MINT and SEALED Electronic masterpiece "THE LIFE OF ERMIE SCUB" RECORD BY JOHN PAUL YOUNG

The Life of Ermie Scub
CMDC - 1980


Michael Panontin

After founding Toronto-based punk(ish) band Cardboard Brains back in 1976, and leading them through a pair of swell EPs (the frankly formulaic and the poppier Black EP two years later) as well as a slot on the scene-defining Last Pogo LP, John Paul Young must have felt constricted by the form-fitting straitjacket of three-chord punk. Young was the middle-class son of medical doctors, and allegedly progeny of both Brigham Young and the founder of American rocketry, Dr. Robert Goddard, and was probably a poor fit for a Toronto scene populated by yobs, headbangers and street youth (as chronicled in Liz Worth's excellent ).

By 1980 Young had set off on his own, playing all the instruments on this quasi-conceptual collection of robot-like minimal synth tracks. And on a continent that was still digesting the original punk movement, The Life of Ermie Scub would surely have been as left-field as they came. With its period analog synths, percolating drum machines and disaffected vocals, the record had more in common with the early OMD, the Normal or even San Francisco's Units than much of what was happening in Toronto at the time. That said, the bulk of ...Ermie Scub is mopy and tedious, with Young's lethargic singing especially annoying. Still, there are flickers of brilliance here, like the two-minute 'Have You Seen the Boy in the Gutter with the Broken Mind?', a frantic electro-workout worthy of Martin Rev, or the whimsical synths on 'The Boulevards of Hope', which seem to edge curiously close to Residents territory (circa The Commercial Album).

Almost implausibly, The Life of Ermie Scub actually reached the digital world in 1998 on the Cardboard Brains' career-spanning compilation John Paul Young And Cardboard Brains (MEG Entertainment).