Inner Beauty

Inner Beauty was co-founded by Frank Drake and Joe Mahoney in the late eighties. The band split the difference between Sonic Youth and Captain Beefheart on a diet of almost entirely original material — loud, restless, and unconcerned with meeting anyone halfway.

The band started under the name Cheese Weasels before settling into its final identity. Gretchen Bowder played bass; Curt Newton, already drumming with Drake in Debris, rounded out the lineup. Drake, Mahoney, and Bowder handled vocals.

The band recorded one album, I Will Not Think Bad Thoughts, released on Chastity Hat LP in 1991. Punk energy and art-damaged rhythms, angular and high-energy, distinctly Boston underground. People who've encountered it online describe it as manic in places, more groove-oriented in others. One record, a compact but vivid document of the band's character and its moment. Listen on YouTube.

The band played regularly around Boston and beyond — Bunratty's, the Rat, AS220 in Providence. Among the more notable gigs: opening for the Pixies at the Rat, and opening for Nirvana at MIT's Steer Roast on April 21, 1990, when Nirvana was still an unknown three-piece from Seattle on their first U.S. tour.

Inner Beauty ran concurrently with Debris, Drake's longer-running experimental project, during one of the more active periods of the Boston underground scene.

Gretchen Bowder maintains a Facebook page for the band — a small archive of photos and memories from people who were there. The band also has a ReverbNation page with more.