After Silence, Vexed Returns To Life With Its Own `Cathexis'

Who is the band Vexed?

Milton Garrison, guitar

Alfred Butler, bass guitar

Buzz Crocker, drums.

After a long period of silence, Vexed has roared back to life with its latest release, "Cathexis." Guitarist Garrison describes their music as "beautiful, frightening angst-filled grooves for desperate days."

Bassist Alfred Butler explains: "There isn't any hyphenated doohickey - like jazz-funk or funk-metal - that's going to describe us perfectly. Those are so cliche. They're cliches of cliches . . . We've ended up fulfilling the niche function of the anti-band a little too well . . . not in an anti-conformist way, but in a reductionist, objective approach to breaking down some kind of quantitative thing. It's music for music's sake."

Hmmm . . .

Whatever Vexed is, it certainly isn't ordinary. "Cathexis" is raw, jagged and slightly discordant, offering a mesmerizing antidote to all those upbeat, pop bands, and to all those Bad Company, Seventies-rock clones. Butler's basslines keep the music terse and tightly wound. Garrison's lyrics - which he doesn't so much as sing as state emphatically - aren't strong but add to the band's atmospheric moodiness.

They've come a way since they formed in the late Eighties and released "The Good Fight" in 1990. They then went into "deep coma," as they say. Former drummer David Lapp left. Butler did a stint with Sky Cries Mary. In 1992, they reemerged with former Alcohol Funnycar

drummer, Buzz Crocker.

Garrison and Crocker both answered an ad in "The Rocket" to join a band. The two disliked the group but admired each other professionally. Garrison and Butler have known each other for years, and the three began jamming.

In psychoanalytic jargon, a cathexis is a concentration of psychic energy on a person, a thing, or the self; a significant emotional investment. Which is how Garrison describes the recording of their CD.

"It's definitely the most important thing in my life," he says. Garrison talks of building his self-esteem and of investing much of his "empower myself" philosophy into the CD.

"I don't have issues anymore of `Am I good enough?' " he says. "I just am."

On the song, Triskadekaphilia (which is a play on the word, "triskaidekaphobia" - the phobia of the number 13), Garrison has written the line, "There is no love, except what you give to me." He now wants to change it to: "There is no love, except what I give to me."

"It's about bringing personal power into playing, instead of bringing fear," he says.

Where to hear Vexed: At their record-release party with the Splashdowns and IMIJ next Friday, Feb. 25, at the Weathered Wall, 1921 Fifth Ave. (448-5688). Doors open at 9 p.m. Cover is $6.

Do you have a band suggestion for Soundcheck? Please send information, photo and demo tape to Vanessa Ho at The Seattle Times, P.O. Box 70, Seattle, WA 98111 (attention: Arts and Entertainment). Or call 464-3718.