The Tris McCall Report
Noam Levy of American Altitude, @ Maxwell's, July 24
I was on the PATH train when the lights went out. At first, I just thought it was an unreasonable delay. When the interior of the car went black and stayed black, I knew something was wrong. But I didn't start to worry until I saw maintenance workers with crowbar-type devices attempting to manually jigger the doors open. At that point, I don't think there was a single person in the stalled car who didn't assume we were back under attack.
The station was evacuated in darkness and near-silence. The street by Hoboken Terminal, on the other hand, was awash in rumors, irritation, and some mild panic. There was no way to get to a telephone; the lines stretched to the kiosk, and irate commuters found their cellphone networks overloaded. A group of cabbies clustered around a car radio, attempting to ascertain what had happened. Electricity was out all over the eastern seaboard and up into Canada, we were told -- was this the first strike of a violent campaign? Across the Hudson, literally powerless, New York City seemed uncomfortably open, vulnerable as a disarmed policeman.
I had to sneak back into the PATH station -- gated up now, a sure sign the autorities knew the power outage was serious -- in order to find an operational payphone. Once Hilary and I had arranged a pick-up point, we negotiated streets without traffic lights on our way back home. Here in Union City, power was sporadic -- lights would be on for a block or two, out for another five. At the Hi-Vue, the computers were on but acting strangely, and we couldn't tell whether or not the fridge was working. Five minutes after walking through the door, we were hit with a massive electrical surge that fried our television and our modem. It wasn't until late yesterday that we were able to battle our way back online.
Some of us don't need to be reminded how utterly dependent upon electricity we urbanites are, but Blackout 2003 was probably enough to chase away any lingering misconceptions or Luddite sympathies. Without electrical power, you can basically chuck the entire city into the garbage can. As I write this, the people in charge of the energy grid still don't seem to know what caused the blackout, or why it took so long to get the juice back running in the metropolis. Anybody who heard Mayor Bloomberg confidently state that the power would be on by midnight Thursday now knows that in an energy pinch, our public officials are every bit as clueless as we are, and their public pronouncements are guesswork at best. So this didn't turn out to be an attack -- even an impish one by corporate pranksters. We've nevertheless just had it advertised to the rest of the world how easy it would be to lay New York City flat on its back. If we now fail to shift our national priorities from blowing up mosques in Tikrit to making sure that our electricity and power don't go dead at the slightest twitch from a well-placed lightning bolt, "homeland security" is an even bigger joke than we originally thought it was.
Right now, in Williamsburg, there's a furious debate raging over whether or not to situate a new power plant on the East River waterfront. Those who oppose the construction of the plant (neighborhood activists, environmentalists, and just about everybody who lives in Greenpoint and Williamsburg) argue quite convincingly that the city doesn't need to plan new plants, it needs to actually build the several plants currently under licence. But, hey, it's not just Polish families and hipster colonialists who don't want an electrical plant in their backyard. Neighborhood activists, community groups, and residents would doubtless protest the construction of any licenced plant anywhere; what the past few days show is that new power plants absolutely have to be built somewhere. I still object (with reservations) to the Greenpoint/Williamsburg power plant -- for one thing, those neighborhoods are already some of the most toxic in the New York metro area and hardly need a new source of noxious emissions -- but I'm now forced to change my tune a little. If we object to this power plant, it's not enough to simply argue why it shouldn't be in Williamsburg. We've also got to come up with a realistic counterproposal that doesn't depend on New Yorkers radically altering their lifestyle and suddenly adopting conservation methods when they have no incentive to do so.
The Next Wave
It's been awhile since I've been on Bedford Avenue. We've wrapped up Shootout At The Sugar Factory -- it's getting duplicated as I type -- and I'll soon launch a website explicitly devoted to this very Jersey-centric album. I don't practice at Sound City anymore, and we haven't attended a show at Northsix or Galapagos in months. More and more frequently, I find myself in Hoboken and Jersey City, just looking around, coming out of a reverie, remembering why I value Northern New Jersey above all other places. It probably isn't coincidental that for the first time since the dissolution of the Independent Music Festival, I'm more excited by the new groups I'm hearing around New Jersey than I am by the latest Brooklyn bands.
I've already written extensively about Like Moving Insects, who, to be perfectly fair, are by definition, location, and self-identification a Philadelphia project. But the main players in LMI were all part of the last wave of great New Jersey independent music, and I think you're a Jersey kid until circumstances definitively prove otherwise. Recently, Like Moving Insects have performed at the Court Tavern, the Somerset Inn, and Maxwell's with many of the other nascent Jersey acts that have recently gotten my attention. Moreover, they share a member -- slide guitarrist Noam Levy -- with New Brunswick's American Altitude, and their drummer is Tom Bendel, whose resume reads like a who's who of ambitious underground Jersey projects. Ex Models may have gotten themselves clean from the Jersey swamps and reimagined themselves as a Brooklyn-scene phenomenon, but the distinctive mark of the Raritan is still plainly visible on LMI.
A group as musically and harmonically inventive as Like Moving Insects -- one willing to present songs that run five minutes plus -- will inevitably get the Jersey mutant-rock tag. But At Maxwell's last Thursday, I was struck by how faithfully LMI songs conform to standard pop-song logic. Verses are followed by choruses, there's usually a sturdy bridge, outros are codas/recapitulations rather than jams. You don't immediately access this, though, because the arrangements are so brilliant, complex, and unexpected. If you're watching a pop song where the lead is being taken by a guy bowing a banjo and running the signal through effects, you don't easily assimilate your experience to any known paradigm of musical listening. But the following day, replaying the songs in your head, they take shape as melodic pieces of inspired folk rock, echoing the lighter side of Peter Gabriel-era Genesis, Traffic, early Split Enz, the Incredible String Band, Neutral Milk Hotel and OTC. This is pastoral music, to be sure, but it's Jersey-country -- the kind of meadows and fields that are probably already under contract to a developer, and are as likely to sprout condominium complexes as early corn.
