Rusted Shut,A Thousand Cranes

Here's a brief sampling of how the Press has interpreted Rusted Shut over the past decade or so. An uncredited writer in our 1996 Music Awards preview pegged them as "noise rock with a bad attitude." Three years later, when they captured the Best Industrial/Noise HPMA, Bob Ruggiero said the trio was "party music for a kegger in hell." In 2000, Brad Tyer praised their "ugly-for-ugly's-sake aesthetic" and John Nova Lomax dubbed them "cacophony artistes" in 2004. By last fall, Daniel Mee had them figured out: "Rusted Shut value nothing but crushing noise." Boy, do we love these guys or what? Even their record label, Austin's Emperor Jones, touts their 2004 disc Rehab (their second overall) as "the culmination of many years of genuine hatred." Be that as it may, Houston has a special place in its dioxin-choked heart for RS founder Don Walsh's obstreperous, improvisational crew. As one of the city's longest-running bands in any genre — founded around 1987, Rusted Shut has a YouTube archive dating back to shows at legendary Montrose convenient store-cum-music venue Pik 'N' Pak — they've profoundly influenced an entire generation of local contrarians. That includes relative newcomers A Thousand Cranes, whose forthcoming Cheap Gold promises a dementia-inducing panoply of near-catatonic drone.