Essential Logic

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Susan Whitby was 15 years old and had been playing saxophone for a little more than six months when she joined her friend Marion Elliot (aka Poly Styrene) and formed the great English punk band X-Ray Spex in 1976. At this juncture, Whitby renamed herself Lora Logic and brought her honking and squawking to X-Ray Spex’s guitar-propelled punk rock, staying in the band long enough to record the seminal feminist-punk single “Oh Bondage, Up Yours!” Prior to the recording of their debut album, Logic abruptly left the band to follow her own quirky songwriting muse and formed the wonderfully named Essential Logic. Eschewing fast and loud guitars for off-kilter rhythms, “bluesy” sax playing, and forays into dissonance and atonality, Essential Logic created some of the most liberating, exciting music of the early post-punk era. Along with her primitive, exhilarating sax playing, Logic displayed a wildly imaginative vocal style that conflated the subtle eroticism of Patti Smith with the epiglottal spasms of Yoko Ono. Singing, braying, and screeching her implicitly (at times explicitly) feminist lyrics while her backing band crashed and bashed in the background, this was almost a punk version of that most despised of genres, art rock. And while the subjects of most of her songs were serious (alienation, sexism, poverty, urban isolation), there was a bratty tongue-wagging raffishness to Logic (and band) that placed them a cut above the rest. After one album as Essential Logic, Lora Logic disbanded the group to go solo.
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  • kabukikat

    PLEASE NOTE* "The EPIGLOTTIS is one of nine cartilaginous structures that make up the larynx (voice box). While one is breathing, it lies completely within the pharynx. When one is swallowing it serves as part of the anterior of the larynx. In some languages, the epiglottis is used to produce speech sounds, though this sound-type is rather rare." I HAD TO LOOK THAT SHIT UP.

    February 2012
  • Lauren-Pz

    i tidy up the kitchen sink...

    December 2011
  • RussellChap

    OK...Kinda post-punk by numbers...Some good ideas

    November 2011
  • Nanninanni

    I just fell in love!

    August 2011
  • clenchedteeth

    'One of my favourite ever singers. Noone else has a voice quite like Lora Logic.' she sounds like girls at our best! and to a lesser extent delta 5

    August 2011
  • Blockades

    anything is better than xrayspecks

    July 2011
  • GrindFreak88

    Essential Logic > X-Ray Spex [2] without a fucking doubt.

    May 2011
  • honestrabbit

    One of my favourite ever singers. Noone else has a voice quite like Lora Logic.

    January 2011
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