Bonified Douche Nozzles?

A week is a long time on the Internet, and a month is a bloody eternity, so forgive me if we're a little late with this news. But did you hear? Urge Overklll is working on a new record! In September, the band leaked Effigy," its first new song in 15 years.

Most people remember Urge for its classy cover of Neil Diamond's "Girl, You’ll be a Woman Soon." And maybe you remember Saturation, the power trio's penultimate full-length, and my official Best Album of the '90s. Seventeen years after it was released, I maintain that Urge Overkill was the perfect band for that one faultless record, achieving a sublime balance of style, weird humour, swaggering riffage and assholishness.

Indeed, once you enter Saturation, you're inside UO's hermetically sealed private joke, where the Rat Pack meets Kiss-with-better-songs, and everything is permitted. Decoding Urge and contemplating its porous line between shtick and reality is half the fun with Saturation, and it remains the era's greatest strike against the po-faced self-importance of grunge. There's no better corrective to Pearl Jam's entire dreary catalogue than Nash Kato soulfully addressing Susan Lucci's Emmy heartache with the words, "Let no one say you're second best," on "Erica Kane."

But Urge was not a well-liked band, especially by those who had watched mainmen Nash Kato (guitar-vocals) and Eddie "King" Roeser (guitar-bass-vocals) fumble around inside Chicago's Stalinist noise-rock community for years, before finally manifesting all their gauche, stadium-sized ambitions with Saturation. Urge was so despised in its hometown that an "anti-fanzine" called The Stalker catalogued every shitty thing the band ever did, and a lot of shitty things that it didn't. Obsessed publishers 'Miss B' and 'Miss K' were otherwise inclined towards brilliantly catty acts of performance art designed to make the band completely miserable, while Steve Albini was also ardently bashing his old friends for being self-serving dilettantes. He further predicted that drummer Blackie Onassis would end his career in a darkened bus shelter, deep-throating old men for spare change.

To this day, Urge inspires an impressive amount of hate. Check out the second commenter here, who describes the band as "bonified douche nozzles" (I think he means 'bona fide,' although maybe not). I love that he ends his screed with "...cool song though." Cause "Positive Bleeding" really is a ferociously cool song, regardless of anybody's aberrant personality. In fact, one suspects that being composed of bonified douche nozzles is basically essential to Urge Overkill's power. In any event, Saturation pretty much tanked anyway, and UO fell back to earth with a painful thud.

"Effigy" sounds closest in spirit to the dark and constipated music the band signed off with in '95 with its last album, Exit the Dragon. Which is okay with me; pissy reviews to the contrary, I think Exit has some great moments. It's certainly an honest record. The band was in huge turmoil at the time, with the guitar axis at war and Onassis losing a battle with heroin addiction. He's apparently still MIA. Exit the Dragon, and exit Urge.

It was a slightly chastened UO that a friend and I met for an interview, backstage at Richard's on Richards in 2004. Kato and Roeser had overcome their differences and hit the road again with a new rhythm section, although Kato arrived looking like Elizabeth Taylor in a foul mood (to steal a line from Joe Strummer) because we'd interrupted his massage. "The girl said it's too bad I had to cut it short because apparently there’s a climactic ending," he muttered, prompting Roeser to tut, "I've never heard of a two-and-a-half hour massage being too short." Roeser went on to handle the interview, although occasionally Kato would pipe up with a statement like, "I was bone-ass naked on a massage table. It was hot shit, applying oil to my bag." But he was pretty much talking to himself.

The show was killer. But frankly I'm amazed that a new song has actually emerged over half a decade later, and I'll be doubly surprised if the touted new album ever arrives. Because I retain the strong impression that Kato and Roeser are terminal screw-ups, or douche nozzles, and possibly cursed. Urge failing and tripping over itself is a key part of the narrative, in my mind, but "Effigy" is a pretty strong argument that I'm wrong. I hope so! The oil is on the bag, if you like. And that's bonified!