Harmonia & Eno, Tracks and Traces ’76 (Groenland)
For the uninitiated, Harmonia were one of those legendary collaborations from the fertile period of Krautrock without which no Electro, Techno, or Post-Rock, as we know them. Comprised of Michael Rother (from Neu!), and Moebius & Roedelius (better known as Cluster), the trio were re-united by Eno on a break between two of his best records, Another Green World (1975) and Before and After Science (1977). Any one branch of the family tree should prompt some intrigue, but taken together, you can see why this re-working of lost recordings (first released in 1997) was one of the most exciting discoveries for audiophiles, in recent years. It’s much more than pop trivia to note that Eno was (literally) on his way to work with Bowie, on Low; there’s a fairly useful metaphor in there, too.
Okay. That’s the bit that writes itself. As anyone who’s tried to navigate Krautrock knows, with or without Julian Cope’s Krautrocksampler to hand, there’s a lot of unlistenable experimentation from the early years of Kluster, Neu!, and Kraftwerk, that sounds like the elevator music in a capricious spaceship designed by Douglas Adams. There’s also a lot of crossover with late-60s psychedelia made by German hippies whose commune-derived ideals meant that everyone got to “express themselves”. Fear not: there’s a melodic strength here, and a tastefulness in the choice of sounds that puts you in mind of some of the finest contemporary musicians, who can’t help but be captivating even when they’re at their most experimental and commercially suicidal (e.g. the offcuts from Kid A / Amnesiac that surfaced as B-Sides; Low on Drums & Guns; Sigur Ros on Von).
Coming relatively late in the day – when sonic experimentation didn’t take hours of re-wiring custom-built machines, and therefore could be combined with musical improvisation while the excitement remained – the predominant sense is of a microbial zoo where strange new sounds shuffle and jitter about, like little biological machines on the cusp of sentience or personality. That’s to say, the tracks-as-lifeforms are never entirely mechanical in their precise, looped rhythms, because the minimal melodic variation suggests the little critters exploring; groping towards consciousness or meaning. In the years before computers (as we know them), Harmonia & Eno used a lot of analogue reverb and gating, so that distorted or fuzzed pulses could be clipped rather than bleeding together – that’s where the submerged sound comes from. Around this time, Kraftwerk were talking about the Man-Machine, which has had an immeasurable influence on popular music, but Harmonia & Eno seem to have kept any ideas about the Machine-Organism to themselves: it’s something that the likes of Aphex Twin, Autechre, Boards of Canada seem to re-discover periodically, without the need for rhetoric. This is the world under the microscope: another direction for instrumental music distinct from the soundscapes of ambient, the 100mph rush down the autobahn of ‘Krautrock’ and ‘Hallogallo’, and the emotional drama of post-rock.
For those who know the 1997 version, ‘Welcome’ is a stunning addition to the album that Krautrock completists already know contains some of the best work by all concerned. Taken from Rother’s tapes, it has both horizontal and vertical movement: his subtle slide-guitar raising the listener to the gentlest ecstasy. ‘Helicon 1’ by Mogwai had been a personal musical epiphany back in ’97, but so was ‘The Big Ship’ (from Eno’s Another Green World) when I heard it a year later – showing that the “post-rock dynamic” was neither new, nor incompatible with minimal electronica. Elsewhere on the album, ‘Almost’ is a masterpiece – an apex of beautiful songwriting for all concerned, although it feels most like Eno’s work. Starting out with the plaintive twitter of a mechanical bird, singing alone (vwi-vwi, vwi-vwi…! vwi-vwi, vwi-vwi…!) an almost subliminal electric piano echoes its rhythm, evoking its sadness at not being quite real. After a few bars, these are joined by a delicate, minimally processed piano played with classical grace, that promises a place where these machines can escape their destiny of mindless routines.
Conceptually, something similar is going on in ‘Les Desmoiselles’, which contrasts an almost idiotically chugging steam engine rhythm, with more elegant synth melodies, as if to question the definition of good taste. There are some clues to the foursome’s awareness of how groundbreaking their music was in the title of the track (as in ‘Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon’, Picasso’s primitivist reworking of an impressionist classic, inspired by African carvings). For listeners who grew up in the 80s, incongruous synth-tones were par for the course, due to pre-sets on keyboards, and many have (thankfully) been selected out of the breeding pool, since then; in the hands of Harmonia & Eno, though, there’s always an underlying awareness of the need to work out what each new sound best expresses, after all: pre-sets didn’t exist.
Closest to the whimsical side of 70s Eno is ‘Luneberg Heath’ (whose lyric runs “don’t get lost on / Lun-e-berg Heath…” over and over). The unidentified instrument here sound like a synthetic tuba, but the jolly idiocy of the riff allows for surprising emotional tweaks when it changes direction – think ‘NY Conversation’ from Lou Reed’s Transformer (a possible influence). Eno’s vocal has the subtle menace of his own ‘Dead Finks Don’t Talk’, ‘The Fat Lady of Limburg’, and various Roxy tracks – that bad-trip moment 70s songwriters do so well, when you’re about to plunge into Wonderland, or the clown’s about to peel off his face, but you have no idea how bad it’s going to be, beneath.
Central to the album is the fifteen minute ‘Sometimes in Autumn’ – their space-rock outing. It’s musically and sonically similar to the longer soundscapes Pink Floyd had been making (the side-long ‘Echoes’, from Meddle; Wright’s instrumental segments within ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’), and opens with a sort of minimalist version of a Roger Waters bass-riff (those two-note thrums approximating a helicopter). None of the artists involved were quite so varied within one album, or within one track, as here; its inclusion makes you think of the range of styles thrown into Faust IV (home to the original ‘Krautrock’), although fortunately not the dire sonic collage that is The Faust Tapes.
Yes, this is a collection of Tracks and Traces, meticulously edited in the late-90s, and again more recently, so that none of the musical ideas out-stay their welcome – in this respect, it’s not quite an album, and when the less melodically surprising tracks fade out, you feel like you’re moving along to the next case in the exhibit, whereas other albums by Cluster, Harmonia, or Cluster & Eno sustain a mood, and often a weird nervous energy, with their generally more urgent rhythms. It’s damning with faint praise to call this “the best collection of fugitive pieces by musical innovators you won’t regret buying” but that’s what it is.
[previously published on DiS]
Friday, 22 July 2011
POETRY / CARTOONS: Silver Jews' frontman, and Actual Air author turns cartoonist
David Berman, The Portable February (Drag City)
Fending off the obvious questions – Why review David Berman’s cartoons? Why review cartoons at all…? – it saves plenty of time to be able to point to the article “Ten Years of Actual Air” in this month’s Believer. Ten years ago, the Silver Jews mainman published a poetry collection that ‘in poetry terms’ has sold triple platinum. So what? you might say, but as the author goes on to argue, “Who actually read Billy Corgan’s poems? Did you even know Jeff Tweedy put out a collection, at all?” Alternative-music consumers aren’t suckers when it comes to poetry, any more than Jewel’s fans.
What makes The Portable February so intriguing is that it’s Berman’s first book since a genuine landmark in US poetry; it’s his first since embracing Judaism; his first since “outing” his own father as a corporate lobbyist of the most diabolical stripe; and it’s his first “release” of any kind since dissolving the Joos. If you’re prurient about Berman’s output since his suicide attempt, you’re looking in the wrong place, but if you’ve been following the saga closely, you may be legitimately curious about how he can possibly think that cartooning is a meaningful alternative to the Joos, and how this works as an extension of his medium-transcending poetics.
So. Here are some notes I made on the book that I desperately wanted to be a sequel to Actual Air:
AA = 40% (US poet-laureate-if-they-had-one) John Ashbery; 70% Kenneth Fearing; 60% Wallace Stevens; 40% Kenneth Patchen-the-poet
TPF = 10% Gary Larson; 30% David Shrigley; 20% Pepperland; 40% Hopi Indian petroglyphs; 60% Outsider Art, e.g. Bobby Baker’s Mental Illness Diaries; 60% Kenneth Patchen-the-great-lost-US-poet, in ultra-naïve illustrator mode.
Why use percentages? Isn’t this all a bit “Pitchfork Media gives Music 6.8”? (As The Onion put it…)
When Berman’s in one-panel, Larson / Shrigley mode, he’s sometimes cringeworthy, e.g. Frankenstein’s monster, with CND button, marching in a protest, with placard that reads “US out of Transylvania”; OR, two caterpillars on a twig watching a butterfly, with a swastika on its wing, the one saying “it’s just a phase”. Hasn’t that cartoon about the butterflies already been done, by Larson or one of his imitators? (It’s a relief that the facing page to Frankenstein’s monster has a movie-theatre showing something called ‘Nightingales Imprisoned in Parallelograms © 1918’ – that’s the Berman we love.) The intriguing detail is the swastika – the joke works without it, but Berman dots them about TPF (as he did with the Joos’ artwork and lyrics), fascinated with the way that repetition nullifies but never eradicates the Nazi legacy, and/or his own neurotic tendency to see everywhere these (and other) signs of persecution / collective evil / human beings’ fondness for investing arbitrary symbols with enormous power. So, let’s assume TPF is meant to be taken holistically; it has rhythms as much as it has hooks (a tree – bird – star motif being one of the most common). Here’s The Portable February at its most quotable, sententious, self-contained:
“We start out Life having won a race AND Wind up humbled by the void”
“I lay in bed & listened to my clock radio. They played a song called ‘Sara’ every night. The lyrics went: “drowning in a sea of love, where everyone would love to drown.” It seemed evil, for someone to want to drown.” (NB – prone figure seems to have his head detached)
That’s almost it – you couldn’t put together all the text in TPF to make a single poem that might have made it into AA. That’s not to say that the two are entirely incomparable – you could (and probably should) come up with your own supply of fresh Bermania just by describing many of the squiggles – but as it happens, Berman is at his most interesting (and successful) when he deliberately departs from the syntax of the traditional 6–8 panel cartoon. Many of these are clever, even beautiful. Like a Joseph Cornell assemblage, disparate drawings or mini one-panel cartoons are slotted into unequal frames, some empty. There’s a suggestion of pseudo-scientific typologies; the three-dimensional collage that is a museum; the cognitive dissonance of stories about celebrities, murders, and the economy in the panels and photos of a newspaper’s lay-out. Implicitly, but undeniably, the puzzle to figure out Berman is the ongoing puzzle to figure out our own world, at a perceptual, pre-verbal level.
So, Berman subverts assumptions of linearity, causality, and so on, in a way that reveals the plasticity of the mind & imagination as much as it explores social mores, or whatever a cartoonist’s supposed to do. He’s not doing this all the time – there are an awful lot of zero-skill squiggles, with negligible humour – but this is meta-cartooning (or the visual branch of metafiction). One of the most linear examples connects its panels by panning in and out, focusing on a different detail from one panel to the next; taking us down a corridor, then focusing on the plug-socket, showing two-scenes through its holes, choosing the distant house in the left over the bird-tree-star scene in the right, flying through its window, and so on. Another multi-panel cartoon relates the grisly (if ambiguous) consequences of an animal visiting the butchers, flying away like a ghost or superhero, and then posits “Be Your Own Kin”, which can only have the most tentative relation to the above. All very dream-like.
Regrettably, the one thing I haven’t mentioned so far, that actually made me so excited about The Natural Bridge way back in 1995, and then AA, in 1999 (let alone TPF, in 2008) isn’t actually included here. “What is the Natural Bridge?” may be this writer’s rarest item of music-related ephemera, and certainly one of the more valuable in terms of developing a poetic sensibility. It’s hard to convey its charm, but it still makes me hope Berman will try harder if this is what he seriously means to do:
**“What Is the Natural Bridge?”**
It’s a contract between species (man brandishes paper at wild beast)
It’s science fiction without the science (tentacled creature brandishes tentacles)
It’s a rejected state capitol design (ah! So that’s what those futuristic buildings in TPF are)
It’s a promise between strangers (US flag, natch)
It’s made by your eye (two sides of a gorge with dotted line denoting bridge)
…and so on.
