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Soggy-"Waitin' For The War!"

As my close, personal friend Imants Krumins told me, how did we ever live so long without knowing this band even existed??? And for a group whose very name conjures visions of breakfast cereal that stayed in the bowl too long, these Soggy guys were pretty hotcha up-there high energy rockers for whom obscurity is certainly not deserving. Anyway, for the uninitiated (and that includes 'most all of you), Soggy were a band of French extraction who were kickin' up their proverbial storm way back in the early-eighties, but I'll excuse you if you (like me) would have been fooled into thinking that they were a relic of the same early-seventies gallic heavy metal scene that gave us the likes of Rotomagus and a bevy of other hard-rockers who appeared on the TETES LOURDES sampler a few years back. Really, it's kinda hard to think of a band this much steeped in early-seventies Detroit metal and shag (complete with a lead singer who's doing his best to ape various Tyner/Pop stage poses) actually hailing from the gnu wave-riddled early eighties but these Sogsters did, and given the sorry state that rock & roll was in at the time no wonder they sunk like a stone! I'm sure that the metal crowd (who were more into "taste" and "chops" than they'd lead you to believe) would have thought Soggy too primitive and the punks would have shuddered at their long hair, and for the gnu wavers I'm positive they were too anti-art project! And who knows what the geeks who were weaned on album oriented "rock" woulda thunk of 'em as well! Let's face it, at the time Soggy were a group without a country destined to wander about until they capsized for good!

But Soggy were there and they came, they saw and they conked out just like too many worthies of the past fifty years that a million editions of BLACK TO COMM couldn't hope to cover in just as many years. And just because they did what they did and suffered through all these years of massive obscurity does BLOG TO COMM dare to rectify the situation once and for all, at least with a little bitta notoriety thanks to this very post. And (just for the sake of argument) if you're one of those doubting Tommys who still thinks I've steered you wrong with a load of previously-undiscovered high energy maniacs throughout the years from Umela Hmota to Les Rallizes Denudes, let's just say that you're going to regret ever having a negative viewpoint regarding yours truly after giving these Soggy guys a listen.

Soggy's sole LP has just been reissued in an edition of 500 copies, and I for one am going to be on the lookout. Until then, one can go to the group's myspace page and learn a heckuva lot more 'bout 'em than I've given you in this pithy post. For the more adventurous, there's a Soggy blog out there as well and although it's entirely in French maybe you can translate a thing or two from it even if you got straight "D"'s in the subject. And for the remaining few who are still unwilling to bend to my ever-subtle attempts to win you over, here's a neat youtube video that'll have you flashing back to Detroit glory days faster'n you can say "resensification"! Who sez the French play bad rock & roll anyway? Not moi!