The West Philly Three makes a fourth.

by A.D. Amorosi

this article first appeared in the City Paper.

Calling the decade-old Stinking Lizaveta simply an instrumental trio is like saying Malcolm X had a way with words. When their music isn't overstuffed with pile-driven polyrhythms, bottom-feeding bass lines and cluttering guitar scrawl, it's a slower experiment within spare, icier surroundings. These three are as crazed and complex as the Dostoyevsky character that inspired their name.

But dedicated. Wild-eyed, hairy, one-man guitar army Yanni Papadopoulos (35), bassist/brother Alexi Papadopoulos (32) and drummer Cheshire Agusta ("I started counting backwards at 30") have remained loyal to their West Philadelphian birthplace.

"Where else is there to go?" asks Yanni, while his bandmates jokingly observe the goings-on outside.

"There's two guys drinking beer outta plastic, get that, bottles in plastic bags," says Alexi.

"New York's alright if you like saxophones," continues Yanni. "But West Philly is the secret lost—but still existing—Atlantian colony. We're the unofficial, official shamans of this colony."

Since creating themselves out of the rubble of local noise ensembles EDO and The National Wrecking Company ("Yanni saw me throw a cymbal at my singer's head and the rest is history," says Agusta), the band's 49th Street digs have become Stink Central. They conceived four monolithic recordings here: the Steve Albini-produced hardcore jazz of Hopelessness and Shame, the harder Slaughterhouse, the wiftier III as well as their newest and most linear album, Caught Between Worlds (At A Loss).

Agusta and Yanni were queen and king of the colony for a time, the couple that lived and played together. "We were together briefly, for six years, but we don't remember it," says Agusta. "We do still live in the same house, but the divorce should be final by 2005."

With irons in the fires of Black Sabbath, Sonny Sharrock, King Crimson and Slint, the Stinking Lizaveta sound corresponds its crunch with an improvisational largess. Still, it's grounded by the all-encompassing Morelli bass swell, the tar-thick, body-heaving beats, the manic, morose wall of guitar whose wrigglings are stoic and thrashing in a most argumentative fashion. There may be more wah, more drums and more pain on Caught. But the band remains true to its aim.

"Life has gotten harder. So have we," says Agusta. "Ten years is long enough for the atoms in our body to have been replaced two times, but we still play a lot of the same songs. Just never the same way twice."

"It's a hard road, motherfucker," says Yanni when asked if recording is secondary to touring. Record labels—even the smallest—are fragile enterprises. "Labels come and go like the winter snow," says Agusta with hints of both sarcasm and weariness.

One constant is that they still confuse audiences with their diffident tones, spaces and corrosion. Coming long before the equally abrasive Sunno and Fucking Champs, they get called all sorts of names. Punks call them hippies. Hippies call them metalheads. Metalheads call them prog. Prog rockers call them punks.

"We are doom jazz!" exclaims Agusta.

What they are also, after a decade, is finally on the move with a force rivaling their noise. With the aid of self-help books, new producers Ben Danaher and Joe Smiley, and Albini (who got them their first trip off the continent, having curated All Tomorrow's Parties 2004 in London), Caught Between Worlds is a rebirth of the Stink.

"ATP was the most important anyone ever made us feel," says Alexi. There they were introduced to Monotreme Records who'll release Caught abroad, with their first European tour to follow. "It's making us feel like we're just getting started."

There's a shockingly peaceful clarity to Caught even during its most improvisational flights—sharper, better-defined textures, gentle rests, greater separation of instruments, directness. While Agusta talks of the labor behind Worlds ("All of life took a back seat. Tracks were lost twice and had to be redone"), Yanni likens it to a soul's retrieval. "It was healing through pain, baptism through fire. Life and death. Death and death."

The Hendrixian rattle of "Out of Breath" can be described in highly physical terms as both a "running song"—it was written by Agusta, jogging through Woodland Cemetery—and a "pumping-iron song." So can the winded "Side Naked," named for a chokehold in jujitsu. But the thrack attack of "I Denounce the Government" has a skull-fucking breathiness that implicates its voice of dissent louder than any Rock the Vote show.

"Thanks for noticing," says Agusta of the real zeal captured on Caught. "People know if you're faking. Little Richard told us that when we met him at South by Southwest in Austin. "Do it for real,' he said. "Don't sell yourself short because that's gonna be you up there gettin' no glory.'"