Mercyland
- 285 W. Washington St., Athens, GA 30601
- Presented By: 40 Watt Club
- Dates: September 17, 2022
- Location: 40 Watt Club
- Time: 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM
- Price: $15
Formed in 1985 in Athens, Ga., by vocalist/bassist David Barbe, Mercyland played a visceral style of post-punk that was both perfectly contemporary and quite ahead of its time. The trio, which also featured guitarist Andrew Donaldson and drummer Joel Suttles, was nourished by a steady diet of The Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime, Husker Du’s Metal Circus, Meat Puppets 2, Dinosaur Jr’s Yr Living All Over Me, The Replacements, Volcano Suns and Mission of Burma, but synthesized the influences of these American underground peers into a sound all its own.
There were few experiences as exhilarating as seeing Mercyland tear up sweaty rock clubs like Athens’ own 40 Watt on a Friday night, and the band frequently left clubgoers up and down the east coast in a meltdown. Mercyland’s lone full-length release, No Feet on the Cowling, came out in 1989 and seemingly tipped the band for a higher profile, especially as major labels began turning their attentions to nascent indie and alternative scenes across the country. Instead, Mercyland broke up in 1991, relegating the music it recorded for a planned final album to be dribbled out on obscure 7-inch singles and compilations.
Three decades later, these last nine songs have been remixed by Barbe and reassembled as We Never Lost a Single Game for their first official collective release – a necessary historical document of the end of this criminally unknown band. “When I listen to the very, very first Mercyland recordings, I can tell what records I’d been listening to when I wrote a song,” Barbe says. “By the time we made the music that became We Never Lost a Single Game, it was the sum of us, rather than the sum of us trying to be some other band. It’s the product of the three of us spending a ton of time together in a van, doing what we loved.”
Barbe admits We Never Lost a Game didn’t come out at the time as the album it was intended to be because “even though we’d just made a record we felt was easily the best thing we’d ever done, we knew it was pretty unlikely that any label would want to release it because we were about to break up.” Had Mercyland persevered, it may have thrived amid the onset of grunge or found itself swept up in the big business of alternative rock. As such, We Never Lost a Single Game offers a fascinating, alternate-universe peek at what might have been.
The first two songs, “Minutes and Parts” and “Tough Ass Knives,” are essentially about being in Mercyland, inspired by similarly self-referential tunes such as ZZ Top’s “Heard It
on the X” and The Minutemen’s “History Lesson Pt. 2.” Barbe says “Minute and Parts” is “kind of the manifesto for the record. The opening lyric says, ‘A three-man band is bound by natural limitations. How bound must that be?’ You don’t have to be bound by anything just because other people use it as a constrictive device. For me, the simplicity of the format allowed me to go anywhere I wanted to.”
This one-for-all mentality extends to “Tough Ass Knives,” which harkens back to sweaty club shows where Mercyland shrugged off parameters and expectations while nodding to the head-nodding rhythms coming out of the Washington, D.C. post-hardcore scene. “We’d call our music punk rock because to us that meant a kind of music that was independent, but it didn’t have to be leather jackets, spiked hair and ‘fuck you,’” Barbe says.
Elsewhere, Donaldson’s songs touch on dead-end jobs (“Service Economy,” written while he was working at the breakfast-focused Southern restaurant chain Shoney’s) and racially charged societal issues (the propulsive “Waiting for the Garbage Can,” inspired by the 1989 murder of African-American teenager Yusef Hawkins in Brooklyn), while Barbe’s acoustic guitar-flavored “Freight Truck” is an homage to his then-baby daughter and his “inexplicable love for this little person.”
After Mercyland’s dissolution, Barbe quickly joined Bob Mould’s new band Sugar and has gone on to produce or engineer hundreds of records by acts such as Drive-By Truckers, The Glands and Deerhunter at his own Chase Park Transduction studio in Athens. He admits it was trippy to revisit this music so long after its creation and to put himself back in the headspace of his younger self.
“Nowadays, my job is taking what people have in their head and helping that come out of somebody’s speakers, but at the time, I wasn’t an engineer and I never felt happy with the way our stuff sounded,” he says. “The techniques that were popular in studios in the late ‘80 were not what we were after. I stripped it down and got it back to what we intended it to be in the first place. I just didn’t have a way to convey that to other people back then.”
