The first time I danced to Shriekback’s “Nemesis” still burns freshly in my brain despite the facts that it happened almost twenty years ago and I was probably on a lot of drugs at the time. I’d heard the song, I’m not sure where, and had liked it; I’d liked Shriekback’s first album, despite the insistence of some good but misguided friends that it was just a Talking Heads pastiche. There hadn’t been anything on Shriekback’s debut anywhere near as ecstatic as “Nemesis,” though. The song is the sound of a lyricist hitting the vein and getting the band to descend into addiction with him. The beat is comic exaggeration, and if you threw extra clicking beats in between its downbeats, you’d have found Shriekback inventing mid-nineties dance music all the way back in 1984. And when the DJ at the City Niteclub in Portland played it for my young permanently jaded secretly-ecstatic and highly-at-risk self, something inside my brain went technicolor. Because the song is joy and dread coming at you in the same moment: that huge beat, the sneering, knowing, soothing, dangerous singing voice, the Jon Hassel-style treated guitars, and that chorus:
