History tends to get romanticized. The people of the past are looked on as having been friendlier, nicer, all around better. The food was more flavorful, the films were more original, the wars were more necessary and the music was more classic. It's not difficult to see why oldies and classic rock remain so popular and such appropriate remedies to the blandness of the modern world. The world of thirty to forty years ago is a retro utopia in the minds of the oft-nostalgic 21st century man.
This nostalgia is not ill-founded. The world of the '60s and '70s was a time of experimentation that would definitely live on to affect the future in numerous ways. It can be argued that rock music changed more in those short decades of its youth than it ever has since. One of the most experimental, and thus influential, genres of rock from this time was the psych-rock/post surf sound. The Michael Yonkers Band's Microminiature Love, recorded in 1968 but only this year released to the world in an easy to find format from Sub Pop records, is the genre's golden fleece of sorts.
The story of Michael Yonkers is a necessary step to fully understanding the history of Microminiature Love. A young techie with dozens of musical gadgets, including home made guitars and fuzzboxes, Yonkers produced rock music that would have gone to be viewed as the grandfather to modern noise rock, had it actually been available at the time of recording. Unfortunately, Yonkers' debut album never received any sort of distribution. Later in his career an accident would leave Yonkers paralyzed and unable to rock as aptly as he had on this album. Finally the album has been released in its entirety, and with six bonus tracks to boot!
Yonkers' sound is distinctly surf influenced with the dark tones of the Rolling Stones. The riffs and drums are mildly tame to today's standards, but at the time of recording were wildly imaginative using feedback and all sorts of noise layers to make the songs fuller. The chaos and anger of a young man with a guitar in the Vietnam-era US rarely sounded more rock than it does on Microminiature Love, a fine "up yours" to all the folk hippies who might have argued that minimalism was the best way to portray pseudo-poetic thoughts.
There are spots on the album where the experimentation seems to get in the way of the rest of the song, but those spots are few and far between. Songs like "Puppeting," "My House," and "Microminiature Love" are the best examples of mild use of technical wizardry from the analog era, before Pro Tools and digital guitar pedals were doing all of the work.
The standout track on the album is the societal commentary on the war, religious conservatism and blind patriotism found in "Kill the Enemy." These words continue to ring as true today as they did in the midst of the draft. "I knelt down on the floor/ and I cried 'God I have to go to war.'/ And he came to my side wrapped in an American flag/ And this is what he said: "Kill those enemies, kill them dead." This simple assessment of a chaotic situation is a prime example of Yonkers' abilities as a musician and a songwriter. By the end of the album, the listener is left to wonder how the world overlooked such a talented and influential figure for so long.
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