Arrangement complexity characterizes the new Jersey pastoralists, young Garden State gardeners with one eye on the soil and another on the shadow of the neighboring skyscrapers. The Raritan and Passaic River Basins boast some of the greatest natural farmland in the world -- that's how we got our nickname -- yet Jerseyans tend to prefer to raise lawns and pharmaceutical office parks. That ambivalence and irony is present in the new Jersey folk-rock, and the artists making this music draw weird, creepy scenes of juxtaposition between the built and natural environments. American Altitude share more than a member with Like Moving Insects -- they also share an arrangement ethos that plays tall grass against executive elevators, bowed saws and acoustic guitars against electronic effects. The American Altitude project is superficially conventional: two guitars, bass, drums. Nevertheless, they push their folk-rock into hallucinatory and occasionally bleak territory; they're fond of extended instrumental passages and unsettling images. It helps that Levy and Stephan Ryshkewitch are such deft and expressive acoustic guitarrists, and that their rhythm section gives them latitude to kick at the boundaries of their songs. At Maxwell's on the 24th of July, they were fiery and autumnal; a harsh-light autumn version of Grant Lee Buffalo without the pop aspirations, the Jayhawks after a swim in the corrosive waters of the Hackensack.
With ample use of xylophone, cheap synth, and strings, Hope, Star & Browning pitches their folk-rock somewhere between Palace Music and the Elephant 6 Collective. On Where The Walker Runs Down, the split LP they share with the Roadside Graves, the songs are presented carefully and thoughtfully; delicate at times, but never precious. Live performance is another matter -- at Maxwell's on the 31st of July, HS&B brought out a set of great warmth and radiance highlighting the versatility of their well-constructed songs. The notorious and noisy back room at Uncle Joe's -- the incubator for so many of New Jersey's most interesting projects -- may in fact be having a salutary effect on the arrangement sensibilities of local musicians. Because you simply can't play loud there without driving your entire audience to the bar with splitting earaches, the material conditions of the space encourages rock acts acts to explore and rediscover the dimensions and brute power of acoustic instruments.
Which brings us to the Roadside Graves. (Incidentally, Rich Zilg, songwriter for Hope, Star & Browning, also plays guitar in the Graves, and it's his upstart label Low City Records that has released both groups' music.) As far as I can tell, the six-piece folk-rock band knows one melody and two chords -- and they prove again that it's not how many scales you play, it's what you do with them that counts. In frontman John Gleason, the Graves have unearthed a lyricist and songwriter with a disturbingly potent poetic gift, a blast of human ball-lightning with a murderous glint in his eye and an incisive way with a phrase. His metier is glorious country/western storytelling: he steers you, boozily, to the heart of Tennessee and Utah, to bars populated by Mexican fighters and the obligatory women of questionable morals, toward endless highways and high skies. But he's enough of a Jerseyan to remain an outsider in his own scenarios, a 7-11 agitator, a penetrating, dangerous dirtbag sage.
There is much about Gleason's roughneck sensibility that grates against my own. As you'd expect from someone so beholden to country storytelling conventions, his female characters often fare badly (though, to be fair, flashes of great insight and sympathy are visible within his outraged declaiming). He displays a bewildering willingness to set his chest hair on fire during shows -- a stunt that a writer of his caliber shouldn't be indulging in. On a scurrilous and troubling -- albeit undeniably poetic -- song about the inadequacies of white girls, Gleason discusses parts of his anatomy that I would really prefer not to consider. But the coupling of Gleason's concise and arresting lyrics with his band's alternately stately and maniacal folk-rock throwdowns has had an electrifying effect on audiences, who hang on every word and shout back with each chorus with a vociferousness reminiscent of Baby Dayliner's Williamsburg faithful. I can't pretend I haven't gotten swept up in it, too: two weeks since their gig at Maxwell's on the 24th, I still find myself singing all of their songs. There's nary a down moment in a Roadside Graves set -- if you're not riveted by Gleason's literate and artfully presented narratives, you'll be kept expectant by the group's direct, muscular, and deeply satisfying musical approach. I'm excited to see how this project develops; there's no limit to the potential of this group.
There's more where all this came from. The charismatic Graves's sideman Jeremy Benson has his own folk-rock project -- the Home Alaskan -- and I'm told it's pretty brilliant. The twin frontmen of LMI, both graced with gorgeous, distinctive voices, tell me without a trace of self-deprecation that their bowed banjo player is the best singer in the group. Evidently, the next wave of Jersey indie rock has talent to burn. More importantly, these new groups are applying that talent in unconventional directions, pushing at the boundaries of generic conventions and reclaiming for New Jersey a position at the forefront of innovative Americana and independednt music. I've had harsh things to say about our indiginous Jersey scene in the past, and I'm not sitting here taking any of them back. But today, I'm more optimistic than I've been in years. And all credit goes to these four groups and others like them -- scribbling away at home in the exurbs or battling gamely with the sound systems at Uncle Joes and the Somerset Inn, putting the Garden State back on the map with a sound and sensibility that's distinctively our own.
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