Bush Tetras were a rock band from New York City, popular in the New York club scene in the early 1980s but never achieving much mainstream success. Their music, sometimes classified under "rare beats", combined funk rhythms and dissonant rock-guitar riffs.
Lead guitarist Pat Place and vocalist Cynthia Sley produced the most distinctive aspects of the Tetras sound. Place's guitar lines were rhythmic and distortion-filled. She had been the original guitarist and one of the founding members of the No Wave band The Contortions. With the Bush Tetras, Pat continued to pursue some of the musical ideas she had explored in that band, although her distinctive slide guitar is absent from many of the Tetras songs. Sley's vocals were half-spoken, half-sung. In songs like "Too Many Creeps" and "You Can't Be Funky," she repeated simple phrases over and over again, creating a hypnotic monotony similar to Place's guitar rhythms.
Along with Let’s Active, the dB’s defined the Southern power pop/jangle pop movement of the early to mid-’80s. The band’s music was a quirky blend of smart pop and psychedelia crossed with the more experimental side of new wave. Though they never received widespread recognition outside of critical acclaim, they provided a key link between Big Star and ’80s alternative guitar acts such as R.E.M.
tracklisting:
01 bush tetras - cowboys in africa
02 bush tetras - moonlite
03 bush tetras - submerging nations (live)
04 bush tetras - too many creeps
05 bush tetras - das ah riot
06 the db's - black and white
07 the db's - dynamite
08 the db's - cycles per second
09 the db's - big brown eyes
10 the db's - amplifier
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