Drag City Reissues Underground Classic With Cosmic Lightning

Artist, filmmaker, onetime porn director, and erstwhile punk auteur John Timmis IV, a.k.a. JT IV, was, to put it mildly, ahead of his time. An indie-rock renaissance man before anyone could appreciate him and an outsider artist before there was any money in it, Timmis released a slew of self-recorded singles and one lone LP, Cosmic Lightning, in the early-to-mid 1980s, and then promptly disappeared, never to be heard from again. Thankfully we can now scratch that last bit, thanks to Chicago super-indie Drag City, which releases its reissue of Cosmic Lightning today.

Despite its somewhat wacky title, Cosmic Lightning is a surprisingly heavy slab of '80s rock heaven, cobbling together an impossibly raw guitar sound with teen-idol vocals and countless arena-ready Pat Benatar-isms. JT’s boyish, tuneful vocal style, floating atop perma-fuzzed guitars and cavernous lo-fi production, gives Cosmic Lightning the uncanny aura of a lost Sex Pistols collaboration with David Cassidy. The record balances crushing punk nuggets like “Death Trip” and “The Monitors” with a long middle stretch of melancholy, vaguely psychedelic acoustic numbers, but despite its adventurous sonics Cosmic Lightning is marked by a pronounced sense of gloom.

JT’s contribution to cinema. Image from MySpace

JT's impressively simplistic lyrics and affectless delivery point to either arrested-adolescence naivete or a remarkably droll sense of humor—probably some combination of the two--but, either way, charmingly direct couplets like “I can’t go down unrecognized / I have to leave you mesmerized” express an emotional neediness that must have been anathema to a 1980s underground audience. But that neediness implodes on the impressively titled "I Love You/You Know That I Love You, Don't You?" in which JT screams “If you ever try to leave me / I’m gonna KILL you!” with the boyish exuberance of a teenage Iggy Pop impersonator. It's funny, in a really creepy way, but it also lays bare the morbid solipsism lurking in the heart of much of the era's teen pop. "The Monitors" balances its manic pop-punk sprawl with a borderline narrative of drug-induced paranoia, and even the goofy public-transit blues of "Waiting For The CTA" (which bites its lyrical structure from Lou Reed's dealer paean "Waiting For The Man") is marked by an undercurrent of simmering frustration.

Sonically, Cosmic Lightning sounds strangely modern. At a time when the ultra-lo-fi likes of Times New Viking, Jay Reatard, and countless other bands are setting bloggers' hearts aflutter, Cosmic Lightning is just another example of a disenfranchised artist executing his vision with whatever means available, production values be damned. But, thanks to MySpace and the proliferation of file-sharing, today's media-savvy youngsters are gifted with a much larger self-promotional palette to work from. It may feel like rough justice for an album like this to survive obscurity only to spend the rest of eternity being traded on Limewire, but John Timmis, wherever he is, finally has us mesmerized. (The CD comes packaged with a DVD of live and documentary footage. Sorry, no Love Quest.)

JT IV MySpace
Drag City
Cosmic Lightning DVD Trailer: