The Tris McCall Report
Your Friends And Neighbors, July 13, 2004
Francophiles & Skinny Ties
From: Brooklyn.
Format: Eight track almost-LP. Francophiles is sort of a tweener between an EP and a proper full-length. Then again, in Brooklyn, bands get in, get on, and get out. The half-hour album is becoming a Williamsburg standard.
Fidelity: Acceptable indie. Francophiles & Skinny Ties sounds pretty raw and digital, like it was recorded straight to a hard-drive or a portable DAT machine. Those of you who remember the Break-Up's former incarnation as Girl Harbor will know what I'm talking about when I say that Francophiles falls somewhere between Down On The Fourth Of July and Shine On.
Genre: Garage-rock revival, angular post-punk. A source close to the band recently told me that despite their wild-man rocknroll underpinnings, AM shares more than a little of the Ex Models' art-school detachment. I think I know what he means.
Arrangements: Everything cues off of the humongous bass guitar. It snarls and snakes; enormous, thick, insistent. When AM fuzzes it out, as they do on "Sex 'N' Drugs", it rips stickily, like a chainsaw on low speed chewing through a pine tree. The guitars are trashy, overdriven and distorted. Occasionally, the group will process their six-strings and get some dime-store electronica grooves going; they fold these experiments into the mix like a secret, teaspoon-sized ingredient in industrial-sized batter. The drums are played with a commensurate recklessness, yet never sloppily. Yelped backing vocals, abrasive leads, distant and cheap whistling synth, organs on low simmer.
What's this record about?: AM head honcho James Jones is a rock and roll degenerate by design. But design implies craft, and his is a tailored persona -- a brainy, two-fisted street urchin with a taste for hard living and the wherewithal to examine his own dependence on the lifestlye. He's not arch, and nor does he joke around very much -- what looks initially like levity in his stance, is, upon closer examination, a grimace, illuminated by the electricity of the street. Unlike other Kingsborough blues-rock shouters, Jones doesn't strain to communicate snottiness-amidst-powerlessness: he may be at the whim of his milieu's caprices, but he feels very much in control of his own destiny. He can create his own love object, as he does on "Monster Heart", and he neither apologizes for nor feels ambivalent about playing Pygmalion. When he's "In The City", he knows where to go; when he's surrounded by "Sex And Drugs", he's never at the mercy of them. The spiked-heeled women who catch his eye are surveyed coolly; he might be screaming and kicking, but he's taking notes the whole time. He's a writer, he controls the flow. Subtly or not, he lets you know.
The singer: Jones has his early-Jagger sneer and his moments of Richard Hell blurt: he bends notes, sliding from phrase to phrase, mixing bluesy with straight-up boozy. It's an old New York tradition. He can sound like a petulant child at times, but that, too, comes with the territory. If on "Bloodshot", the shrieks thin out his voice a bit and make him sound more hysterical than menacing, you could never say it isn't all authentic. If these perfomances weren't one-takes, an awful lot of craft went into making them sound like one-takes. Yeah, yeah, that's what it is, I'm sure.
The band: AM begins with bassist Scott Cleveland, a rock and roll animal who grinds a ditch into the bottom of these songs. His tone is like an old lead pipe: heavy, corroded, patchy in places but solidly functional. The group succeeds because they build outward from the plumbing -- they make sure the rhythm section is in place before horsing around with the treble instruments. Jarrod Ruby beats the drums with punk energy, but he's a classic-rock skinsman at heart. He provides a loose framework for Cleveland's explorations, and generally succeeds in keeping him on the reservation. On "Quiet And Dayglo", for instance, he chase after Cleveland's rampaging part, catches it by the collar, and lets it squirm around without ever forcing it back into its seat. That's a good way to preserve the appropriate 'tude. Jones is a trash-scrawl guitar player in the grand Williamsburg style -- he doesn't really solo, but he will make constant commentary, answering his own voice, scribbling semi-legible notes in the margins of the songs. He also digs the trick of playing the same notes on the guitar that he's singing. Hey, why don't Jersey bands ever do that?
The songs: Bluesy, obnoxious, immediate, fun. They usually build to singalong choruses, but even where they don't, there's always a memorable hook or two in the verses. "Sex N Drugs", the best (or maybe just the most interesting) thing on the collection is also the trashiest: it builds from a punishing two-note riff through an explosive release in which Ruby tries to hit every piece in his kit at once.
What differentiates this record from others like it? There exist in Williamsburg pure garage-rock revival bands, historical reconstructionists like the Mooney Suzuki who strain to rid their music of any trappings of ornamentation. AM aren't like that at all. There are two tendencies pulling the group away from the rudimentary template. The first is their manifest love for the classic rock tradition and their accompanying taste for big chord power-pop. Second, and more indicative of the group's future direction, is their inclination toward angular, arty minimalism. Almost every song features elements that, if emphasized, would take AM toward spazz-out rhythmic New Wave. My guess is that as the band develops further, they will push on in this direction.
What's not so good?: I owe AM an apology. I've been sitting on Francophiles & Skinny Ties forever. Part of that was dumb luck -- when I first put all the CDs I was going to review for this column in a random order, they drew the shortest straw, and so went to the bottom of the list. But part of it is a consequence of their own production choices. Because Jones runs his voice through filters and some very harsh effects, and then pinches the hell out of it with EQ, I frequently cannot understand what he is saying. I've had long experience as a rock decipherer -- I've sat there with Clientele records, trying to disagreggate Alistair MacLean's poetry from the Space Echo, and succeeding intermittently -- so I'm no prima donna here. But AM (or just Jones, who does not always articulate) needs to do a better job of presenting their lyrics. I'd say at least a third of Francophiles & Skinny Ties is garbled beyond my recognition -- and that's after considerable exposure.
Recommended?: I like to rock, and so do you. But as summertime comes, I start to feel less like rocking: rhythm guitar begins to feel like a woolen sweater, a sweatshirt of sound. What Brooklyn bands realize that too many Jersey bands do not: those sweatshirts are suffocating, constricting. They are okay for those varsity football games, but not so good for anything else. AM understands better than many the role of their instruments -- they take care of the fundamentals, and they let the bass guitar and the drums dictate the pace and the size of the sound. I don't mean to imply that there isn't plenty of guitar here. There is. But even in garage-rock, it's how you use it that counts.
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: Get yourself to the official AM site. There's also a video there for the acoustic(!) read on "Monster Heart". Unashamed of their trad-pop and singer-songwriter underpinnings, these guys are.
Title: And The Maps Came Down
From: Jersey City, New Jersey. It's hard to imagine this amalgam of junkyard technology, unabashed artiness, multiculturalism, and high theory coming from anywhere else.
Format: Full-length long-player. Fourteen tracks, forty-four minutes.
Fidelity: Much of And The Maps Came Down was recorded on four-track media, and you can tell. But there aren't any sloppy or muted songs, and as arty as this band is, affecting a fashionable murkiness isn't part of the project. When it counts, they're clear and communicative. Call them mid-fi.
Genre: Art-rock.
Arrangements: Cool synthesizer and guitar buzz, flamenco hand-claps, horns, lonely recorder, casio drum machine loops, a keyed instrument that sounds remarkably like a mellotron (couldn't be...), random unidentified bubbles and burbles, rattling percussion, whispers, introspective muttering, machine whirs, chants in foreign languages, the distorted speech of passersby.
What's this record about?: It's a hypnotic European travelogue of impressions, experiences, chance encounters, and missed connections. But this is no Club Med vacation -- AWM want to bring out Europe as confusing, sleazy, foggy, threatening, decayed; usually sexy, sometimes dangerous, always alluring. Jason Cieradkowski's songs are crammed with peddlers, old buildings, ruins, airports, cafes, "chlopcy", and fetching girls whose languages he doesn't speak. Lost in a kaleidoscope of vaguely recognizable sounds and cultures, Cieradkowski's narrators drift from location to location, following barely-discenrnable signals and voices, and an unarticulated longing. Chasing chicks through grubby European streets becomes a metaphor for communication breakdown. Or maybe it's the other way around.
The singer: Cieradkowski howls, chants, scats, hisses, croons, and breathes heavy, and leaves it all on the table even if he never goes over the top. If he's more impassioned than tuneful, or if his voice is an acquired taste, well, I can only suggest you work with him -- he'll take you down some strange, frightening alleyways where you never imagined you'd go. I'd compare his cracked, side-of-the-mouth tone and approach to Phil Judd, the first singer of Split Enz, but I fear he's a forgotten man even in New Zealand. At times, (especially the walk across the rooftops of "Black Market Cologne") his cigarette-choked pipes sound remarkably like those of Paul Buchanan of the Blue Nile. He's also one of the few vocalists this side of Aidan Moffat who's capable of doing spoken-word tracks and not coming off as a total idiot in the process.
The band: An intractable art-rock combo. The guitars never crunch or pulverize: instead, they play wiry, angular figures that insinuate their way into the listener's consciousness. The chilling "Dresden" proves that drummer Brian Wilson can do a four-on-the-floor beat, but he'd probably rather not -- his tastes lean toward jazzy ride cymbal and busy, unconventional snare parts. AWM likes synth pads that sound as if they were borrowed from the preset bays of disused mid-eighties digital models. It all adds to the Euro-creepiness: the feel of abandoned tower-blocks and gorgeous, polluted canals, and tourism as dislocation and flight through a panorama of intangibles.
The songs: Built around grooves. American Watercolor Movement generally take a guitar figure or rhythm, lace a melody or recicitive over it, and let it build to a climax or dissolve into ether. There's a dub streak here too -- the track is liable to fall away at the most unexpected moments, creating an aural close-up on Cieradkowski's shreiking, perplexed face.
What distinguishes this record from other indie records like it?: I'll be straight:And The Maps Came Down is a major release, and one of the most interesting rock albums to come from New Jersey in the past five years. Musical travelogues tend to be distinctive by nature, but Cieradkowski's European explorations have gone to tape with uncommon vividness. Far from home, surrounded by unfamiliar faces and beholden to a foreign logic, the narrators stumble through sonic tapestries alternately carnivalesque and menacing. The silences between the tracks feel like the spaces lost in translation.
What's not so good?: Four-track recording imposes its particular limitations on even the most imaginative acts. Here, too often, the bass guitar that should be driving these groove-pieces is milky and insubstantial, or as on "I Paparazzi", almost absent. As good as And The Maps Came Down is, it would have hit harder had the bass guitar been properly recorded and mixed.
Recommended?: This is not the easiest listen; some of the pieces, like the French riot of "Pour Les Auditeurs" or the savage post-colonial madness of "Lifestyle", are manic and abrasive. They're also great. Even the most challenging moments here are worth riddling through. And The Maps Came Down is a brilliant record, and if you're brilliant yourself (and I know you are), you owe it to yourself to pay attention to it.
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: Try the website first. If that doesn't work out, I think the group is affiliated with Perhaps Transparent (and if they're not, they ought to be). Even if I'm wrong, it's always worth catching up with the Perhaps Transparent vision and mission.
Title: M&G Sessions
From: Lower Manhattan. Frequent readers of my stuff may recall that Benjamin Cartel is part of the Larchmont Crew of transplanted city rockers. Cartel frontman Ben Rosenthal epitomizes many of the virtues of the crew: he's a trad-rocker and painstaking, conscientious songwriter, he's very literate, he's poised, he's a storyteller.
Format: Four-song EP. My tracklisting is totally messed up -- the sleeve on the CD has "Angela" second and "Leave Me Be" last. But on the CD I have, "Angela" is third and "Amelia" is last. I know Ghostface Killa screws up his tracklisting all the time, but in music like the Cartel's, properly communicating the song title is important.
Fidelity: Excellent for an indie release. There's nothing about the sound here that I'd change. If I ran the radio, this would be radio quality. There's an immediacy to M&G Sessions that wouldn't be there if it was more polished. Genre: Roots-rock, Americana. Benjamin Cartel is essentially a folk-rock act.
Arrangements: Big, swinging drums with a slap that might remind you of Damn The Torpedoes, groovy bass, guitar (probably Telecaster) mixed with that heartland twang, super tremelo on the downbeats of "Amelia", roller-rink Hammond on "No One", twinkly Buckingham-"Gypsy" lead on "Angela", something that sounds like the "You Got Lucky" synth on "Leave Me Be", but which might be a treated guitar. Rosenthal almost never strums his six-string in big sheets; he strikes it like a rhythm instrument, and keeps it out of the way of the vocals.
What's this record about?: Well, one song is called "Angela", another is called "Amelia" -- you tell me. These are songs about girls; some of whom Rosenthal is after, some of whom he can't forget. But Benjamin Rosenthal has always been the toughest-minded of the Larchmont crew, and his romanticism is often tempered by a strangely sympathetic petulance. On Salt Water, the Cartel's 2002 full-length, he was always as prepared with a kiss-off as he was with a kiss, and the balance between those two desires made the album fascinating. M&G Sessions catches Rosenthal in a better mood. But while the ambivalence has been softened, it's still there. "No one works as fast", he shouts on the opener, likening a woman to a quick-acting medication. But it's also a put-down; it's stormy and disgusted, he can't keep up with his object of affection, he's outclassed. "I can't think about her without feeling sorry for myself", he offers to another woman on "Leave Me Be". Generous, sure, but it also comes wrapped in a threat. "You'd better leave me be", he growls, and it's more cautionary than helpful. Even the awaited homecoming in "Angela" also promises restiveness, vague dissatisfaction. "Can't you see where I've been coming from?", the narrator entreats. She can't. These men and women don't understand each other, the communicate uneasily, they sidestep toward a truce.
The singer: Benjamin is the most conventionally sweet-voiced of the Rosenthal clan -- he's got some of Milton's warmth and steam and some of the St. James Stars' sweat, but he also has the capacity to croon like a troubadour, and he takes it. "Amelia" is probably the most winsome performance here, but much of "Angela" is lovely, too. He can sound tough when he wants to. That isn't often.
The band: There is an incredibly audible fuck-up at the beginning of "Amelia" -- the bass guitar comes in a little late. I cannot thank Benjamin Rosenthal enough for leaving it in. It only interrupts the groove for a split-second. If there's one thing I'm tired of, it's records with no mistakes on them. You listen to classic stuff from the seventies -- Van Morrison, the Boss, Joni Mitchell -- and all of those albums preserve mistakes. Making mistakes is a part of making music, and one misplaced beat or wrong note shouldn't scupper a take with a good feel. But Benjamin Cartel has always been about feel -- Rosenthal isn't the flashiest drummer working this territory, but he's got a real swing. And nothing he's played on ever sat there inert for three minutes. Likewise for the guitar stuff on M&G Sessions: never earthshaking, but always effective.
The songs: There are those who don't think we need any more Tom Petty songs. Then there are people like me, for whom too many Tom Petty songs are never enough. The Cartel's resemblance to the Heartbreakers have been pointed out for years, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that Rosenthal, as he improves, seems to be writing more like Petty. Relative minors, folk-rock progressions, singalong choruses, general Byrdsiness, you get it all here. Slot any of these songs into Hard Promises, and they'd fit in seamlessly. You might not think that's high praise. I do.
What differentiates this record from others in its genre? Next to nothing. As we've come to expect from Larchmonters, Rosenthal is more literary than his peers. But he never hits you over the head with it -- it's just there, right under the surface, if you want to engage with it. And if you don't, Rosenthal has no problem with your uncomplicated desire to rock along.
What's not so good?: For a singer committed to clarity, and who rejects melisma or ornamentation out of hand, it can be very difficult figuring out what the hell Rosenthal is saying. Much of the first verse of "No One" is garbled, and it took me about five passes to catch the hook in "Angela". I'm not sure it's a performance issue -- in concert, Rosenthal enunciates clearly, and is peculiarly easy to follow. I think it's probably an EQ issue. But it's one he should really correct: Cartel lyrics are always solid, and they should be foregrounded more.
Recommended?: This is the best recording I've heard out of the Cartel so far, and I dug Salt Water a lot. Four excellent trad-rock songs with good stories, solid arrangements, an undercurrent of undeniable tension, and Rosenthal's own proletarian but sympathetic folkster vocals. What's not to like?
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: I'd start with the artist's website. Alternately, you can hang around Pete's Candy Store. You're sure to run into one of the Rosenthals there before too long.
Title: Drama Queen
From: A strange wasteland between Williamsburg and Hudson County called "Manhattan".
Format: This is a long long-player. Twenty-one songs stretched out over two imaginary sides; sixty-six minutes of Krieger's music.
Fidelity: Lo-fi. Instruments drift a bit, as does Krieger's voice. I'm not sure what microphones he used to make these four track recordings, but it doesn't sound like there were any compressors handy.
Genre: Singer-songwriter. I would even say "Asbury Park singer-songwriter", but for the unfortunate fact that Krieger isn't from Asbury Park. All of the elements of Asbury music are here: wistful, traditional folk-rock songs, a voice that sounds channeled from classic radio, insecurity, the winter wind blowing through the amusement park.
Arrangements: Strummed acoustic guitar, lead electric, some bass, machine drums playing rock patterns, backing vocals at all the appropriate moments. Krieger knows the trick of making his electric sound like a pedal steel by rolling the volume pedal back and forth. Hey, it always works.
What's this record about?: Heartbreak, romantic failure, feelings of inadequacy. Krieger's narrators all seem to be in the midst of breaking up, getting left behind, being spurned. They maintain tremendous humanity throughout, though, taking their blows with dignity. Ironically, the key to understanding and inhabiting Krieger's perspective might be the one non-love song on this collection of twenty-one tracks: "Five-Foot Three", which finds the hero at a rock concert, unable to see over the perms and mullets of his fellow concertgoers. "If I had one wish...", sings Krieger, with a longing that can't be counterfeitied. The stories play out against a New York City backdrop of bars, record shops, streetsm subways and apartments. But these narrators aren't partygoers or barflies -- they're just Manhattan citizens, hoping that a few extra inches might make all the difference.