The best thing TPF may do is to send you back to AA with a renewed appreciation for its poetics. It’s a lot less weird than first impressions suggest. ‘Governors on Sominex’ is a traditional poem inasmuch as it patterns its sententia in a rhythmed fashion, dispersed among the “purely visual” (albeit fantastic) images; these sententia take the form of semi-abstract images (“she was the light by which he travelled from this to that”), and reveal the always-tacit impulse to console the reader in the sad realization of life’s repetitiveness – formulated through the abstract “new ways of understanding to throw at the same days”, and so on. In a sense, Berman crystallizes the essence of song & poetry alike in these lines, but the quoted lines are only successful – i.e. convincing rather than cloying – because of his deft balance between the familiar and the fantastic, showing the push from Experience to Ideal, whilst gently nudging the reader to understanding by hinting at what he’s aiming for.
Ultimately, TPF may not provide the deep immersion of Actual Air, which felt like spiritual consolation for Gnostics and Agnostics alike, in an exquisite expression of Whitmanian cultural democracy (mobilizing the symbols of your daily lives to approach metaphysical truths). In its best moments, though, and taken together, TPF approaches the inexhaustible allure of a melody; pleasurable in itself, and all the more reassuring for countering the compulsion to seek the New, to Use Once & Destroy, by pushing towards an openness of interpretation that may well be the characteristics of Art that makes it so threatening to Commerce: that you can come back to it, that it isn’t built with inherent vice, that its value is ‘made by your eye’.
Fending off the obvious questions – Why review David Berman’s cartoons? Why review cartoons at all…? – it saves plenty of time to be able to point to the article “Ten Years of Actual Air” in this month’s Believer. Ten years ago, the Silver Jews mainman published a poetry collection that ‘in poetry terms’ has sold triple platinum. So what? you might say, but as the author goes on to argue, “Who actually read Billy Corgan’s poems? Did you even know Jeff Tweedy put out a collection, at all?” Alternative-music consumers aren’t suckers when it comes to poetry, any more than Jewel’s fans.
What makes The Portable February so intriguing is that it’s Berman’s first book since a genuine landmark in US poetry; it’s his first since embracing Judaism; his first since “outing” his own father as a corporate lobbyist of the most diabolical stripe; and it’s his first “release” of any kind since dissolving the Joos. If you’re prurient about Berman’s output since his suicide attempt, you’re looking in the wrong place, but if you’ve been following the saga closely, you may be legitimately curious about how he can possibly think that cartooning is a meaningful alternative to the Joos, and how this works as an extension of his medium-transcending poetics.
So. Here are some notes I made on the book that I desperately wanted to be a sequel to Actual Air:
AA = 40% (US poet-laureate-if-they-had-one) John Ashbery; 70% Kenneth Fearing; 60% Wallace Stevens; 40% Kenneth Patchen-the-poet
TPF = 10% Gary Larson; 30% David Shrigley; 20% Pepperland; 40% Hopi Indian petroglyphs; 60% Outsider Art, e.g. Bobby Baker’s Mental Illness Diaries; 60% Kenneth Patchen-the-great-lost-US-poet, in ultra-naïve illustrator mode.
Why use percentages? Isn’t this all a bit “Pitchfork Media gives Music 6.8”? (As The Onion put it…)
When Berman’s in one-panel, Larson / Shrigley mode, he’s sometimes cringeworthy, e.g. Frankenstein’s monster, with CND button, marching in a protest, with placard that reads “US out of Transylvania”; OR, two caterpillars on a twig watching a butterfly, with a swastika on its wing, the one saying “it’s just a phase”. Hasn’t that cartoon about the butterflies already been done, by Larson or one of his imitators? (It’s a relief that the facing page to Frankenstein’s monster has a movie-theatre showing something called ‘Nightingales Imprisoned in Parallelograms © 1918’ – that’s the Berman we love.) The intriguing detail is the swastika – the joke works without it, but Berman dots them about TPF (as he did with the Joos’ artwork and lyrics), fascinated with the way that repetition nullifies but never eradicates the Nazi legacy, and/or his own neurotic tendency to see everywhere these (and other) signs of persecution / collective evil / human beings’ fondness for investing arbitrary symbols with enormous power. So, let’s assume TPF is meant to be taken holistically; it has rhythms as much as it has hooks (a tree – bird – star motif being one of the most common). Here’s The Portable February at its most quotable, sententious, self-contained:
“We start out Life having won a race AND Wind up humbled by the void”
“I lay in bed & listened to my clock radio. They played a song called ‘Sara’ every night. The lyrics went: “drowning in a sea of love, where everyone would love to drown.” It seemed evil, for someone to want to drown.” (NB – prone figure seems to have his head detached)
That’s almost it – you couldn’t put together all the text in TPF to make a single poem that might have made it into AA. That’s not to say that the two are entirely incomparable – you could (and probably should) come up with your own supply of fresh Bermania just by describing many of the squiggles – but as it happens, Berman is at his most interesting (and successful) when he deliberately departs from the syntax of the traditional 6–8 panel cartoon. Many of these are clever, even beautiful. Like a Joseph Cornell assemblage, disparate drawings or mini one-panel cartoons are slotted into unequal frames, some empty. There’s a suggestion of pseudo-scientific typologies; the three-dimensional collage that is a museum; the cognitive dissonance of stories about celebrities, murders, and the economy in the panels and photos of a newspaper’s lay-out. Implicitly, but undeniably, the puzzle to figure out Berman is the ongoing puzzle to figure out our own world, at a perceptual, pre-verbal level.
So, Berman subverts assumptions of linearity, causality, and so on, in a way that reveals the plasticity of the mind & imagination as much as it explores social mores, or whatever a cartoonist’s supposed to do. He’s not doing this all the time – there are an awful lot of zero-skill squiggles, with negligible humour – but this is meta-cartooning (or the visual branch of metafiction). One of the most linear examples connects its panels by panning in and out, focusing on a different detail from one panel to the next; taking us down a corridor, then focusing on the plug-socket, showing two-scenes through its holes, choosing the distant house in the left over the bird-tree-star scene in the right, flying through its window, and so on. Another multi-panel cartoon relates the grisly (if ambiguous) consequences of an animal visiting the butchers, flying away like a ghost or superhero, and then posits “Be Your Own Kin”, which can only have the most tentative relation to the above. All very dream-like.
Regrettably, the one thing I haven’t mentioned so far, that actually made me so excited about The Natural Bridge way back in 1995, and then AA, in 1999 (let alone TPF, in 2008) isn’t actually included here. “What is the Natural Bridge?” may be this writer’s rarest item of music-related ephemera, and certainly one of the more valuable in terms of developing a poetic sensibility. It’s hard to convey its charm, but it still makes me hope Berman will try harder if this is what he seriously means to do:
**“What Is the Natural Bridge?”**
It’s a contract between species (man brandishes paper at wild beast)
It’s science fiction without the science (tentacled creature brandishes tentacles)
It’s a rejected state capitol design (ah! So that’s what those futuristic buildings in TPF are)
It’s a promise between strangers (US flag, natch)
It’s made by your eye (two sides of a gorge with dotted line denoting bridge)
…and so on.
The best thing TPF may do is to send you back to AA with a renewed appreciation for its poetics. It’s a lot less weird than first impressions suggest. ‘Governors on Sominex’ is a traditional poem inasmuch as it patterns its sententia in a rhythmed fashion, dispersed among the “purely visual” (albeit fantastic) images; these sententia take the form of semi-abstract images (“she was the light by which he travelled from this to that”), and reveal the always-tacit impulse to console the reader in the sad realization of life’s repetitiveness – formulated through the abstract “new ways of understanding to throw at the same days”, and so on. In a sense, Berman crystallizes the essence of song & poetry alike in these lines, but the quoted lines are only successful – i.e. convincing rather than cloying – because of his deft balance between the familiar and the fantastic, showing the push from Experience to Ideal, whilst gently nudging the reader to understanding by hinting at what he’s aiming for.
Ultimately, TPF may not provide the deep immersion of Actual Air, which felt like spiritual consolation for Gnostics and Agnostics alike, in an exquisite expression of Whitmanian cultural democracy (mobilizing the symbols of your daily lives to approach metaphysical truths). In its best moments, though, and taken together, TPF approaches the inexhaustible allure of a melody; pleasurable in itself, and all the more reassuring for countering the compulsion to seek the New, to Use Once & Destroy, by pushing towards an openness of interpretation that may well be the characteristics of Art that makes it so threatening to Commerce: that you can come back to it, that it isn’t built with inherent vice, that its value is ‘made by your eye’.
GIG: The Lost Songs of Richey Manic, Live
Manic Street Preachers @ The Roundhouse, Camden May 28, 2009
It’s a strange ritual, the initiation by Electrical Audio, and only for the pure of heart. Shorn of overdubs, and naked but for your instrument, you confront a man known as “Whippet”, and in less than an hour you’re shown your true worth. Some have passed through into legend (Spiderland, In Utero, After Murder Park), others have been pure, but their weapons were wrong (Mogwai, GYBE!), and then… then there’s the rank failures, like Razorblade Suitcase. Whether it comes to be regarded as great or merely good, Journal for Plague Lovers was always going to be an important release.
So. Leaving aside discussion of the lyrics of Richard James Edwards (as we’re calling him now), Manic Street Preachers have learned to play Journal for Plague Lovers live, under the tutelage of Steve Albini, and they’re going to do so tonight, in its entirety. You already know it’s the best album they’ve made – sonically – in years, and if you haven’t played it on shuffle with the rest of their opus, you should. Tonight’s show at The Roundhouse, Camden, could almost be a “Don’t Look Back” set, for an album that would have been legendary if anyone dared to believe Richey’s carefully guarded folder of lyrics would ever surface.
Studying the set-dressing (lots of smoke; that banned album-cover, by Jenny Saville; nothing else), and listening closely to the wording of James Dean Bradfield’s introduction, you can tell this series of shows isn’t meant to be a wake, or an elegy, or a requiem for the dead. There’s no painful sense of Richey’s absence… and no attempts to assert his presence by making the stage a shrine. As friends and band-members, the Manics have worked through the rituals, the legal protocol, and even the ritual of authenticity (only half-jokingly) described above. This is the band, remember, who played without Richey, in 1994, so as to pay his hospital bills. Theatrical by design, not by nature.
Anyhow: as a performance, you get the same sense that Journal is a muscular record, a well-poised record, a typology of thoroughly modern characters (‘Me and Stephen Hawking’, ‘Jackie Collins’ Existential Question’) that almost complete Edwards’ intellectual trajectory from the Political to the Personal – he wants to believe in the “table for two / such a sweet delight…” but can’t quite relate. This doesn’t make the record (and its lyrics) a failure; rather, it’s an exemplary struggle to share everyone else’s normality. ‘Marlon JD’ is greeted with the most furious pointing of fingers, and LED-displays on cameras glow like cigarette lighters during the acoustic numbers.
Having only heard it three or four times though, the record stands up pretty damn well – in fact, it’s almost distracting to watch how efficiently JDB darts about the stage, trading his white Gibson for an acoustic, and introducing the string quartet, so that the performance feels seamless, unlike an actual Don’t Look Back gig. It occurs to me that this is what “Lifetime Achievements” are for – doing the duckwalk like Chuck Berry, spinning around on one foot, gabbling out all those lyrics – JDB should get some kind of Trooper of the Year award. If only Nicky hadn’t injured his back it wouldn’t look so much like James is over-compensating, or as Nicky puts it: “up at 7am for an interview on breakfast television; running around, playing four guitars at once… Mister James Dean Bradfield: my ultimate guitar hero…!”
A Greatest Hits set follows. It’s not yet apparent which of the new songs would have made the grade – ‘Peeled Apples’? ‘Virginia State Epileptic Colony’? – but that’s no criticism. ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ is up first, in a double gesture of confidence and historical importance: this is how good we were from the Word Go, and this is how unfazed we are, when it comes to matching past glories. ‘Your Love Is Not Enough’ follows – the only song, it seems, from the three later (and lesser?) albums – but sounds strong. Having focused so heavily on “Richey’s album” in the first set, the second set only has one song apiece from Gold Against the Soul (1993) and The Holy Bible (1995), those documents of his physical decline… and mental peak. After ‘No Surface’, ‘You Love Us’, and ‘Tsunami’, we get the defiant singles ‘La Tristessa Durera’ and ‘Faster’. Either song could have been the highlight, but the best are delivered as a fistful, with ‘If you tolerate this…’ (from This Is My Truth…) and ‘Little Baby Nothing’ (from Generation Terrorists).
For my money, singles tend to be a guide to what you can leave off an album, or a Best Of… but maybe there are other things going on here. Yes, ‘Australia’ and ‘You Stole the Sun from My Heart’ boast choruses as dramatic and exuberantly sing-along as those earlier selections from Everything Must Go (1996) and This Is My Truth… (1998), but their emotion is weaker; these are songs of retreat… and, granted, retreat from something more devastating than many of us face so young, or can articulate, but they’re not songs about confronting the horror (“the horror…”), or wallowing in it. This isn’t an ad hominem criticism, or attack on Nicky (and James and Sean); just an explanation of why so many later Manics songs don’t have the same impact. Take that line from ‘If you tolerate this, then your children will be next’ – “I’ve walked Las Ramblas / but not with real intent”. Prior to The Holy Bible, Richey became a voyeur in the fleshpits of South-east Asia, indulging himself to understand humanity… Las Ramblas, on the other hand, is a European red light district, making the song both a critique of alienation (or the abstraction that allows us to tolerate so much), and an enactment of the process.
Less anthemic, but, no less energetic, the final portion of the set has a historic feel to it: one of the earliest Manics songs, ‘Sorrow 16’, is dedicated to their first label, Heavenly, and then ‘Stop! In the Name of Love’ segues into ‘Motown Junk’. When the South Wales Quartet sidle onto the stage, you can tell we’re going to be played out with ‘Everything Must Go’ and ‘A Design for Life’, with strings that could have been scored by John Barry. Neither song has ever been a favourite, and both were unpleasantly ubiquitous in ’96 / ’97, but there’s nowhere to go, at a gig, and no better track to skip to. Listening in depth for the first time in years, there are no nuances to discover – these are still a pair of songs about compromised and debased idealism, with an irony that’s uncomfortable; i.e. everyone “gets” the irony of singing about selling-out & getting drunk, but do they get the complexity of the ideas that have been put on hold for the duration of these songs? Doesn’t irony grate because it makes it seem uncool to say any more… like Duh, of course?! Still, the Manics didn’t pursue that direction, and those songs were a necessary line in the sand: this is what lies outside the venue, and at the end of the night; the (impoverishment of) values that defines the world out there.
[Unpublished review]
It’s a strange ritual, the initiation by Electrical Audio, and only for the pure of heart. Shorn of overdubs, and naked but for your instrument, you confront a man known as “Whippet”, and in less than an hour you’re shown your true worth. Some have passed through into legend (Spiderland, In Utero, After Murder Park), others have been pure, but their weapons were wrong (Mogwai, GYBE!), and then… then there’s the rank failures, like Razorblade Suitcase. Whether it comes to be regarded as great or merely good, Journal for Plague Lovers was always going to be an important release.
So. Leaving aside discussion of the lyrics of Richard James Edwards (as we’re calling him now), Manic Street Preachers have learned to play Journal for Plague Lovers live, under the tutelage of Steve Albini, and they’re going to do so tonight, in its entirety. You already know it’s the best album they’ve made – sonically – in years, and if you haven’t played it on shuffle with the rest of their opus, you should. Tonight’s show at The Roundhouse, Camden, could almost be a “Don’t Look Back” set, for an album that would have been legendary if anyone dared to believe Richey’s carefully guarded folder of lyrics would ever surface.
Studying the set-dressing (lots of smoke; that banned album-cover, by Jenny Saville; nothing else), and listening closely to the wording of James Dean Bradfield’s introduction, you can tell this series of shows isn’t meant to be a wake, or an elegy, or a requiem for the dead. There’s no painful sense of Richey’s absence… and no attempts to assert his presence by making the stage a shrine. As friends and band-members, the Manics have worked through the rituals, the legal protocol, and even the ritual of authenticity (only half-jokingly) described above. This is the band, remember, who played without Richey, in 1994, so as to pay his hospital bills. Theatrical by design, not by nature.
Anyhow: as a performance, you get the same sense that Journal is a muscular record, a well-poised record, a typology of thoroughly modern characters (‘Me and Stephen Hawking’, ‘Jackie Collins’ Existential Question’) that almost complete Edwards’ intellectual trajectory from the Political to the Personal – he wants to believe in the “table for two / such a sweet delight…” but can’t quite relate. This doesn’t make the record (and its lyrics) a failure; rather, it’s an exemplary struggle to share everyone else’s normality. ‘Marlon JD’ is greeted with the most furious pointing of fingers, and LED-displays on cameras glow like cigarette lighters during the acoustic numbers.
Having only heard it three or four times though, the record stands up pretty damn well – in fact, it’s almost distracting to watch how efficiently JDB darts about the stage, trading his white Gibson for an acoustic, and introducing the string quartet, so that the performance feels seamless, unlike an actual Don’t Look Back gig. It occurs to me that this is what “Lifetime Achievements” are for – doing the duckwalk like Chuck Berry, spinning around on one foot, gabbling out all those lyrics – JDB should get some kind of Trooper of the Year award. If only Nicky hadn’t injured his back it wouldn’t look so much like James is over-compensating, or as Nicky puts it: “up at 7am for an interview on breakfast television; running around, playing four guitars at once… Mister James Dean Bradfield: my ultimate guitar hero…!”
A Greatest Hits set follows. It’s not yet apparent which of the new songs would have made the grade – ‘Peeled Apples’? ‘Virginia State Epileptic Colony’? – but that’s no criticism. ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ is up first, in a double gesture of confidence and historical importance: this is how good we were from the Word Go, and this is how unfazed we are, when it comes to matching past glories. ‘Your Love Is Not Enough’ follows – the only song, it seems, from the three later (and lesser?) albums – but sounds strong. Having focused so heavily on “Richey’s album” in the first set, the second set only has one song apiece from Gold Against the Soul (1993) and The Holy Bible (1995), those documents of his physical decline… and mental peak. After ‘No Surface’, ‘You Love Us’, and ‘Tsunami’, we get the defiant singles ‘La Tristessa Durera’ and ‘Faster’. Either song could have been the highlight, but the best are delivered as a fistful, with ‘If you tolerate this…’ (from This Is My Truth…) and ‘Little Baby Nothing’ (from Generation Terrorists).
For my money, singles tend to be a guide to what you can leave off an album, or a Best Of… but maybe there are other things going on here. Yes, ‘Australia’ and ‘You Stole the Sun from My Heart’ boast choruses as dramatic and exuberantly sing-along as those earlier selections from Everything Must Go (1996) and This Is My Truth… (1998), but their emotion is weaker; these are songs of retreat… and, granted, retreat from something more devastating than many of us face so young, or can articulate, but they’re not songs about confronting the horror (“the horror…”), or wallowing in it. This isn’t an ad hominem criticism, or attack on Nicky (and James and Sean); just an explanation of why so many later Manics songs don’t have the same impact. Take that line from ‘If you tolerate this, then your children will be next’ – “I’ve walked Las Ramblas / but not with real intent”. Prior to The Holy Bible, Richey became a voyeur in the fleshpits of South-east Asia, indulging himself to understand humanity… Las Ramblas, on the other hand, is a European red light district, making the song both a critique of alienation (or the abstraction that allows us to tolerate so much), and an enactment of the process.
Less anthemic, but, no less energetic, the final portion of the set has a historic feel to it: one of the earliest Manics songs, ‘Sorrow 16’, is dedicated to their first label, Heavenly, and then ‘Stop! In the Name of Love’ segues into ‘Motown Junk’. When the South Wales Quartet sidle onto the stage, you can tell we’re going to be played out with ‘Everything Must Go’ and ‘A Design for Life’, with strings that could have been scored by John Barry. Neither song has ever been a favourite, and both were unpleasantly ubiquitous in ’96 / ’97, but there’s nowhere to go, at a gig, and no better track to skip to. Listening in depth for the first time in years, there are no nuances to discover – these are still a pair of songs about compromised and debased idealism, with an irony that’s uncomfortable; i.e. everyone “gets” the irony of singing about selling-out & getting drunk, but do they get the complexity of the ideas that have been put on hold for the duration of these songs? Doesn’t irony grate because it makes it seem uncool to say any more… like Duh, of course?! Still, the Manics didn’t pursue that direction, and those songs were a necessary line in the sand: this is what lies outside the venue, and at the end of the night; the (impoverishment of) values that defines the world out there.
[Unpublished review]
MUSIC: various minor releases & re-issues
Cultural Amnesia, Enormous Savages (Klang Galerie)
Ooh! A lost post-punk band whose handful of cassette-only releases (1981–1983) is now being made available. In theory, **Cultural Amnesia** should be of interest only to Coil completists, given that John Balance co-wrote three of the tracks, and the band are absent from all the Indexes on my music shelf. As it happens, this turns out to be a genuine discovery, from the period when British psychedelia and prog was being played with the energy of punk. Half the time, the vocals may be redundant – satirical sketches consisting of “I am a banker / I have a car” or pseudo-mysticism like “I can tell you nothing that you do not know / I can show you nothing that I have not seen”. As the band’s conceptual framework indicates, this might once have been a performance artist’s clever detournement of tribal fetishes and rituals, recreated in the First World – but after a few decades, such musical Desmoiselles d’Avignon have become emblematic of the avant-garde at its most static. So, ignore the lyrics, and check out a psych-rock band where the synths and rhythm section Drank the Lemonade, and the vocalist and guitarist Ate the Cake. Cultural Amnesia couldn’t reinvent music (and didn’t want to trick their audience with the novelty synth-sounds of the 80s) but they could at least change the ratios between rock’s components, growing hypertrophied mutant limbs to match their ambitions. If Camberwell Now are one of your Great Lost Bands of the Decade, this will reassure you that there are other fine lost bands out there.
De La Mancha, Atlas (Crying Bob)
In no way Quixotic, nor Spanish, **De La Mancha** (from Denmark) claim to be the next big thing after Sigur Ros, and the artwork of their new album has a suitably glacial feel, to ensure journalists pick their metaphors accordingly – that would be Atlas (out now, on Crying Bob). With their grandiose claims, and misleading influences before, De La Mancha are more likely to remind you of Oasis, and indeed inhabit a stratospheric realm between (early) Oasis and Ride, with a smidgen of Elbow or Doves. The Sigur Ros resemblance is apparent occasionally – in ambient, trumpet-led instrumentals – but mostly it’s a slow-build to wall-of-sound / hurricane guitars.
Flatline Skyline, All Sound / No Vision (Mechanoise Labs)
As far as contemporary comparisons go, this isn’t far off XinliSupreme or Tweaker (i.e. NIN-member, Charlie Clouser). Either way, it’s punishingly abrasive noise, with bursts of beauty. In their hydraulic-press rigidity, though, the rhythms hark back to Cabaret Voltaire, Coil, Throbbing Gristle; in between, the clean soundscapes that introduce many tracks (and continue beneath the grind) recall early Labradford. Nicely paired with Cultural Amnesia, it’s a sign that being on a micro-niche indie-labels never meant lacking in ambition, and perhaps these are the “genuine” indies, inasmuch as there’s no mirroring of major label formulae (with less gloss, or more attitude).
Greycoats, Setting Fire to the Great Unknown (Sneak Attack Media)
Astonishing – the Minneapolis-based Greycoats namecheck Arcade Fire, Sigur Ros, Radiohead, and claim that their singer “recalls Morrissey”. Couldn’t they have just said, “We sound like U2. U2, U2, and more U2. Oh, and Coldplay, but that kinda goes without saying.” In no respect do they resemble Sigur Ros, or Radiohead (unless track 8, ‘Watchman’, is supposed to be their crib of ‘Street Spirit’). In the first three tracks, we get plenty of “Woah-oh!” of the kind Bono quit before The Joshua Tree, and even a lyrical echo of ancient U2 track ‘Two Hearts’. On the sleeve, the boys dress up in military regalia, and occasionally batter the snares in something like a tattoo. Having only made it through one Coldplay record, this sounds similarly smooth and digestive; only distinguishing itself by swapping some of the crescendos for white funk breakdowns.
Lord Gammonshire’s Guide to Everyday Sounds (Bitter Buttons)
“File Under UNPOPULAR: Whimsical PROG” says the back-cover. How droll…! “For fans of Caravan, Stackridge, Vivian Stanshall, and others”, says the press release, with a daring degree of obscurantism that makes you realize there are some things worse than saying “prog” (which might at least imply the guitar work-outs of Yes, or the brain-scrambled weirdness of Gabriel-era Genesis). Sadly, theirs is far too accurate a description… Had [X + Y] who comprise Lord Gammonshire half the wit of Stanshall – whose Sir Henry at Rawlinson’s End is one of the greatest feats of British Surrealism – there’d be ample reason to wade through their quirky musical porridge, but sadly not.
Odawas, The Blue Depths (Jagjaguwar)
At a time when the rhythmic and spiky synth music of the early-80s is being pillaged by popstrels and indie-bands alike, it’s good to see a few people recreating the smoother, organic sounds of the early-90s: Laurie Anderson (especially _Strange Angels_), Vangelis, the Pet Shop Boys (their album tracks rather than singles). As the title suggests (or sets mental alarm-bells clamouring) Odawas drift perilously close to providing a soundtrack for candle-and-crystal shops – there are songs here called ‘Song of the Humpbacked Angler’ and ‘Our Gentle Life’. What keeps you listening – and I do mean listening, rather than slipping into a coma, is the detail of the songs, the strength of the melodies, and the fact that these swooping, gliding, syrupy sounds have been painstakingly constructed, and not just played by using the “whalesong” pre-set on the keyboard, or turning the Decay dials to maximum. In keeping with the whimsical / magic realist feel of the song-titles, the vocals are very Jonathan Donahue (i.e. Mercury Rev); wandering wide-eyed beneath the waves in a way that says “gosh, look at the treasures of Poseidon…” whatever the actual lyrics might be about. With the Rev long since gone-ghastly, however, this could actually be the record 90s prog fans have been waiting for; Odawas have that extra hint of sadness that keeps them from cloying, their melodies playing out like sunbeams seen from a few fathoms down, where the darker waters are visible at the same time, and for all the colours on display, many of them will fade with the depth. It’s hard to say who’s going to make the first great synth record of the decade to focus on “glide” and “swoop” rather than “stab” and “batter”, but as an aquatic companion to SVIIB’s more aerial _Alpinisms_ or Ribbons’ alien worlds, this is a good sign of more directions to explore.
Proem, _Til there’s no breath_ (Non-Response)
Damn, that’s a sinister album cover – the HR Giger-ish alien worlds kinda clash with dedications to (solo artist) **Proem**’s young family. Perhaps he decided to make this album of “Sleepcore / Dark Ambient / Drone” (as the sleeve says helpfully) as a remedy for new fathers? On the first few tracks, think: those moments in Lynch films when a flame fills the screen, and the ripping sound it makes flickering suddenly explodes around you. These are the sinister sounds of the kingdom of the insects… but by the second half, the horror and Gothery has subsided, and you’ve entered the serene territory of Stars of the Lid, or Labradford.
Holly Throsby, A Loud Call (Woo Me)
These days, Will Oldham’s patronage is a valuable commodity… and a fair indication of potential stars in the making, who manage to retain their cult-status, more or less: Jason Molina, Devandra Banhart, and Joanna Newsom, have all benefited from an early blessing from the Bearded One. It’s no guarantee, of course, but it makes you raise an eyebrow, just as Holly Throsby’s list of support slots does (which includes Oldham, Banhart, Newsom, plus Mark Kozelek, Bill Callahan, Dave Pajo, Low, and many others). With her lulling, gentle strum, and mild-mannered vocals Throsby is pleasant enough, but most of the songs quickly drift into the background… well before the duet with Oldham that’s supposed to be such a selling point. Reminiscent of Oldham’s simplest songwriting (on _Master and Everyone_), ‘Would You?’ feels lazy (and a touch cynical); rather than develop the imagery or hint at some mystery, Throsby fills in the song’s gaps (Q: Would you have an affair? A: Nah, probably not…) with Oldham’s voice. All in all, the album feels like the work of a professional support act; the kind of self-effacing, pleasantness that guarantees repeat business, without any threat of taking centre-stage.
Ooh! A lost post-punk band whose handful of cassette-only releases (1981–1983) is now being made available. In theory, **Cultural Amnesia** should be of interest only to Coil completists, given that John Balance co-wrote three of the tracks, and the band are absent from all the Indexes on my music shelf. As it happens, this turns out to be a genuine discovery, from the period when British psychedelia and prog was being played with the energy of punk. Half the time, the vocals may be redundant – satirical sketches consisting of “I am a banker / I have a car” or pseudo-mysticism like “I can tell you nothing that you do not know / I can show you nothing that I have not seen”. As the band’s conceptual framework indicates, this might once have been a performance artist’s clever detournement of tribal fetishes and rituals, recreated in the First World – but after a few decades, such musical Desmoiselles d’Avignon have become emblematic of the avant-garde at its most static. So, ignore the lyrics, and check out a psych-rock band where the synths and rhythm section Drank the Lemonade, and the vocalist and guitarist Ate the Cake. Cultural Amnesia couldn’t reinvent music (and didn’t want to trick their audience with the novelty synth-sounds of the 80s) but they could at least change the ratios between rock’s components, growing hypertrophied mutant limbs to match their ambitions. If Camberwell Now are one of your Great Lost Bands of the Decade, this will reassure you that there are other fine lost bands out there.
De La Mancha, Atlas (Crying Bob)
In no way Quixotic, nor Spanish, **De La Mancha** (from Denmark) claim to be the next big thing after Sigur Ros, and the artwork of their new album has a suitably glacial feel, to ensure journalists pick their metaphors accordingly – that would be Atlas (out now, on Crying Bob). With their grandiose claims, and misleading influences before, De La Mancha are more likely to remind you of Oasis, and indeed inhabit a stratospheric realm between (early) Oasis and Ride, with a smidgen of Elbow or Doves. The Sigur Ros resemblance is apparent occasionally – in ambient, trumpet-led instrumentals – but mostly it’s a slow-build to wall-of-sound / hurricane guitars.
Flatline Skyline, All Sound / No Vision (Mechanoise Labs)
As far as contemporary comparisons go, this isn’t far off XinliSupreme or Tweaker (i.e. NIN-member, Charlie Clouser). Either way, it’s punishingly abrasive noise, with bursts of beauty. In their hydraulic-press rigidity, though, the rhythms hark back to Cabaret Voltaire, Coil, Throbbing Gristle; in between, the clean soundscapes that introduce many tracks (and continue beneath the grind) recall early Labradford. Nicely paired with Cultural Amnesia, it’s a sign that being on a micro-niche indie-labels never meant lacking in ambition, and perhaps these are the “genuine” indies, inasmuch as there’s no mirroring of major label formulae (with less gloss, or more attitude).
Greycoats, Setting Fire to the Great Unknown (Sneak Attack Media)
Astonishing – the Minneapolis-based Greycoats namecheck Arcade Fire, Sigur Ros, Radiohead, and claim that their singer “recalls Morrissey”. Couldn’t they have just said, “We sound like U2. U2, U2, and more U2. Oh, and Coldplay, but that kinda goes without saying.” In no respect do they resemble Sigur Ros, or Radiohead (unless track 8, ‘Watchman’, is supposed to be their crib of ‘Street Spirit’). In the first three tracks, we get plenty of “Woah-oh!” of the kind Bono quit before The Joshua Tree, and even a lyrical echo of ancient U2 track ‘Two Hearts’. On the sleeve, the boys dress up in military regalia, and occasionally batter the snares in something like a tattoo. Having only made it through one Coldplay record, this sounds similarly smooth and digestive; only distinguishing itself by swapping some of the crescendos for white funk breakdowns.
Lord Gammonshire’s Guide to Everyday Sounds (Bitter Buttons)
“File Under UNPOPULAR: Whimsical PROG” says the back-cover. How droll…! “For fans of Caravan, Stackridge, Vivian Stanshall, and others”, says the press release, with a daring degree of obscurantism that makes you realize there are some things worse than saying “prog” (which might at least imply the guitar work-outs of Yes, or the brain-scrambled weirdness of Gabriel-era Genesis). Sadly, theirs is far too accurate a description… Had [X + Y] who comprise Lord Gammonshire half the wit of Stanshall – whose Sir Henry at Rawlinson’s End is one of the greatest feats of British Surrealism – there’d be ample reason to wade through their quirky musical porridge, but sadly not.
Odawas, The Blue Depths (Jagjaguwar)
At a time when the rhythmic and spiky synth music of the early-80s is being pillaged by popstrels and indie-bands alike, it’s good to see a few people recreating the smoother, organic sounds of the early-90s: Laurie Anderson (especially _Strange Angels_), Vangelis, the Pet Shop Boys (their album tracks rather than singles). As the title suggests (or sets mental alarm-bells clamouring) Odawas drift perilously close to providing a soundtrack for candle-and-crystal shops – there are songs here called ‘Song of the Humpbacked Angler’ and ‘Our Gentle Life’. What keeps you listening – and I do mean listening, rather than slipping into a coma, is the detail of the songs, the strength of the melodies, and the fact that these swooping, gliding, syrupy sounds have been painstakingly constructed, and not just played by using the “whalesong” pre-set on the keyboard, or turning the Decay dials to maximum. In keeping with the whimsical / magic realist feel of the song-titles, the vocals are very Jonathan Donahue (i.e. Mercury Rev); wandering wide-eyed beneath the waves in a way that says “gosh, look at the treasures of Poseidon…” whatever the actual lyrics might be about. With the Rev long since gone-ghastly, however, this could actually be the record 90s prog fans have been waiting for; Odawas have that extra hint of sadness that keeps them from cloying, their melodies playing out like sunbeams seen from a few fathoms down, where the darker waters are visible at the same time, and for all the colours on display, many of them will fade with the depth. It’s hard to say who’s going to make the first great synth record of the decade to focus on “glide” and “swoop” rather than “stab” and “batter”, but as an aquatic companion to SVIIB’s more aerial _Alpinisms_ or Ribbons’ alien worlds, this is a good sign of more directions to explore.
Proem, _Til there’s no breath_ (Non-Response)
Damn, that’s a sinister album cover – the HR Giger-ish alien worlds kinda clash with dedications to (solo artist) **Proem**’s young family. Perhaps he decided to make this album of “Sleepcore / Dark Ambient / Drone” (as the sleeve says helpfully) as a remedy for new fathers? On the first few tracks, think: those moments in Lynch films when a flame fills the screen, and the ripping sound it makes flickering suddenly explodes around you. These are the sinister sounds of the kingdom of the insects… but by the second half, the horror and Gothery has subsided, and you’ve entered the serene territory of Stars of the Lid, or Labradford.
Holly Throsby, A Loud Call (Woo Me)
These days, Will Oldham’s patronage is a valuable commodity… and a fair indication of potential stars in the making, who manage to retain their cult-status, more or less: Jason Molina, Devandra Banhart, and Joanna Newsom, have all benefited from an early blessing from the Bearded One. It’s no guarantee, of course, but it makes you raise an eyebrow, just as Holly Throsby’s list of support slots does (which includes Oldham, Banhart, Newsom, plus Mark Kozelek, Bill Callahan, Dave Pajo, Low, and many others). With her lulling, gentle strum, and mild-mannered vocals Throsby is pleasant enough, but most of the songs quickly drift into the background… well before the duet with Oldham that’s supposed to be such a selling point. Reminiscent of Oldham’s simplest songwriting (on _Master and Everyone_), ‘Would You?’ feels lazy (and a touch cynical); rather than develop the imagery or hint at some mystery, Throsby fills in the song’s gaps (Q: Would you have an affair? A: Nah, probably not…) with Oldham’s voice. All in all, the album feels like the work of a professional support act; the kind of self-effacing, pleasantness that guarantees repeat business, without any threat of taking centre-stage.
MUSIC: The Magnetic Fields, The Charm of the Highway Strip (1993)
MUSIC: The Magnetic Fields, The Charm of the Highway Strip (1993)
Given that so many of the artists tagged “Alt.Country” actually consider themselves Rock or Indie, and most grew up with Punk, Hardcore, and 70s Soft Rock, the question of authenticity goes out the window; in fact, you could almost say that Alt Country is Inauthentic Country. For those involved, you might as well use synths and drum-machines alongside your slide and fiddles (like Smog, or Sparklehorse), and in a sense you are being true to what it means to be "country", in the 21st century.
Years before the question of tracing lines of influence ever bothered me, **The Magnetic Fields** already seemed to have made an Alt.Country classic, in the form of The Charm of the Highway Strip (1993). In many respects the most coherent concept album in The Magnetic Fields’ oeuvre, Highway Strip was the first album Stephin Merritt sang in his own voice, having delegated vocal duties to Susan Anway, on _Distant Plastic Trees_ (1989) and _The Wayward Bus_ (1991). Their, her stylized vocals underscored the irony of a chanteuse singing these ‘Gay & Loud’ songs (as Merritt called his publishing company). The seeds of Merritt’s interest in Folk and Country as a conceptual counterpoint to his Futurist electronica are apparent early on, though, in songs like ‘100,000 Fireflies’, which closes _Distant Plastic Trees_ –
I have a mandolin – I play it all night long
It makes me want to want to kill myself
I also have a dobro, made in some mountain range
Sounds like a mountain range in love
But when I turn up the tone on my electric guitar,
I’m afraid of the dark without you close to me
At the end of the song, Merritt hints that Country music’s a state of mind, and the country itself (the boondocks; Hicksville; Nowhere, Idaho) is just a metaphor for an unhappy couple’s solitude:
You won’t be happy with me, but give me one more chance
You won’t be happy anyway
Why do we still live here, in this repulsive town?
All our friends are in New York.
Why do we keep shrieking, when we mean soft things?
We should be whispering all the time.
Given that Merritt’s made “a career from being blue” (as he jokingly sings on _69 Love-Songs_) it’s no surprise that when he first chose to sing in his own voice, Merritt adopted a country-singer persona, even if he only kept it up for a whole album, on _Highway Strip_. It’s the music of misery, after all. If the irony weren’t glaringly obvious, consider the fact that he also released _Holiday_ in 1993, to represent his carefree electro-pop side, as on _The Wayward Bus_ (and in spite of its title taken from John Steinbeck – him again!)
In fact, there’s a more sincere, and more sophisticated engagement with the traditions of Country Music than many in the Alt. Country genre. Released three years before David Lynch’s _Lost Highway_ (1996), Merritt’s album reflects a longstanding preoccupation in American culture that screenwriter Barry Gifford picked up on, when he sent the split-minded protagonists along the lost highway, and into the desert, to consult the vampiric figures feeding on them (respectively: providing them fast women… and the eyes of the crowd on them, until each addiction destroyed them). Like Gifford (himself a peripheral figure in the later years of the Beat Generation), Merritt would have been thinking of Hank Williams’ ‘Lost Highway’ when he wrote the opening track, ‘Lonely Highway’, and there’s a gradual build-up to a complex mythology, from that romantically exaggerated, but otherwise realist, setting. The opening-verse of Merritt’s opening-song sounds straight (i.e. literal), unless you assume there’s a camp pun on the name of the town / the name of a (male) lover:
I’m never going back to Jackson
I couldn’t bear to show my face
I nearly killed you with my drinking
Wouldn’t be caught dead in that place
So far, so Country, but then we get a stronger taste of Surrealism, in the second track. Remember, Surrealism drew on the richly metaphoric poetry of exotic cultures, in an age of European pillaging, but it also drew on the urban experience of images and ideas colliding in the metropolis: the weirdness (i.e. seemingly fated meaningfulness) of chance encounters; the unexpectedly poetic beauty of scientific neologisms like “magnetic fields” for André Breton & co. This is ‘Long Vermont Roads’ –
Your eyes are long Vermont roads
With a tacky song on the radio
And your eyes are toothless young men in Tennessee
…
But after all those trains, and all those breakdown lanes
The roads don’t love you, and still they won’t pretend to
Country singers love their puns… but goddamnit do they hate faggots, which makes their forced analogies so appealing to pilfer, albeit affectionately, for a Noo Yawk Bohemian like Merritt. In that second verse, Merritt transforms “breakdown lanes” into another symbol – part metaphor, part synecdoche – after all, it’s the place you literally pull over, the hard-shoulder you cry on, when you’re driving away from your lover (and maybe it’s where you pick up hitchers for a good time, too). By the third song, we’re truly on the Lost Highway:
Some roads are only seen at night
Ghost roads – nothing but neon signs
But sometimes the neon gas gets free
And turns into walking dead like me
It’s possible, even likely, that Merritt was thinking of the vampire symbolism in Bret Easton Ellis’ _Rules of Attraction_ and _The Informers_ when he wrote many of these songs. Gifford’s vampire had its own duality (i.e. represented forms of addiction that were both literal and figural), and Ellis focused on the dealer-as-vampire (also, the emotionally-cold user-as-vampire), but either way the vampire is one of the most polymorphous and perverse of symbols, in a psyche that’s already supposed to be polymorphously perverse (sez Freud). By using vampires again in the next track, ‘I Have the Moon’, Merritt defamiliarizes hackneyed notions of eternal love:
…we have walked in ancient times
And we’ve been burned for many crimes
We have ended many lives
But we never really died…
…all of which is gushingly sad, drawled out in Merritt’s world-weary tone, but reminds us all (as listeners) how many people we seem to have been, each time we embark on a new love, and each time we realize we’re those lovers – we’re going through the motions that put us on a path that stretches back to the beginning of time. Sometimes old songs – not just country songs – can do this for us young’uns, sick of contemporary schmaltz; they make you realize people felt the same things decades ago, people who “were born and then they lived and then they died / seems so unfair, I want to cry” (to quote Stephen Morrissey). From a heterosexual perspective, the song’s doubly moving, because it’s the first one in which the singer (or his persona) comes out at the end, revealing the vampire as a double metaphor of love that should never die (but flames up and shrieks when it does), and the homosexual inhabiting a nocturnal world, whose lover may not have come out:
I’d like to come and comfort you
But I’d be blinded by the blue
You have the sun, I have the moon
You’re bound to die under the sun
But I’ll be doomed to carry on
You have become like other men
But let me kiss you once again
You have the sun, I have the moon
The album isn’t all appropriations of Country music, to serve the interests of listeners (and a songwriter) supposedly excluded from the genre. Leaving aside the modern classics for hip young metrosexuals, Merritt digs up Arthur Miller’s Willie Loman, who every primary-school child knows is the symbol of aspirational but downtrodden America. In ‘Crowd of Drifters’ Merritt doesn’t specify the demons at any point, only that:
Sometimes the road is too long
You meet all kinds of people
Some of them cast no shadows
They have no reflections
Take a look in your photobook
I’m not there anymore
I was a travelling salesman
I got lost on the back roads
Fell in with a crowd of drifters
Sometimes the sun is too bright and
It burns you like acid…
Without forcing the analogy, Merritt tricks the listener into hearing wage-slavery as spiritual death. Maybe the anonymous people on the road “cast no shadows” because they’re thin – emaciated by poor diets and broken sleep in Motel rooms – or they only come out at night. Maybe, their lack of ‘reflections’ may be a lack of capacity for self-reflexion, or a trope for their one-dimensional existence (no depth to their characters; no Ego or Id, only the Super-Ego piloting them along).
Is the singer no longer “in your photobook” because he was never quite there, or his face has ceased to have any meaning, to be noticed? Has he been taken out in some frustrated gesture of banishment, and then forgotten – he was written off so long ago? There’s something delirious, sleep-deprived, early-morning dream-logic about the lack of resolution. The burning sun in the second verse, again, doesn’t force the vampire metaphor: it also captures the sting of the late-afternoon sun reflecting off fenders and hoods onto weary eyes.
This guy doesn’t have nothing though: he has a car; he has that good old phallic symbol of autonomy and masculinity. Continuing his symbolic trajectory through American myth-history, Merritt introduces a female character in ‘Fear of Trains’ (track 7), a song that would be almost academic in its exhuming of white men’s guilt, if it weren’t for its jaunty train rhythm… although even that manages to be pointed; the use of trains being class-coded, a mark of social stratification, and an instrument of economic subjugation:
It was the Army train that took her Daddy from her
It was the Bible train that took her Momma too
And that high loud whistle made her horse run away
But the straw that broke the camel’s back was you
It was the Government train that took away her childhood
It was the KKK that took away her past
It was the white man’s will that hers be broken
But that barefoot girl could run too fast
In ‘When the Open Road Is Closing In’, the singer has simply become the road; realizing that the highway is the beginning and the endpoint of automation: curbing your life to a straight line, and making you one-dimensional in the process. The sequencing of the album isn’t strictly (reverse) chronological, but its penultimate track suggests that The Charm of the Highway Strip is only slightly removed from The Charm of the Railway Track, which came before. On the rails, the destination is a vanishing point that only the driver can see, while the passengers are looking at a procession of blurred images. On the Lonely Highway, every driver may be isolated in their metal shell, but the passengers on a train are often just as lonely among strangers, and lack the comforting illusion of autonomy. There’s not much to say about the final instrumental, but given the historic parallels between the events of 80 years ago, and the events of 2008 – 2009, a track entitled ‘Dust Bowl’ is a poignant message that where we’re coming from (historically) is often where we’re going.