Formed in 1985 in Athens, Ga., by vocalist/bassist David Barbe, Mercyland played a visceral style of post-punk that was both perfectly contemporary and quite ahead of its time. The trio, which also featured guitarist Andrew Donaldson and drummer Joel Suttles, was nourished by a steady diet of The Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime, Husker Du’s Metal Circus, Meat Puppets 2, Dinosaur Jr’s Yr Living All Over Me, The Replacements, Volcano Suns and Mission of Burma, but synthesized the influences of these American underground peers into a sound all its own.
There were few experiences as exhilarating as seeing Mercyland tear up sweaty rock clubs like Athens’ own 40 Watt on a Friday night, and the band frequently left clubgoers up and down the east coast in a meltdown. Mercyland’s lone full-length release, No Feet on the Cowling, came out in 1989 and seemingly tipped the band for a higher profile, especially as major labels began turning their attentions to nascent indie and alternative scenes across the country. Instead, Mercyland broke up in 1991, relegating the music it recorded for a planned final album to be dribbled out on obscure 7-inch singles and compilations.
Three decades later, these last nine songs have been remixed by Barbe and reassembled as We Never Lost a Single Game for their first official collective release – a necessary historical document of the end of this criminally unknown band. “When I listen to the very, very first Mercyland recordings, I can tell what records I’d been listening to when I wrote a song,” Barbe says. “By the time we made the music that became We Never Lost a Single Game, it was the sum of us, rather than the sum of us trying to be some other band. It’s the product of the three of us spending a ton of time together in a van, doing what we loved.”
Barbe admits We Never Lost a Game didn’t come out at the time as the album it was intended to be because “even though we’d just made a record we felt was easily the best thing we’d ever done, we knew it was pretty unlikely that any label would want to release it because we were about to break up.” Had Mercyland persevered, it may have thrived amid the onset of grunge or found itself swept up in the big business of alternative rock. As such, We Never Lost a Single Game offers a fascinating, alternate-universe peek at what might have been.
The first two songs, “Minutes and Parts” and “Tough Ass Knives,” are essentially about being in Mercyland, inspired by similarly self-referential tunes such as ZZ Top’s “Heard It
on the X” and The Minutemen’s “History Lesson Pt. 2.” Barbe says “Minute and Parts” is “kind of the manifesto for the record. The opening lyric says, ‘A three-man band is bound by natural limitations. How bound must that be?’ You don’t have to be bound by anything just because other people use it as a constrictive device. For me, the simplicity of the format allowed me to go anywhere I wanted to.”
This one-for-all mentality extends to “Tough Ass Knives,” which harkens back to sweaty club shows where Mercyland shrugged off parameters and expectations while nodding to the head-nodding rhythms coming out of the Washington, D.C. post-hardcore scene. “We’d call our music punk rock because to us that meant a kind of music that was independent, but it didn’t have to be leather jackets, spiked hair and ‘fuck you,’” Barbe says.
Elsewhere, Donaldson’s songs touch on dead-end jobs (“Service Economy,” written while he was working at the breakfast-focused Southern restaurant chain Shoney’s) and racially charged societal issues (the propulsive “Waiting for the Garbage Can,” inspired by the 1989 murder of African-American teenager Yusef Hawkins in Brooklyn), while Barbe’s acoustic guitar-flavored “Freight Truck” is an homage to his then-baby daughter and his “inexplicable love for this little person.”
After Mercyland’s dissolution, Barbe quickly joined Bob Mould’s new band Sugar and has gone on to produce or engineer hundreds of records by acts such as Drive-By Truckers, The Glands and Deerhunter at his own Chase Park Transduction studio in Athens. He admits it was trippy to revisit this music so long after its creation and to put himself back in the headspace of his younger self.
“Nowadays, my job is taking what people have in their head and helping that come out of somebody’s speakers, but at the time, I wasn’t an engineer and I never felt happy with the way our stuff sounded,” he says. “The techniques that were popular in studios in the late ‘80 were not what we were after. I stripped it down and got it back to what we intended it to be in the first place. I just didn’t have a way to convey that to other people back then.”
