Cable

Variable Speed Drive

Don’t cry for me, Hategentina | Translation Loss

It is not unusual to see Cable mourned as the neglected red-headed stepchild of mid ’90s noise-core, as if the dudes from Kiss It Goodbye and Bloodlet sit in mansions all day stacking coin like Scrooge McDuck, slathering Neosporin on their royalty check envelope-opening thumb cuts while sad little Cable are suspended in an endless fourth dimensional purgatory, waiting for a birthday pony that never comes.

It’s bunk, really. Considering the band’s sonic evolutions, disappearances and break-ups, Cable have done plenty fine in the name-check legacy game. And, as for their contemporaries, didn’t I see Sean Ingram of Coalesce on The People’s Court not long ago trying to get a defunct band to pay for t-shirts he screened them? Not exactly Paul McCartney or Pete Townshend-grade binds. (Those would be, respectively, a one-legged, psychopathic woman extorting you out of 48 million pounds and cops tracking your credit card number to kiddie porn sites.) Only last year Cable were feted with Last Call, a generous swansong compilation, and now one of the reactivated band’s best, Variable Speed Drive, has been reissued with bonus tracks.

So, daub your tears, princess—or at least save them for Rorschach. Often as not, the hallmark of a trailblazer is in not reaping the reward. That’s for those descendent bands willing to repackage the vivid and authentic into something anodyne enough for mass consumption to collect. (If reading Decibel teaches us anything, it’s that we have elite tastes, not popular ones.) What set Cable apart on the beautifully unhinged Variable Speed Drive and its stellar follow-up, Gutter Queen, was a harrowing display of emotional vulnerability and a stunningly rueful misanthropy in a scene of confrontational bravado. The overriding feeling a Cable record or show left you with was: This damage is for real. Time has not dulled that sheen. That’s real power. That’s real reward.

—Shawn Macomber

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