Chrome as Space Rock Avatars and Cyberpunk Pioneers

My short playlist case for Chrome as underground proto-cyberpunk musical missing link to Erik Davis's High Weirdness in California in the 1970s. 

Damon Edge, creator of Chrome, after recording Visitation, 1976, their debut, sent the record to Warner Brothers but they rejected it. They told Edge it sounded like a "messed up Doors album." He took this as a compliment, of course. I might want to add a 'messed up stag Jefferson Airplane' but, yes, very apt. This is the only Chrome album that has such a bad '60s hangover vibe and isn't yet characteristically post-punk. 

What if NYC's band Suicide lived in the Bay Area and had a thing for sci-fi Alien Soundtracks, consider Chrome's second album that came out in 1978? "Chromosome Damage" might be a worst case scenario. Bad trip psychedelia meets DIY tech. Helios Creed joins the band on the second album to solidify the nucleus of Edge and Creed through Chrome's classic period, Alien Soundtracks to 3rd from the Sun (1982). 

"Zombie Warfare (Can't Let You Down)," off Chrome's '79 album Half Machine Lip Moves. Maybe their best album but there are several other legit contenders. As live music fantasies go Half Machine Chrome double-billed with the Wipers, not inconceivable, generates sci-fi psychedelic punk rock mind-melding live music energies. Cum feel the noize. 

Here's Chrome, if I'm not mistaken, and I could very well be, but from what I could gather, 1980, "unreleased studio outtake," so tossed out but, more significantly, tossing off seemingly effortlessly a prototype of a particular feedback heavy guitar band emo-screamo vocal style that anticipates bands like Husker Du and Nirvana and Guided by Voices. Although, I can't say for sure how much actual guitar Chrome uses in this take because all the instrumentation sounds, as usual, heavily treated and filtered. Still, more rootsy and soulful than typical Chrome. 

Chrome's New Wave bid, "Animal," off Red Exposure, 1980. I admire the boldly abstracted pop move but understand longtime fans find it a slight sell-out. 

From the 1981 Chrome album, Blood On The Moon, another album contender. "The Need." Chrome's mature sound is a visionary amalgam of jittery punk, bad trip psychedelia, space rock, and a kind of space rock musique concrete that would morph into industrial music in the 1980s. Creed's noir guitar sound also a big influence on Sonic Youth.  

I've tried less successfully with Chrome before. There is a muted quality to the production that makes everything sound distorted and staticky and so alienated and impenetrable but once you stop trying to get to some clear narrative center the sculpted, conceptual, abstracted shards of muted noise rock are catchy. Some wag on youtube mused, "Chrome are for Hawkwind fans into industrial music." That sounds about right to me. 

Chrome are a combo of psychedelia, punk rock, and obsessive uses of DIY technology. High-low weirdness from San Francisco, California, in the 1970s. Hardcore fans seem to favor '82's 3rd from the Sun as a kind of aesthetic culmination but my sense of the album is it's when they settle into a more conventional dark metal sound and lose some of the weird charm of their earlier records. Edge leaves the band and moves to Paris in '83, ending what I'll call their classic period.