Catching Up With... Simply Saucer

Assuming there are some who still haven't heard the good news, Hamilton, Ontario's best-ever proto-punk band, Simply Saucer, have returned to the studio and are releasing their first new work in 30 years, Half Human, Half Live, later this month on Sonic Unyon.

It's unclear what the new album will hold, but the band promises a mixture of old songs never recorded and some new songs. Whether the new material equals the original or not, Simply Saucer may finally get the publicity it never got while active originally. (A collection called Cyborgs Revisited appeared to some minor acclaim in the early '90s.)

It's better to listen to the music than try to describe the sound, but imagine the Stooges at their snarliest with electronics courtesy of Silver Apples or Suicide. (And anyone thinking that a certain sub-set of metro Cleveland was rocking to the same kind of sound at the time -- thanks to Pere Ubu and Dead Boys -- would be right on target.)

And as if that wasn't enough, additional cred comes courtesy of the band's studio team of the '70s, a pair of garage-recorder brothers named Bob and Daniel Lanois (both of whom were just getting started on their production careers).

"Instant Pleasure"

"Mole Machine"

"Bullet Proof Nothing"