New Math - Gardens [2025 Remastered & Expanded Edition]
In early 1983, following the release of their 1981 debut EP They Walk Among You (415 Records), New Math made a final push to break through to a wider audience. The weekend of February 18-20, the group traveled to New York City and recorded three potential singles — “Diana,” “Take to the Night” (an earlier version of “Wild Child”), and “The Flesh Element” — at Skyline Studios. The goal was to pursue a more commercial sound in hopes of landing a record deal, all at the expense of their then-manager. Following the sessions, the group met with Columbia Records, who were 415’s Distributor, and was offered a deal for $30,000. Ultimately, they turned it down, agreeing it wasn’t enough money to cover the five of them plus their roadies, Duane Sherwood and Rock J. Papy. Instead of getting a better offer, New Math went home. Despite this setback, the experience provided the group with valuable insights, ultimately leading to a period of self-reflection and further experimentation. By this point, co-founder and primary songwriter Gary Trainer was still writing, but was growing less inclined to create songs that neatly aligned with the polished “new wave” aesthetic, so he started consciously chasing moods, spacing out fragments, and employing the type of hallucinatory imagery you’d find in Kenneth Anger films.
This direction is all over and fully amplified on what would become Gardens, New Math’s final release in 1984. While you could argue Gardens is an album (or a “mini album”) as the group was always chasing to make one, its eight tracks deepens New Math’s sinister onslaught of poetic tales and metamorphosis that was introduced on They Walk Among You. During the making of Gardens, the group — Trainer (bass), Kevin Patrick (vocals), Mark Schwarz (keyboards), Chris Yockel (guitar), and Roy Stein (drums) — had moved to a new rehearsal spot in Rochester, NY: the infamous Cox building downtown. Old, decrepit, and with elevators that were less than safe, the eerie, decaying atmosphere of the building seemed to seep into the group’s sound before they laid it all down and produced it themselves at PCI studios just a few miles down the road. Gardens captures that in-between phase: the songs stretched out, the arrangements grew more introspective, and cinematic, and there was a clear fascination with American gothic imagery, surrealism, and a kind of haunted psychedelia with very graphic, peeling guitar lines, otherworldly organ drones, and mechanical precision — “electric music for your body and your mind.” Across Gardens, cuts like “Living on Borrowed Time” and “Love Under Will” echo the emotional depth of The Psychedelic Furs, but feel more visceral, desperate, and tangled. There’s a bittersweet, almost pastoral quality to them, yet still that underlying unease Trainer was always good at channeling. Meanwhile, “Ominous Presence” and a re-recorded album version of “The Flesh Element” shift to sharp, tense, and brooding atmospheres, raising the band’s darker, more unsettling edge in the tradition of The Gun Club, Roky Erikson, and The Teardrop Explodes. “Meets The Eye” is almost avant-garde with lyrics like “Misery needs company / Needs habits on which to feed / From human hosts, they must have to breathe,” capturing its eerie, almost ritualistic atmosphere. The track underscores the restless tension between Stein’s tribal drumming, Schwarz’s spinning organ sounds, and Yockel’s feedback-heavy guitar, a product of his background as an electrical engineer constantly experimenting with sonic textures.
During this phase, the group also grew increasingly disillusioned with their name and felt it was time to evolve, chasing stranger, and more sinister moods that no longer fit within the boundaries of what New Math once was (i.e. the earlier power pop singles “Die Trying,” “Angela,” “The Restless Kind). They felt out of step with where they wanted to be and even played out sometimes under the names, “The Mink Witches,”“Wake The Dead,” and “The New Math,” signaling their desire to experiment with new identities and break away from expectations. They would also introduce new material like “Go Devils” and “Double Cross” to their live sets that would later be revisited.
Unfortunately, few ever heard the eight tracks on Gardens, as the label Brain Eater, who were set to release it, ceased operations weeks before the album could be shipped to record stores. This left copies sitting unopened in boxes, gathering dust over the shrink wrap for decades — the record was truly dead on arrival. Though copies were sent to the press for review and some college radio stations gave it airplay, it was nearly impossible to find in stores. With the label’s collapse, the album’s release never fully materialized, and things were left uncertain for the group.
New Math quietly disbanded that spring of ‘84 until their longtime friend Steve Pross, (who ran Brain Eater), now affiliated with Enigma Records came calling. Pross reached out about the group contributing a track to The Return of The Living Dead soundtrack, which featured highlights from The Cramps, 45 Grave, and The Damned. Not only were Trainer and Patrick fans of the other groups involved, but they saw the soundtrack as a fresh start. This paved the way for New Math to regroup, rebrand, and enter their final form — the hellbound post-punk noir and ghost town balladry of The Jet Black Berries. The new name felt natural as it was taken from a lyric in “Garden of Delight,” the second track on They Walk Among You. Initially, the group was working on the songs “Shadowdrive” and “All Is Lost” (both appeared on the limited edition of the group’s debut LP Sundown On Venus) for the soundtrack, but Enigma’s deadline was pushed up and Pross grabbed “Love Under Will” from Gardens (credited now to The Jet Black Berries) and the rest is history.
As The Jet Black Berries, the group wanted to distance themselves completely from their New Math material, but this alienated some of their early supporters. To avoid disappointing these fans, they came up with the solution opening their live shows as a New Math cover band called “Wake The Dead,” performing their older material and then later in the night, they’d return to the stage as The Jet Black Berries to play the new material they were excited about. Their debut LP Sundown On Venus was recorded in just two days in August ‘84 and eventually released in September on Pink Dust and Enigma. Embracing this new chapter, The Jet Black Berries went on to record two more albums in the later half of the 1980s — Desperate Fires (1986) and Animal Necessity (1988).
In this reissue that you are holding, you will hear the original tracks on Gardens fully remastered and expanded with five bonus tracks — four recorded live at Rochester’s go-to punk club Scorgies (including a cover of The Standells’ gritty garage nugget “Sometimes Good Guys Don’t Wear White”) and the original Skyline Studios version of “The Flesh Element.” Some of this bonus material would later be carried out by The Jet Black Berries both live and in the studio, revealing the natural evolution from the seeds planted on Gardens. In short: Gardens was the end, but also the beginning of a revived sense of direction and creative freedom.