Pain Teens

Houston's harrowing Pain Teens were one of the earlier bands to fuse the chilly gloom of goth rock with the harsh experimentalism of early industrial music, setting the stage for a hybrid that would become increasingly common as the '90s wore on. The Pain Teens' core was the husband-and-wife team of Bliss Blood and Scott Ayers; Blood played the role of goth chanteuse, while Ayers' murky, ultradistorted guitar work veered from creepy psychedelia to pure avant-garde noise, with occasional hints of Texas blues filtered through the Birthday Party. Also filling the role of electronics manipulator, Ayers' tracks were laden with pounding tribal percussion, tape loops, dialogue samples, and assorted found sounds. Like their main influences (Swans, Throbbing Gristle), or even to a degree their fellow Texans the Butthole Surfers, the Pain Teens' lyrical interests were highly provocative: kinky sex, murder, mental illness, child abuse, religious hypocrisy, and anything else that evoked the dark side of human existence. Much more than her forebears, though, Blood tempered those confrontational shock tactics with a tangible, underlying feminist and social concern. The Pain Teens were quite prolific over their decade-long existence, and although the goth/industrial/noise formula shifted its emphasis from time to time, much of their work was generally of a piece. The Pain Teens were formed in 1985 as a chiefly studio-bound project between Scott Ayers (a veteran of local punk act Naked Amerika) and Bliss Blood. Essentially a Stooges-influenced punk band at first, their sound quickly grew beyond those roots, as documented on a lengthy series of cassette-only releases issued on the band's own Anomie label. After honing their style for a couple of years, the Pain Teens finally started to...