic combustion. Inspiring, really.
Otis Redding – Complete & Unbelievable: The Otis Redding Dictionary Of Soul
Start with the stereo version. Otis Redding and Booker T. and the MG’s, placed in eccentrically dynamic array across your headphones (we’d indulge in exactly this kind of stereo collage throughout recording and mixing the album). It’s the best way to hear how Otis Redding, the greatest singer in popular music history, could turn every single word into a hook. Al Jackson Jr’s knockout-punch snare drum; Steve Cropper’s sharp Telecaster jabs. The songs are architectural marvels. You can hear Otis and the band playing with garage rock aesthetics (sounds that drew a whole lot from Otis and other Stax artists in the first place!); the drums are that much heavier; the guitar and bass are frequently accented with fuzz. The call-and-response between Otis’s vocals (which reach their apotheosis on this record) and the Stax band are the closest that Otis & the MG’s would get to the sublime energy of their live recordings (see: the choruses of “I’m Sick Y’All”). The Beatles hinted at garage rock on “Day Tripper”; Otis Redding went the extra mile and turned it into a punk song, shouting every word in effervescent competition with Booker T’s electrifying organ punches and that all-out snare heartbeat. Few artists have influenced us the way Otis Redding has, and this record made a definitive impression on Art History.
The Sonics – Boom
Boom is a heavy record, but in the pre-Marshall full-stack / pre-distortion pedal world of the mid-sixties, that heaviness comes entirely from how the Washington quartet attacked their songs. That made a real impression on us: “punk” less as a matter of high-gain distortion pedals or speed and more as a result of just how enthusiastically and energetically you could tear into the stuff. “Action Painting” is an example, a song we recorded largely with single coil guitars and Vox amps, eschewing more typically “heavy” equipment: the electricity had to come from how we played it. Check out The Sonics’ version of “Louie Louie” from Boom: with little more than a slight arrangement tweak and some of the most bombastic drumming you’ll ever hear (not to mention a stylishly laissez faire attitude to blowing out microphones), a garage-pop curio is turned into one of punk music’s most explosive cuts — all because The Sonics hit that much harder and shouted that much louder.
The Beatles – Revolver
Another true story: on the first day of recording for Art History, I gave everyone in the band (and our producer/engineer Chris Teti) a copy of the 2022 reissue of The Beatles’ Revolver. Call it a bit of direct sonic inspiration, a setting of tone, a mod-pop map to follow. The recipe. The “how-to” instructions manual. We wanted a 30 minute record that was also a pop-art experiment. Look no further than Revolver. There are so many moments, textures, flavors that come from that album on our own record. Our most frequently-used guitar amp combination was an Epiphone Casino into a Vox AC30, a very literal reflection of how much we dug the sound of songs like “And Your Bird Can Sing”, “Taxman” and “Paperback Writer” (the non-album single from the Revolver sessions). Art History is absolutely full of those Beatle-esque grace notes: backwards guitar (“Jet Set Mono”), fuzz bass (“The Mystery Tone”), impressionistic stereo mixing (“A Is For Abstract”), avant-garde sound loops (“B Is For Brutalism”). Revolver was the record we looked up to most as we added layer after layer to Art History.
Cecil Taylor – Unit Structures
We had included sound collages and abstract instrumental sections on previous records, but with Art History we wanted to make sure that those moments on the LP stood out as their own signature moments. The sculpting of those tracks, “A Is For Abstract” and “B Is For Brutalism” became real focal points as we added and subtracted layers, sounds, effects, editing tricks. One key influence on our approach to these passages was Cecil Taylor’s avant garde post-bop classic Unit Structures. The way sounds and musical phrases burst in and out of focus on that album is just so incredibly captivating, and became crucially influential on (for instance) the ambient drums we recorded for both of the instrumental tracks on Art History. Blue Note reissued Unit Structures during the Art History sessions, which meant it spent even more time on our turntable around that time. Indeed, we shout-out Unit Structures by name on one of the songs on the album. A heartfelt ode to a record I love.