Finally, if there is as strong a connection to Bret Easton Ellis as I’ve suggested, Merritt must have loved the fact he got to put a “Merge” sign on the back of his minimalist sleeve – alluding simultaneously to Kraftwerk’s _Autobahn_ and the dark punning in Less Than Zero, not to mention subsequent novels about spiritual, cultural, and moral vacuity in contemporary America. In the novel, the narrator ponders Freeway etiquette (“people are afraid to merge”) without ever thinking of his insight as an epiphany. Like Ellis, Merritt more than once transforms ghosts and vampires from the stock figures of horror-movies (personifying guilty memories or predatory sexuality) into emblems of distinctly fin-de-siecle anxieties: ghostliness as emptiness, and the vampire as insatiable, unfeeling consumer, drained by the late-capitalist economy. Sounds like an Alt.Country album to me, and a classic one at that…
[slightly edited from previous publication on DiS]
Given that so many of the artists tagged “Alt.Country” actually consider themselves Rock or Indie, and most grew up with Punk, Hardcore, and 70s Soft Rock, the question of authenticity goes out the window; in fact, you could almost say that Alt Country is Inauthentic Country. For those involved, you might as well use synths and drum-machines alongside your slide and fiddles (like Smog, or Sparklehorse), and in a sense you are being true to what it means to be "country", in the 21st century.
Years before the question of tracing lines of influence ever bothered me, **The Magnetic Fields** already seemed to have made an Alt.Country classic, in the form of The Charm of the Highway Strip (1993). In many respects the most coherent concept album in The Magnetic Fields’ oeuvre, Highway Strip was the first album Stephin Merritt sang in his own voice, having delegated vocal duties to Susan Anway, on _Distant Plastic Trees_ (1989) and _The Wayward Bus_ (1991). Their, her stylized vocals underscored the irony of a chanteuse singing these ‘Gay & Loud’ songs (as Merritt called his publishing company). The seeds of Merritt’s interest in Folk and Country as a conceptual counterpoint to his Futurist electronica are apparent early on, though, in songs like ‘100,000 Fireflies’, which closes _Distant Plastic Trees_ –
I have a mandolin – I play it all night long
It makes me want to want to kill myself
I also have a dobro, made in some mountain range
Sounds like a mountain range in love
But when I turn up the tone on my electric guitar,
I’m afraid of the dark without you close to me
At the end of the song, Merritt hints that Country music’s a state of mind, and the country itself (the boondocks; Hicksville; Nowhere, Idaho) is just a metaphor for an unhappy couple’s solitude:
You won’t be happy with me, but give me one more chance
You won’t be happy anyway
Why do we still live here, in this repulsive town?
All our friends are in New York.
Why do we keep shrieking, when we mean soft things?
We should be whispering all the time.
Given that Merritt’s made “a career from being blue” (as he jokingly sings on _69 Love-Songs_) it’s no surprise that when he first chose to sing in his own voice, Merritt adopted a country-singer persona, even if he only kept it up for a whole album, on _Highway Strip_. It’s the music of misery, after all. If the irony weren’t glaringly obvious, consider the fact that he also released _Holiday_ in 1993, to represent his carefree electro-pop side, as on _The Wayward Bus_ (and in spite of its title taken from John Steinbeck – him again!)
In fact, there’s a more sincere, and more sophisticated engagement with the traditions of Country Music than many in the Alt. Country genre. Released three years before David Lynch’s _Lost Highway_ (1996), Merritt’s album reflects a longstanding preoccupation in American culture that screenwriter Barry Gifford picked up on, when he sent the split-minded protagonists along the lost highway, and into the desert, to consult the vampiric figures feeding on them (respectively: providing them fast women… and the eyes of the crowd on them, until each addiction destroyed them). Like Gifford (himself a peripheral figure in the later years of the Beat Generation), Merritt would have been thinking of Hank Williams’ ‘Lost Highway’ when he wrote the opening track, ‘Lonely Highway’, and there’s a gradual build-up to a complex mythology, from that romantically exaggerated, but otherwise realist, setting. The opening-verse of Merritt’s opening-song sounds straight (i.e. literal), unless you assume there’s a camp pun on the name of the town / the name of a (male) lover:
I’m never going back to Jackson
I couldn’t bear to show my face
I nearly killed you with my drinking
Wouldn’t be caught dead in that place
So far, so Country, but then we get a stronger taste of Surrealism, in the second track. Remember, Surrealism drew on the richly metaphoric poetry of exotic cultures, in an age of European pillaging, but it also drew on the urban experience of images and ideas colliding in the metropolis: the weirdness (i.e. seemingly fated meaningfulness) of chance encounters; the unexpectedly poetic beauty of scientific neologisms like “magnetic fields” for André Breton & co. This is ‘Long Vermont Roads’ –
Your eyes are long Vermont roads
With a tacky song on the radio
And your eyes are toothless young men in Tennessee
…
But after all those trains, and all those breakdown lanes
The roads don’t love you, and still they won’t pretend to
Country singers love their puns… but goddamnit do they hate faggots, which makes their forced analogies so appealing to pilfer, albeit affectionately, for a Noo Yawk Bohemian like Merritt. In that second verse, Merritt transforms “breakdown lanes” into another symbol – part metaphor, part synecdoche – after all, it’s the place you literally pull over, the hard-shoulder you cry on, when you’re driving away from your lover (and maybe it’s where you pick up hitchers for a good time, too). By the third song, we’re truly on the Lost Highway:
Some roads are only seen at night
Ghost roads – nothing but neon signs
But sometimes the neon gas gets free
And turns into walking dead like me
It’s possible, even likely, that Merritt was thinking of the vampire symbolism in Bret Easton Ellis’ _Rules of Attraction_ and _The Informers_ when he wrote many of these songs. Gifford’s vampire had its own duality (i.e. represented forms of addiction that were both literal and figural), and Ellis focused on the dealer-as-vampire (also, the emotionally-cold user-as-vampire), but either way the vampire is one of the most polymorphous and perverse of symbols, in a psyche that’s already supposed to be polymorphously perverse (sez Freud). By using vampires again in the next track, ‘I Have the Moon’, Merritt defamiliarizes hackneyed notions of eternal love:
…we have walked in ancient times
And we’ve been burned for many crimes
We have ended many lives
But we never really died…
…all of which is gushingly sad, drawled out in Merritt’s world-weary tone, but reminds us all (as listeners) how many people we seem to have been, each time we embark on a new love, and each time we realize we’re those lovers – we’re going through the motions that put us on a path that stretches back to the beginning of time. Sometimes old songs – not just country songs – can do this for us young’uns, sick of contemporary schmaltz; they make you realize people felt the same things decades ago, people who “were born and then they lived and then they died / seems so unfair, I want to cry” (to quote Stephen Morrissey). From a heterosexual perspective, the song’s doubly moving, because it’s the first one in which the singer (or his persona) comes out at the end, revealing the vampire as a double metaphor of love that should never die (but flames up and shrieks when it does), and the homosexual inhabiting a nocturnal world, whose lover may not have come out:
I’d like to come and comfort you
But I’d be blinded by the blue
You have the sun, I have the moon
You’re bound to die under the sun
But I’ll be doomed to carry on
You have become like other men
But let me kiss you once again
You have the sun, I have the moon
The album isn’t all appropriations of Country music, to serve the interests of listeners (and a songwriter) supposedly excluded from the genre. Leaving aside the modern classics for hip young metrosexuals, Merritt digs up Arthur Miller’s Willie Loman, who every primary-school child knows is the symbol of aspirational but downtrodden America. In ‘Crowd of Drifters’ Merritt doesn’t specify the demons at any point, only that:
Sometimes the road is too long
You meet all kinds of people
Some of them cast no shadows
They have no reflections
Take a look in your photobook
I’m not there anymore
I was a travelling salesman
I got lost on the back roads
Fell in with a crowd of drifters
Sometimes the sun is too bright and
It burns you like acid…
Without forcing the analogy, Merritt tricks the listener into hearing wage-slavery as spiritual death. Maybe the anonymous people on the road “cast no shadows” because they’re thin – emaciated by poor diets and broken sleep in Motel rooms – or they only come out at night. Maybe, their lack of ‘reflections’ may be a lack of capacity for self-reflexion, or a trope for their one-dimensional existence (no depth to their characters; no Ego or Id, only the Super-Ego piloting them along).
Is the singer no longer “in your photobook” because he was never quite there, or his face has ceased to have any meaning, to be noticed? Has he been taken out in some frustrated gesture of banishment, and then forgotten – he was written off so long ago? There’s something delirious, sleep-deprived, early-morning dream-logic about the lack of resolution. The burning sun in the second verse, again, doesn’t force the vampire metaphor: it also captures the sting of the late-afternoon sun reflecting off fenders and hoods onto weary eyes.
This guy doesn’t have nothing though: he has a car; he has that good old phallic symbol of autonomy and masculinity. Continuing his symbolic trajectory through American myth-history, Merritt introduces a female character in ‘Fear of Trains’ (track 7), a song that would be almost academic in its exhuming of white men’s guilt, if it weren’t for its jaunty train rhythm… although even that manages to be pointed; the use of trains being class-coded, a mark of social stratification, and an instrument of economic subjugation:
It was the Army train that took her Daddy from her
It was the Bible train that took her Momma too
And that high loud whistle made her horse run away
But the straw that broke the camel’s back was you
It was the Government train that took away her childhood
It was the KKK that took away her past
It was the white man’s will that hers be broken
But that barefoot girl could run too fast
In ‘When the Open Road Is Closing In’, the singer has simply become the road; realizing that the highway is the beginning and the endpoint of automation: curbing your life to a straight line, and making you one-dimensional in the process. The sequencing of the album isn’t strictly (reverse) chronological, but its penultimate track suggests that The Charm of the Highway Strip is only slightly removed from The Charm of the Railway Track, which came before. On the rails, the destination is a vanishing point that only the driver can see, while the passengers are looking at a procession of blurred images. On the Lonely Highway, every driver may be isolated in their metal shell, but the passengers on a train are often just as lonely among strangers, and lack the comforting illusion of autonomy. There’s not much to say about the final instrumental, but given the historic parallels between the events of 80 years ago, and the events of 2008 – 2009, a track entitled ‘Dust Bowl’ is a poignant message that where we’re coming from (historically) is often where we’re going.
Finally, if there is as strong a connection to Bret Easton Ellis as I’ve suggested, Merritt must have loved the fact he got to put a “Merge” sign on the back of his minimalist sleeve – alluding simultaneously to Kraftwerk’s _Autobahn_ and the dark punning in Less Than Zero, not to mention subsequent novels about spiritual, cultural, and moral vacuity in contemporary America. In the novel, the narrator ponders Freeway etiquette (“people are afraid to merge”) without ever thinking of his insight as an epiphany. Like Ellis, Merritt more than once transforms ghosts and vampires from the stock figures of horror-movies (personifying guilty memories or predatory sexuality) into emblems of distinctly fin-de-siecle anxieties: ghostliness as emptiness, and the vampire as insatiable, unfeeling consumer, drained by the late-capitalist economy. Sounds like an Alt.Country album to me, and a classic one at that…
[slightly edited from previous publication on DiS]
MUSIC: This Heat, Deceit (1981)
Judged by its cover alone, Deceit (1981) is the great prophetic record of the era – the front depicts a scream beneath a mask that is a collage of: Mushroom-Cloud between-the-eyes; JFK & Khruschev shaking hands; Stars & Stripes across the tongue; Ron & Nancy on the forehead. These are the images still familiar in 2008. The lyric-sheet is scattered with the same clippings, and some more helpful captions. Much of this is identical to the collage ingredients for OK Computer (1997) and its singles: what to do in the event of a bomb, or when the siren sounds; where tactical nukes are deployed, worldwide; those oddly dehumanizing line-drawings of how to prepare your fall-out shelter. Deceit came out in 1981, though – a couple of years before Star Wars (the Strategic Defense Initiative); before Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein; before the first massacre of the Kurds. Ten years later, GW1; ten years further on, 9/11; then the War for Oil, then the Credit Crunch; and only this week can we see real hope of a decline in Republican war-mongering and financial mismanagement (the legacy of Milton Friedman, via Reagan & Thatcher). You know most of this; the point is, to get a sense of history… but also a sense of “prophecy” as a meaningful term in the context of avant-garde music.
