Mars

***A common misconception about MARS is that their music was meant to be dark and nihilistic. That’s not totally wrong: When their guitars sawed noise, rhythms lurched heavy and words came in howls, listening could be a harrowing experience, as suffocating as any of their apocalyptic No Wave counterparts. But the quartet’s work was also energetic, joyful and buoyantly melodic. After all, they started by jamming on tunes by the Velvet Underground, pretty much the ur-band when it comes to sounding both dark and bright. As much as MARS stretched and remade that model into new wiry shapes, the spark of brightness sustained.

It’s easy to hear when listening to this set recorded in the summer of 1977 at a series of shows put on by the late Terry Ork at the Village Gate, a renowned jazz club in Greenwich Village. All eight songs have an urgent bounce, which is clearest in the caffeinated energy of the vocals, usually delivered in the pungent wail of either Sumner Crane or Connie Burg. Mark Cunningham’s rubbery bass and the chopping guitars of Crane and Burg shoot flares as if they were running a fireworks display. Add Nancy Arlen’s nonstop drumming – roughly echoing Mo Tucker if she had extra limbs and Live at the Village Gate becomes a dizzying rush of tunes that zooms by in a taut 24 minutes.

Though Mars hadn’t even recorded at this point, they were already what Burg called “like a machine in a way – a really out of control machine.” Most of these songs were honed when the band was called China, a name they changed a few months before this gig after discovering other, potentially litigious groups bearing that moniker. In fact these songs were so far along that when Mars did start recording, only “3E” would survive, none of the other seven would ever see the dank light of a studio. That’s a shame, but it’s also hard to imagine a studio capturing the same spilling ecstasy of what Mars managed live – from the chugging pre-Feelies slash of “Cry” to the see saw sway of “Compulsion,” to the absolute rhythmic mastery of “81 Warren Street,” with its slipping beat like thread darting through the eye of a needle.

What would become the a-side for Mars’ first single, “3E” plays out much differently here from what it later became. Cunningham’s insistent bass and Crane’s hyperactive yelps are firmly in place, but this version is longer and looser, not as tightly wound as it ended up on record. It’s all the more exciting for it, as the band seems ready to collapse at any moment, only to steer the teetering ship back to safety every time. Like much of Live at the Village Gate, it’s a perfect manifestation of what Burg often said she hoped for Mars. “I wanted to see how far it could go and still be called music.”

—Marc Masters