Springing from the fertile grounds of Boston's parochial hardcore punk-rock scene,
Moving Targets
are a little-known but seminal link in a chain that joins hardcore and
other early-'80s Boston music strains like collegiate art rock and
folk-rock to '90s alternative rock.
Forming in 1981 around the songwriting,
blistering guitar work, and emotive vocals of Kenny Chambers, the
original power trio included bassist/vocalist Pat Leonard and the
strong-man drumming of
Pat Brady. After a few years of trying to scrape together gigs in the competitive early-'80s Boston rock club scene,
Moving Targets'
first significant exposure came in 1984 via Bands That Could Be God
(Conflict/Radiobeat), a record of various Massachusetts punk and
post-punk bands compiled by Gerard Cosloy, the soon-to-be head of the
Homestead and Matador record labels. The LP included three songs
recorded with Lou Giordano, one of the founding producers of Boston's
legendary Fort Apache studio. Giordano had worked with the influential
Minneapolis trio Hüsker Dü, who were clearly a major influence for the
Targets.
Working with Giordano, the band continued
to record, eventually finishing a 15-song demo, which led to their
signing to the Boston punk label Taang! (which is also responsible for
unleashing Lemonheads and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones on the rock
world). These demo songs form the basis of the band's explosive debut
LP,
Burning in Water,
from 1986. The album is an essential piece of post-punk, combining the
band's love of hardcore, '70s progressive rock, and classic rock. It
openly showed the influences of seminal art-punk-rock group
Mission of Burma
-- a Boston band also capable of punk anthems -- as well as another
Burma-influenced group, Hüsker Dü, who released their legendary LP New
Day Rising the same year as
Burning in Water.
Moving Targets
learned a great deal from the 1984 Hüsker Dü record Zen Arcade and seem
to almost anticipate New Day Rising, latching onto many of the same
ideas on
Burning in Water:
combining the urgent energy and aggression of punk with the
understanding and reverence for more traditional forms of music. The
Targets do not come off merely as imitators; they are eager students who
have digested various influences and end up sounding like none of them
specifically.
Burning in Water
is its own beast, moving punk-rock songcraft into another class. While
akin to Hüsker Dü's output, the Targets possessed a distinctive and
decidedly Boston flair. The LP announced the arrival of an influential
band. Any mid-'80s underground rock & roll band in Massachusetts
would have been affected by its release and the LP also resonated
overseas, where the band toured to some success.
Moving Targets were devastating in a live setting. The original lineup was the best and most magical.
Chambers
shredded the guitar and his vocal cords on highly crafted songs. Brady
proved to be an untouchable drummer, fitting fills, rolls, and crashes
into impossibly tight corners like a punk-rock Keith Moon or Neil Pert.
Bassist/vocalist Leonard showed an unusual melodic sense on the bass,
somehow managing to keep up with the incendiary performances of his
partners, while never sounding hurried and rarely approaching the bass
like a guitar, unlike some power-trio bass players.
Alas, the volatile lineup was not meant to last, and was soon fractured. The disarray sidetracked the group and
Chambers acted as a second guitarist for a few years with one of the first punk metal bands
Bullet Lavolta. All the while,
Chambers continued to write for
Moving Targets.
Bassist Chuck Freeman entered the fray as Leonard's replacement, the
two sharing the workload for the band's follow-up LP, Brave New Noise,
released in 1989. The CD version of the record includes
Burning in Water, making the collection a slam-dunk for fans of intelligent melodic post-punk.
The sound of
Fall
is a bit more polished, textured, evenly paced, and varied than Burning
in Water/Brave Noise, in other words: a somewhat predictable pattern
for the band to follow. They parallel Hüsker Dü's development into
pop-punk and folk-punk territory, shedding a bit of the more overt Burma
influences and displaying some of the more mainstream hard rock guitar
work that
Chambers had practiced over the intervening years with
Bullet Lavolta. But the changes are mostly welcome signs of growth and the songs are rewarding.
That trend continued with 1993's
Take This Ride, though this time the lineup had been stripped down to just
Chambers
as the only remaining founding member. He rounded the group out with
Jeff Goddard on bass and Jamie Van Bramer on drums, two members of
Boston band Jones Very. The band was simply not the same, missing
Brady's pummeling drums in particular. The group now resembled a
Chambers
solo project, and indeed he did release some solo recordings: Double
Negative in 1990 on European label Cityslang (featuring Goddard); No
Reaction, which was recorded in 1993 and released in 1994; and 1996's
Sin Cigarros. He has been relatively quiet since. Goddard went on to
play with the Lune and Karate. Leonard continued to play in local bands
and Brady was, at last report, a firefighter.