Back in 1979, punk in the sense of scuzzed-up glam or sped-up blues had already exhausted its capacity for subversion. Nonetheless, a door had clearly been opened for the experimentalism of post-punk (in a loose sense), and within that (or overlapping), a kind of proto-industrial music that has little to do with Ministry, NIN, or Front 242. Alongside Lydon’s definitive nail-in-the-coffin of the Pistols – Metal Box (1979) – This Heat’s debut was the sound of re-invention and refutation, both musical and ideological. Heavier than Throbbing Gristle or Cabaret Voltaire, the industrial analogies (at the time) require some contextualizing: industrial as a simile (metal on metal), industrial as a reflection of process (customized machines), industrial as an allusion to critiques of the “military industrial complex”. The best (or worst) was yet to come, however…
Deceit (1981) is prophetic, for a start, in that it’s glossolalic – it’s gibberish, it’s speaking in tongues, it’s too many ideas at once, and if you throw them at the wall, some of them are bound to stick, and look like a warning three decades later, if not like Revelations. Thing is, prophecy often attracts the wrong people, and gets ignored by the rest, when they assume it must refer to some specific event in the future (i.e. Kabbalism), rather than referring to the horror here and now, but visibly imminent to those who can see the historic patterns (…which is one aspect of Gnosticism). Track 5, ‘Cenotaph’ spells this out: “his-tory / his-tory / repeats itself / repeats itself // Poppy Day – remember poppies are red / and the fields are full of poppies” – it’s literally a song about decoding symbols, and not letting the signal become noise; it’s not a Fuck You to the jingoism and self-righteousness of the generation who “served” (as Sid, Siouxsie, and others claimed their Nazi regalia was meant to suggest), nor does this song disrespect the dead, but it does demand that we re-consider our values. The most recognizably “punk” track on the album, ‘SPQR’ (Track 4), identifies another repetition, and how we’re taught by rote to repeat the values, and sometimes the mistakes, of our parents – right back to the imperialism and centralized government of 2,000 years ago: “we’re all Romans / we know all about straight roads / every road leads home / home to Rome / amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant.”
The devastating industrial freak-out, ‘Makeshift Swahili’ (Track 8), condenses most of these ideas into one song, although you wouldn’t know it at first from the Dalek-voice: “…makeshift she sings / in her native German / you try to understand / what she’s trying to say / she says ‘You’re only as good / as the words you understand / and you, you don’t understand / the words.’ / CHORUS: Tower of Babel!!! / Swaaaaaaahili!!! / It’s all Greek to me!” The middle-eight introduces a pretty guitar figure, and a second voice relates a fragment of history that might have been dropped in as a sample, years later: “ ‘we give you firewater / you give us your land’ / ‘white-man speak with forked tongues / but it’s too late now / to start complaining…’” The sinister drones resume almost immediately, and then the song explodes with an intensity surpassing punk at its most violent – Charles Hayward shrieking “Rhubarb! Rhubarb! Rhubarb!” Granted, this track may not be the most obvious demonstration of the genius of This Heat – Yes, Babel remains the best-known parable of the dangers of imperialism (if not globalization) collapsing under the weight of its ambition; there are also hints that language is power, and literacy was an instrument of subjugation, in the case of the Native Americans, rather than being the gift of enlightenment (see also, Gang of Four’s contemporaneous Entertainment!). These allusions operate according to the collage-principles of juxtaposition and partial-tearing to create new meanings – collage being the best known Dadaist strategy – but This Heat also employ sound-poetry and a kind of automatic-speaking akin to channelling and possession (these being associated with Dadaism’s loopier, more magic(k)al experiments, pre-WWI). Art-history lesson almost done, it remains to point out that when inter-war Surrealism re-visited Dadaism, it used the slogan “Surrealism in the service of the revolution”, and was firmly Marxist in its orientation. If 1970s English Progressive Rock was a debased surrealism in the service of trippiness, This Heat brought the revolutionary spirit back.
What of the rest of the album? It’s a complex beast, whose intra-textualities are as numerous as the inter-textualities. The use of loops, drones, found-sounds, and unusual percussion (girders, dummy-heads) was so elaborate that you have to look to The Beatles’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ for a precursor, and as far ahead as Aphex Twin when describing the more danceable and abrasive tracks. A guitarist as evil – but subtle – as Charles Bullen wouldn’t be found until Dave Pajo (of Slint), and if you want a comparison for the first album, only liars have come close, with Drum’s not Dead (2006). Personally, I can hear the ghost of Nico channelled into This Heat’s weird mix of fucked-up lullabies (Track 1: ‘Sleep’), and drone-based proto-industrial nightmares. The drawing of parallels between the End of Rome & the Cold War Era is also very Nico, and the phrase “the sound of explosions” on ‘A New Kind of Water’ (Track 10) feels like a reference to Eno’s “bomb-noises” for Nico’s The End. (Eno also recorded Manzanera’s pre-Roxy band, Quiet Sun, who included one Charles Hayward, later of This Heat. Rhubarb Rhubarb.)
Opening track ‘Sleep’ tells us we’re all unconscious, lulled by commercials (hence “softness is a thing called Comfort”), and these operate on us like Pavlov’s dogs (CHORUS: “stimulus and response”). ‘Triumph’ might be suggesting a parallel between Neighbourhood Watch (imported from the US in 1982 – a landmark in the history of surveillance), and the early years of Nazism, when Riefenstahl assembled her filmic montage Triumph of the Will. ‘SPQR’ is sung in the first person plural and refers to the supposedly democratic electorate as “unconscious collective” – Cold War propaganda and sci-fi alike often fantasized the enemy as an insectile hive-mind, but this song isn’t about an external enemy: the enemy is now internal. ‘Independence’ (Track 9) is, quite literally, the Declaration of Independence. Ask yourself, as a UK-citizen, have you ever read it? Do you know what it says? Could you imagine trying to implement its ideals now? Doesn’t its endorsement of revolution sound – well, “un-American” (as the Patriot Act defines “American”)? The climax is post-punk masterpiece and personal favourite, ‘A New Kind of Water’, which layers un-synchronized drums, bass, and a chiming guitar line – a distant siren that hasn’t yet been recognized as a warning signal. As the parts cycle, and change in volume, the notes interact differently. The initial chorus vocals are those of impotent, infantilized consumers (“we were told to expect more / and now that we’ve got more / we want more”). After that, the vocal delivery is soulless and hollow – Winston Smith at the end of 1984 – we have hope, it says: ‘a cure for cancer / we’ve got men on the job.’ Urgency increases… the drums begin to pound… you realize the apocalypse is here and you wish you were in Neverland (“fly away Peter / hideaway Paul…”). The title of the final track is written in Japanese characters, transliterated into Romaji (‘Hi Baku Shyo’), and then translated into English (‘Suffer Bomb Disease’). There are no words in this murky, marshy soundscape – maybe this is the world in which only cockroaches have survived. Maybe English-speakers are only tolerated as slaves of the victorious “Yellow Peril” (hence the Romaji-script). Then again, maybe the bomb has already dropped, and we became insects without realizing it.
THIS HEAT:
This Heat (1979) 8 / 10
‘24 Track Loop’ also available on In the Beginning was Rhythm (SoulJazz), revealing the dancier, dubbier side of post-punk.
“Health & Efficiency EP” (12”: 1980; CD: 1998)
[Starts like Supergrass – “here’s a song about the sunshine! / dedicated to the sunshine!” – and then breaks down into a kind of punk/jazz instrumental] 8 / 10
Deceit (1981) 9 / 10
Made Available: BBC Sessions, 1977 (1996)
[Live versions of “best” / most song-like tracks from the first album, a version of ‘Makeshift’ some might prefer, and more noise-scapes] 8 / 10
Repeat (1998)
[Extended version of ‘24 Track Loop’; percussive B-side to “Health” EP, 12”; various experiments from 1979] 6 / 10
CAMBERWELL NOW:
‘Meridian’ EP (1982) / The Ghost Trade LP (1985) / ‘Greenfingers’ EP (1986)
[Collected as All’s Well that End’s Well (2006)] 8 / 10
Back in 1979, punk in the sense of scuzzed-up glam or sped-up blues had already exhausted its capacity for subversion. Nonetheless, a door had clearly been opened for the experimentalism of post-punk (in a loose sense), and within that (or overlapping), a kind of proto-industrial music that has little to do with Ministry, NIN, or Front 242. Alongside Lydon’s definitive nail-in-the-coffin of the Pistols – Metal Box (1979) – This Heat’s debut was the sound of re-invention and refutation, both musical and ideological. Heavier than Throbbing Gristle or Cabaret Voltaire, the industrial analogies (at the time) require some contextualizing: industrial as a simile (metal on metal), industrial as a reflection of process (customized machines), industrial as an allusion to critiques of the “military industrial complex”. The best (or worst) was yet to come, however…
Deceit (1981) is prophetic, for a start, in that it’s glossolalic – it’s gibberish, it’s speaking in tongues, it’s too many ideas at once, and if you throw them at the wall, some of them are bound to stick, and look like a warning three decades later, if not like Revelations. Thing is, prophecy often attracts the wrong people, and gets ignored by the rest, when they assume it must refer to some specific event in the future (i.e. Kabbalism), rather than referring to the horror here and now, but visibly imminent to those who can see the historic patterns (…which is one aspect of Gnosticism). Track 5, ‘Cenotaph’ spells this out: “his-tory / his-tory / repeats itself / repeats itself // Poppy Day – remember poppies are red / and the fields are full of poppies” – it’s literally a song about decoding symbols, and not letting the signal become noise; it’s not a Fuck You to the jingoism and self-righteousness of the generation who “served” (as Sid, Siouxsie, and others claimed their Nazi regalia was meant to suggest), nor does this song disrespect the dead, but it does demand that we re-consider our values. The most recognizably “punk” track on the album, ‘SPQR’ (Track 4), identifies another repetition, and how we’re taught by rote to repeat the values, and sometimes the mistakes, of our parents – right back to the imperialism and centralized government of 2,000 years ago: “we’re all Romans / we know all about straight roads / every road leads home / home to Rome / amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant.”
The devastating industrial freak-out, ‘Makeshift Swahili’ (Track 8), condenses most of these ideas into one song, although you wouldn’t know it at first from the Dalek-voice: “…makeshift she sings / in her native German / you try to understand / what she’s trying to say / she says ‘You’re only as good / as the words you understand / and you, you don’t understand / the words.’ / CHORUS: Tower of Babel!!! / Swaaaaaaahili!!! / It’s all Greek to me!” The middle-eight introduces a pretty guitar figure, and a second voice relates a fragment of history that might have been dropped in as a sample, years later: “ ‘we give you firewater / you give us your land’ / ‘white-man speak with forked tongues / but it’s too late now / to start complaining…’” The sinister drones resume almost immediately, and then the song explodes with an intensity surpassing punk at its most violent – Charles Hayward shrieking “Rhubarb! Rhubarb! Rhubarb!” Granted, this track may not be the most obvious demonstration of the genius of This Heat – Yes, Babel remains the best-known parable of the dangers of imperialism (if not globalization) collapsing under the weight of its ambition; there are also hints that language is power, and literacy was an instrument of subjugation, in the case of the Native Americans, rather than being the gift of enlightenment (see also, Gang of Four’s contemporaneous Entertainment!). These allusions operate according to the collage-principles of juxtaposition and partial-tearing to create new meanings – collage being the best known Dadaist strategy – but This Heat also employ sound-poetry and a kind of automatic-speaking akin to channelling and possession (these being associated with Dadaism’s loopier, more magic(k)al experiments, pre-WWI). Art-history lesson almost done, it remains to point out that when inter-war Surrealism re-visited Dadaism, it used the slogan “Surrealism in the service of the revolution”, and was firmly Marxist in its orientation. If 1970s English Progressive Rock was a debased surrealism in the service of trippiness, This Heat brought the revolutionary spirit back.
