Athens, Georgia, in the late 1970s and early 1980s was a free-for-all. Bands popped up for house parties and backyard shows in direct defiance of what constituted a band: The B-52s were all beehives and surf licks, Pylon started out backing a Teach Your Parrot To Talk record before hiring one of rock’s great frontwomen. Perhaps no band during that first wave embodied that why-the-hell-not sensibility or exploded the drums-bass-guitar lineup as gleefully as Limbo District, a short-lived group that featured Jeremy Ayers reciting poetry and playing percussion, his boyfriend Davey Stevenson playing bass and Dominique Amet pounding out chords on the keyboard and howling wildly.
Even before they played their first notes together, Ayers was well known in Athens, a misfit and artist instantly recognisable for his oddball Victorian-thrift-store fashion. (In fact, Michael Stipe, a close friend, copied that scarecrow look during REM’s early years.) Beloved in Athens but a harder sell anywhere else, Limbo District recorded only a handful of sides together, but didn’t last long enough to make an album. But their natural setting was the stage, where they were off-putting, confrontational, even charming in their antagonism. Their shows were concerts or even performance-art happenings so much as they were occultic rituals, swirling with hypnotic rhythms, atonal chantings and a weird Southern-pagan vibe.
All of that is captured on the messy and mesmerising new Live Limbo, which collects an assortment of performances and easily doubles the size of the band’s catalogue. The music is formless, unrehearsed, open to chaos – all in the best way. Limbo District lived in the moment, which means this collection preserves their spontaneity within the grooves of the vinyl. Anything can happen in these songs – and always does. “Miss Missionary” hurries along on a taut pulse that recalls Suicide, Amet caterwauls operatically on “A La Maison”, and their cover of Buffalo Springfield’s “Mr Soul” sounds like everybody remembers the song differently, so why not just end with Ayers screaming maniacally.
The ’60s organ and exotica percussion on “Bamboo Ruin” aren’t the only aspects of Live Limbo that recall The B-52s, with whom Limbo District shared a philosophy that a band can be whatever you want it to be and sound however you want it to sound. In these feral jams you can hear the zigzagging grooves of Pylon, the post-punk jangle of REM and The Method Actors, even the freak polymusicality of the Elephant 6 brigade 15 years later. Those moments of overlap lend Live Limbo a warm familiarity – you immediately clock them as an Athens band – and makes them an important part of local history. By sculpting their clamour into something so compelling, Limbo District showed what all was possible in this small town.