Stevie Wonder – Up-tight
An album I adore so much that we titled a key song on Art History after it, in large part because Up-tight was a key inspiration for the sound of this record: cutting-edge pop music in exuberant bursts. Up-tight is one of the defining documents of the Motown Sound circa 1966: hooks everywhere you look, perfect melodic songwriting, but with increasingly adventurous studio experimentation. Pop music as pop art. Really listen to the bass and drums on “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)” — you can hear that fuzzed-out energy pushing the limits of what a record stylus and a car radio could handle. That seemed to be the point: Top 40 hits that were also subtly and joyfully avant-garde, simultaneously sweet and daring. Stevie Wonder’s genius for arrangement and sonic detail is unmatched, and on Up-tight he directed all of that brilliance towards a collection of songs that effervescently leaps out of the speaker.
The Supremes – The Supremes A’ Go-Go
You get the sense that fuzzed-out bass and in-the-red kick drum were very in-vogue at Hitsville in 1966: you can hear the same groovy, fizzy sound all over The Supremes A’ Go-Go. The record kicks off in precisely this mode, all rattling, crackling low-end wallop on the indelible “Love Is Like An Itching In My Heart” (same goes for later track “You Can’t Hurry Love”, one of Motown’s greatest achievements), making for an addictive pairing when matched to Diana Ross’s sugary vocal delivery. A lot of the songs on A’ Go-Go are covers of earlier Motown hits, which means that these renditions feature the Funk Brothers house band experimenting with fresh, dynamic arrangements (a group of musicians always in search of the new and the exciting) and the Supremes finding novel approaches to melodies that by 1966 were already classics. The results are like a 30-minute pop workshop, a team of artists at the absolute height of their powers attacking these songs with brilliant creative energy. Working on a record that we thought of above-all-else as a pop art project, The Supremes A’ Go-Go was a hugely important example for how to go about putting together your sound in new ways.
The Creation – “Making Time” b/w “Try And Stop Me” / Small Faces – Small Faces
Two stone-cold mod classics that were in constant rotation during the writing and recording of Art History: R&B, early psychedelic pop, garage rock, proto-punk, electric blues, all delivered with maximum art-pop attitude. And while it might be a slight case of cheating to include a single, The Creation’s debut 7” is about as definitive a garage pop document as you’re likely to find. There’s plenty of the angular attack of “Making Time” in Art History tracks like “How The Ivy Crawls”. These records have an exhilarating live-in-the-room giddiness, like a shook up bottle of cherry coke (see: “You Better Believe It”). It’s infectious and addictive. We fell in love with that sound, and the more we crafted and fine-tuned the general sonic palette of Art History, the more Small Faces and The Creation became a touchstone for the record. Call it mod punk. Call it The Perennial Sound, circa 2024. In fact, the song “Art History” has a brief guitar ad-lib that we’ll say is borrowed from a Small Faces cut.
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Perennial are also playing release shows in Connecticut tonight (6/7) and Brooklyn on Saturday (6/8), followed by a short West Coast tour surrounding No Earbuds Fest, more Northeast dates in July/August, and more. All dates:
6/7 – ART HISTORY RELEASE SHOW, Vernon CT, Arts Center East with Minus Points, DJ Steady Habit
6/8 – ART HISTORY RELEASE SHOW, Brooklyn NY, Purgatory with Labrador, better living.
6/15 – Pomona CA, The Glass House, No Earbuds Fest!
6/16 – San Francisco CA, The Knockout with FeeFawFum, Vivian Panache, Curling
6/17 – Chico CA, Naked Lounge with Cherry Ghoul, Phantom Falls
6/18 – Portland OR, Zero Wave with Collate, Chatterbox
6/19 – Olympia WA, Second Home Gigs Show with Pigeon Pit, Wavers
6/20 – Seattle WA, The Vera Project with Black Nite Crash, Miscomings, The Dust Mice
7/11 – New Haven CT, NOLO with Big Sigh, VVebs, Joy Cleaner
7/12 – New Brunswick NJ, In The West with Joy Cleaner, Rotoscope, Screenager
7/13 – Philadelphia PA – TBA
8/9 – Malden MA, Faces Brewing Company with TBA
8/10 – Pittsfield MA, Hot Plate Brewing with Radical Joy and TBA