What of the rest of the album? It’s a complex beast, whose intra-textualities are as numerous as the inter-textualities. The use of loops, drones, found-sounds, and unusual percussion (girders, dummy-heads) was so elaborate that you have to look to The Beatles’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ for a precursor, and as far ahead as Aphex Twin when describing the more danceable and abrasive tracks. A guitarist as evil – but subtle – as Charles Bullen wouldn’t be found until Dave Pajo (of Slint), and if you want a comparison for the first album, only liars have come close, with Drum’s not Dead (2006). Personally, I can hear the ghost of Nico channelled into This Heat’s weird mix of fucked-up lullabies (Track 1: ‘Sleep’), and drone-based proto-industrial nightmares. The drawing of parallels between the End of Rome & the Cold War Era is also very Nico, and the phrase “the sound of explosions” on ‘A New Kind of Water’ (Track 10) feels like a reference to Eno’s “bomb-noises” for Nico’s The End. (Eno also recorded Manzanera’s pre-Roxy band, Quiet Sun, who included one Charles Hayward, later of This Heat. Rhubarb Rhubarb.)
Opening track ‘Sleep’ tells us we’re all unconscious, lulled by commercials (hence “softness is a thing called Comfort”), and these operate on us like Pavlov’s dogs (CHORUS: “stimulus and response”). ‘Triumph’ might be suggesting a parallel between Neighbourhood Watch (imported from the US in 1982 – a landmark in the history of surveillance), and the early years of Nazism, when Riefenstahl assembled her filmic montage Triumph of the Will. ‘SPQR’ is sung in the first person plural and refers to the supposedly democratic electorate as “unconscious collective” – Cold War propaganda and sci-fi alike often fantasized the enemy as an insectile hive-mind, but this song isn’t about an external enemy: the enemy is now internal. ‘Independence’ (Track 9) is, quite literally, the Declaration of Independence. Ask yourself, as a UK-citizen, have you ever read it? Do you know what it says? Could you imagine trying to implement its ideals now? Doesn’t its endorsement of revolution sound – well, “un-American” (as the Patriot Act defines “American”)? The climax is post-punk masterpiece and personal favourite, ‘A New Kind of Water’, which layers un-synchronized drums, bass, and a chiming guitar line – a distant siren that hasn’t yet been recognized as a warning signal. As the parts cycle, and change in volume, the notes interact differently. The initial chorus vocals are those of impotent, infantilized consumers (“we were told to expect more / and now that we’ve got more / we want more”). After that, the vocal delivery is soulless and hollow – Winston Smith at the end of 1984 – we have hope, it says: ‘a cure for cancer / we’ve got men on the job.’ Urgency increases… the drums begin to pound… you realize the apocalypse is here and you wish you were in Neverland (“fly away Peter / hideaway Paul…”). The title of the final track is written in Japanese characters, transliterated into Romaji (‘Hi Baku Shyo’), and then translated into English (‘Suffer Bomb Disease’). There are no words in this murky, marshy soundscape – maybe this is the world in which only cockroaches have survived. Maybe English-speakers are only tolerated as slaves of the victorious “Yellow Peril” (hence the Romaji-script). Then again, maybe the bomb has already dropped, and we became insects without realizing it.
THIS HEAT:
This Heat (1979) 8 / 10
‘24 Track Loop’ also available on In the Beginning was Rhythm (SoulJazz), revealing the dancier, dubbier side of post-punk.
“Health & Efficiency EP” (12”: 1980; CD: 1998)
[Starts like Supergrass – “here’s a song about the sunshine! / dedicated to the sunshine!” – and then breaks down into a kind of punk/jazz instrumental] 8 / 10
Deceit (1981) 9 / 10
Made Available: BBC Sessions, 1977 (1996)
[Live versions of “best” / most song-like tracks from the first album, a version of ‘Makeshift’ some might prefer, and more noise-scapes] 8 / 10
Repeat (1998)
[Extended version of ‘24 Track Loop’; percussive B-side to “Health” EP, 12”; various experiments from 1979] 6 / 10
CAMBERWELL NOW:
‘Meridian’ EP (1982) / The Ghost Trade LP (1985) / ‘Greenfingers’ EP (1986)
[Collected as All’s Well that End’s Well (2006)] 8 / 10
MUSIC: The Whiskers, War of Currents (2009)
Welcome to your new favourite band… kinda like your old favourite band.
Okay, so that’s subjectivity raised to the n-th degree, but The Whiskers – who formed through the mediation of a Frog Eyes message board – often sound like a microscopically observed homage to not just one weird band, but the whole damn Axis of Krug, namely: Sunset Rubdown, Swan Lake, Frog Eyes, Blackout Beach, Destroyer… and even throws in some of their tourmates for good measure, like Xiu Xiu and Elfin Saddle. Perhaps in an effort to throw off the older influences, the new album builds its surreal ballads up from seesawing acoustic riffs stretched out to 6, 7, 8 minutes, and adds brass – entering Neutral Milk Hotel territory – but with a cast of vampires, ghosts, swans, and seamstresses sewing wings onto doomed lovers, the shadow of Spencer Krug is cast over much of it.
Formed around Connecticut-based brothers Thom and Jim Stylinski, the Whiskers are a shifting, pan-American collective who make quirky chamber-pop or freak-folk. You could call it a Prog revival, if it’s understood that The Whiskers are far more accessible than that makes them sound, if not instantly likeable. Albums #1 & 2 (_The Whiskers_ & _The Distorted Historian_) took the Frog Eyes formula of lo-fi garage-prog with rapid-fire lyrics starring mythical figures, and substantially improved on it with f/x-heavy synths and programming that explodes in several directions at once. That might make the Whiskers sound like a completely different band, but it’s those unplayable, machine-generated sounds that replicate Frog Eyes’ dozen-ideas-a-second, while (paradoxically) having more emotional impact for being tight in a way Frog Eyes just aren’t. (Alternative comparison: If you ever wished Magnetic Fields would re-make their first two albums with Stephin Merritt on vocals, instead of Susan Amway… look no further).
With their third album, _War of Currents_, The Whiskers have largely retired the synths, and taken a crack at the multi-segmented epic song, with the example of _In the Aeroplane Over the Sea_ or Sunset Rubdown’s _Dragonslayer_ behind them. In a nutshell: it’s a masterclass in epic songwriting, which only falls short of greatness in its reluctance to vary the (new) formula. Then again, unlike yer-akshel 70s progsters, The Whiskers never bore or jar by dropping in unnecessary movements; always unifying their songs with a strong riff or chord progression.
Granted, there are other precedents for this 7 track, 42 minute album, but with songs like ‘The Seamstress’ you have to wonder whether they’re not attempting a deliberate patchwork of Krug-isms (in this case: ‘The Mending of the Gown’ spliced with ‘Shut Up, I am Dreaming of Places Where Lovers Have Wings’). When Krug sings about chameleons and leopards, morticians and magicians, you know he’s fretting and sometimes snarking about the nature of performance, even as he mythologizes it; when Stylinski adopts these (and adds a few of his own, like ornithopters and wing-walkers), for better or for worse, it feels as if you’re just getting the fantasy, without an obvious route back to the personal. (Not that he doesn’t have his own quotable moments: “you married on the ferris wheel / honeymooned in the haunted house / you were buried in the cemetery / I want to blow the winter out of the sea…”).
Elsewhere, the Stylinski brothers deliberately mimic the vocal interplay of Bejar / Mercer / Krug on the Swan Lake records (those three songwriter showdowns), and as if they’re worried no-one’s got the point, they even pull Dan (Destroyer) Bejar’s trick of quoting classic pop songs with completely different melodies (on ‘Birds of Paradise’: “bird-bird-bird / bird is the word / everybody’s heard / about the bird…”). Somehow, it always comes across as affectionate rather than lazy; fun rather than tired, so keep watching this space for genuine greatness.
All three albums are available to download or order on CD at www.awkwardcore.com
[Re-published here since the sad demise of the band... not completely unmourned]
Okay, so that’s subjectivity raised to the n-th degree, but The Whiskers – who formed through the mediation of a Frog Eyes message board – often sound like a microscopically observed homage to not just one weird band, but the whole damn Axis of Krug, namely: Sunset Rubdown, Swan Lake, Frog Eyes, Blackout Beach, Destroyer… and even throws in some of their tourmates for good measure, like Xiu Xiu and Elfin Saddle. Perhaps in an effort to throw off the older influences, the new album builds its surreal ballads up from seesawing acoustic riffs stretched out to 6, 7, 8 minutes, and adds brass – entering Neutral Milk Hotel territory – but with a cast of vampires, ghosts, swans, and seamstresses sewing wings onto doomed lovers, the shadow of Spencer Krug is cast over much of it.
Formed around Connecticut-based brothers Thom and Jim Stylinski, the Whiskers are a shifting, pan-American collective who make quirky chamber-pop or freak-folk. You could call it a Prog revival, if it’s understood that The Whiskers are far more accessible than that makes them sound, if not instantly likeable. Albums #1 & 2 (_The Whiskers_ & _The Distorted Historian_) took the Frog Eyes formula of lo-fi garage-prog with rapid-fire lyrics starring mythical figures, and substantially improved on it with f/x-heavy synths and programming that explodes in several directions at once. That might make the Whiskers sound like a completely different band, but it’s those unplayable, machine-generated sounds that replicate Frog Eyes’ dozen-ideas-a-second, while (paradoxically) having more emotional impact for being tight in a way Frog Eyes just aren’t. (Alternative comparison: If you ever wished Magnetic Fields would re-make their first two albums with Stephin Merritt on vocals, instead of Susan Amway… look no further).
With their third album, _War of Currents_, The Whiskers have largely retired the synths, and taken a crack at the multi-segmented epic song, with the example of _In the Aeroplane Over the Sea_ or Sunset Rubdown’s _Dragonslayer_ behind them. In a nutshell: it’s a masterclass in epic songwriting, which only falls short of greatness in its reluctance to vary the (new) formula. Then again, unlike yer-akshel 70s progsters, The Whiskers never bore or jar by dropping in unnecessary movements; always unifying their songs with a strong riff or chord progression.
Granted, there are other precedents for this 7 track, 42 minute album, but with songs like ‘The Seamstress’ you have to wonder whether they’re not attempting a deliberate patchwork of Krug-isms (in this case: ‘The Mending of the Gown’ spliced with ‘Shut Up, I am Dreaming of Places Where Lovers Have Wings’). When Krug sings about chameleons and leopards, morticians and magicians, you know he’s fretting and sometimes snarking about the nature of performance, even as he mythologizes it; when Stylinski adopts these (and adds a few of his own, like ornithopters and wing-walkers), for better or for worse, it feels as if you’re just getting the fantasy, without an obvious route back to the personal. (Not that he doesn’t have his own quotable moments: “you married on the ferris wheel / honeymooned in the haunted house / you were buried in the cemetery / I want to blow the winter out of the sea…”).
Elsewhere, the Stylinski brothers deliberately mimic the vocal interplay of Bejar / Mercer / Krug on the Swan Lake records (those three songwriter showdowns), and as if they’re worried no-one’s got the point, they even pull Dan (Destroyer) Bejar’s trick of quoting classic pop songs with completely different melodies (on ‘Birds of Paradise’: “bird-bird-bird / bird is the word / everybody’s heard / about the bird…”). Somehow, it always comes across as affectionate rather than lazy; fun rather than tired, so keep watching this space for genuine greatness.
All three albums are available to download or order on CD at www.awkwardcore.com
[Re-published here since the sad demise of the band... not completely unmourned]
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)