April 5 — “Double Suicide (Mercy Killing)” by Versus

Versus

If you only listen to one song today, make it “Double Suicide (Mercy Killing)” by Versus (1996, from the album Secret Swingers).

Versus is an indie-rock band from New York City. They made five records between 1993 and 2000, then disbanded. After a ten-year break, they re-formed to make an album in 2010, which was good enough to rank #8 on my list of my favorite 15 non-Canadian records of 2010. Of all the lists that I’ve ever written, including some grocery lists and to-do lists, that one might be the most flawed. I’d still leave On the Ones and Threes somewhere in the middle of the pack. Most of the records on the list would still be on the list if I re-wrote it today, but the re-ordering would be pretty drastic.

The core of the band is Richard Baluyut on guitar and vocals, and Fontaine Toups on bass and vocals. Richard’s brothers Ed (drums) and James (guitar) rotated in and out of the band, with other people making brief appearances in the band. The current lineup is Richard, Fontaine, and Edward. For the purposes of today’s song, all three Baluyut brothers were in the band at the time.

The Baluyuts grew up in Detroit and are pretty serious about their Detroit Red Wings hockey. I once made the mistake, when I used to write a hockey blog, of putting them in the New York Rangers camp in a Stanley Cup playoffs battle of the indie-rock bands. In my head, I imagined that the series of posts on that would be fun. It turned out to be a mess. Anyway, the point is that those guys are Red Wings fans. They’re big fans of sports in general. There’s some speculation that one of the working titles for their debut record was Meat, Sports, and Rock. In the end, they settled on The Stars are Insane.

If you never got a chance to see Versus play live during their heyday, you really missed out. They always put on a spectacular show. They made it seem effortless, but they were all absolutely shredding. And there was something awe-inspiring about the way Richard smoked his cigarette with an impossibly long cherry and sang at the same time.

I always loved the way that Richard and Fontaine worked together. While neither is an award-winning singer, they do what they need to do, and they harmonize nicely. They do it a lot in today’s song:

“Double Suicide (Mercy Killing)” by Versus

While I love the cadence of the drums, and the silly heavy metal drum fill in the bridge between the chorus and the second verse, it’s the end of the song that I really love. After the second chorus, it gets really rowdy. Starting at 2:52 and going all the way to the end, it’s just a buzz of guitar sound punctuated by a simple heavy drum beat and the coed harmonized vocal chorus. There’s three seconds of relative quiet between 3:58 and 4:01 when it gets quiet enough for Richard to whisper “Mercy Killing”, and then the rowdy bit comes back, even rowdier.

I love that ending. Play it really loud. The whole song, or at least the last two and a half minutes, should give you an idea of what their shows were like. Loud. Angsty. Beer-soaked. Smoky. Not anymore, though. While I don’t miss going home from rock venues smelling like I myself smoked thirty packs of smokes, I miss the visual effect of the smoke, especially when the bands were the ones smoking. Smoke machine smoke just isn’t the same.

Secret Swingers is out of print, but you should be able to find a used physical copy from amazon. If nothing else, get a legal download of this album somewhere. It’s extraordinary.