The League Of Extraordinary Tracks 1: PLACENAMES Poll

I’m not sure if we’ll develop a tradition of anonymity about our picks, but I’ll cop to being the Bandcamp Exclusive nominator here. The Lettered Streets is a neighborhood just north of downtown Bellingham, Washington, and U.S.S. Horsewhip was a local hardcore group from that city that has a number of songs I could have picked for this category (for e.g. “Sweet Home Alabama Street” and “Please Don’t Make Bellingham Ever Smaller Than It Already Is”).

I lived in Bellingham in 2004 and 2005, and I at first nominated a different song that reminds me of that time, United State of Electronica’s “Emerald City,” as my pick for this round — “Emerald City” being a nickname for Seattle rather than a reference to the capital of Oz. (My actual hometown also bears the “Emerald City” sobriquet and is in a different Oz.)

U.S.E. played the Western Washington University student union while I matriculated there — my review of their show was one my first published pieces as a writer; the band told me one of its biggest influences was Eiffel 65 — and I love the exuberant American take on Eurodisco of their hometown anthem. I had, however, already put “Emerald City” on my nomination slate for the original Placenames poll, so I decided to challenge myself and switch them out for something fresher.

U.S.S. Horsewhip is just a local band. They don’t exist anymore and I don’t think they really found any attention beyond their particular corner of the Pacific Northwest in the mid 2000s. You can download their entire’ catalogue for free from the Bandcamp link in this post. One blog described them, in October of 2005, as: “the corner where Drive Like Jehu, Mudhoney, and Judas Priest meet up. They started out on a slightly more ‘rawk’n’roll” tip, quickly tired of playing with shitty ‘ironic’ rock revival bands, got into metal, let their Jesus Lizard influence show through, and routinely played shows that left the audience as sweaty as the band.”

I never saw them, but I bet they were great live; they sound like that kind of band. “Cop Cars in the Lettered Streets” isn’t an important song, but it is a three-minute blast of paranoia over smashed guitars about local shit and feeling creeped out about the police. As the guitars layer, the anxiety compounds. The yelling is the kind of yelling that would sound awesome in a small and cramped venue.

I can’t tell you much about the Lettered Streets; it was the other side of town from where I lived, but I might have gone to a party there once, and if that party is the one I’m thinking of, it’s where the editor-in-chief of the college paper drunkenly told me he liked a review I wrote of Lloyd Banks’s Bellingham show. (I was extremely flattered.) Bellingham is nicknamed the City of Subdued Excitement, but for such a modest place, it has songs about it beyond the U.S.S. Horsewhip oeuvre; Death Cab for Cutie, which formed there, mentions parts of town in “State Street Residential,” “Song for Kelly Huckaby,” and “A Movie Script Ending.”