The singer: Krieger sings in a classic Seventies quaver; he sounds like he's stepped out of a Bread album cover. He can do Seventies-rough just as well as he can do Seventies-sensitive, too. Even when he loses pitch, he does so with the charm of Mick Jagger. He recognizes his voice is an asset -- it's mixed to the front of almost all of these tracks.
The band: This is song-presentation music. Krieger has stories to tell, and the instruments are supporting characters; outlines, really. The rock and roll drum programming is effective, even if the patterns feel pre-set at times. Some of the best songs, like "Jarrod and the January Girls", are just guitar and voice: strummed or twinkly patterns on the acoustic, ballpoint-thin lines of electric lead. The twin guitar logic might remind you of...
The songs: The liner notes to Drama Queen end by letting you know that Mirror Blue is "now playing" in Krieger's house. Honestly, he didn't have to tell us. On a few of these songs, he's practically on a Vincent Black Lightning. But if you're going to wear your influences proudly, why not pick the best? If Drama Queen reads as a lo-fi version of the lighter side of Richard Thompson's Capitol records, well, that's not criticism, that's praise. This is traditional British and American folk-rock songcraft. Krieger has an ear for pleasing melodies, too, and the variations on his basic songwriting logic never sound reiterative.
What distinguishes this record from other records of its genre?: If you're going to be in anybody's presence for over an hour, you'd better find them likeable. Krieger understands this instinctively -- or perhaps he doesn't need to. At any rate, he's an sympathetic writer, and manages to animate his characters with warmth, frailty, and humanity. The stretch of songs from "All My Tears" to "Jarrod & The January Girls" is an arc of great beauty and poise.
What's not so good?: Drama Queen was recorded on Cakewalk software, which does allow you to quantize. Still, many of the parts here don't exactly sync up. Some of the guitar sits poorly with the bass and/or the machine drums. I'm not a fascist about compression, but still, I have to wish that the vocal signal here didn't drift quite so much. Moreover, though it's not as bad as its t-shirt title makes it sound, the "Beer Won't Break Your Heart" scenario is beneath Krieger. I know that Richard Thompson also liked to throw in a few substandard tracks on his records just to keep his audience honest, but still, Drama Queen probably could have benefited from a final edit.
Recommended?: I recommend that everybody in Asbury Park (particularly Tommy Strazza, whose music Drama Queen sometimes resembles) extend honorary membership in the Jersey Shore scene to Ben Krieger. I also recommend that they drop whatever the hell they're doing at the Stone Pony and get Krieger up on stage to play "Denver". That room was built to air songs like this one.
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: As you might have ascertained by now, Krieger is a real sweetheart, and a booster of local music. His Gun Street Radio site promotes his music, but also provides links and descriptions of other local acts in Krieger's orbit. He's a community-builder, and his generosity extends to his album notes. Drama Queen comes with two red cardboard inserts containing all the lyrics, and some very winning explication of the recording decisions. And in a rock scene cluttered with bands twisting your arm to "play loud", Krieger includes a memorial picture of an old pet, and insists "this CD should not be played until you've walked your dog". Sympathetic to the end, this guy is.
Title: On My Way
From: Texas, originally, though he now lives in Brooklyn. Sha Sha, Kweller's first solo record, was largely set in Texas. The songs and stories on On My Way unfold in New York City. This record represents the real first fruits of Kweller's transformation from a child star (in Radish) to a NYC hipster icon.
Format: Full-length.
Fidelity: A shade below radio-quality. Some of this will probably get airing on alternative shows. Ben Kweller isn't shooting for Z-100, but he's got a large enough fan base that he can probably expect token mainstream interest in his work.
Genre: Power-pop. Because of his occasionally wild singing, Kweller has picked up an emo following, but really, he's much more interested in classic Seventies pop songwriting and structure than in primal release.
Arrangements: Nothing too fancy. Rock rhythm section, acoustic rhythm guitar in places, a much dirtier electric lead that Kweller's used in the past, some piano (but not enough of it), intermittent backing vocals. There's a little bit of xylophone on "The Rules", and harmonica on "Hear Me Out". In both cases, I wish there were more. Most of these songs are guitar-bass-drums-Kweller's voice.
What's this record about?: Innocence, new awakening, new love, growing up, transition to a new city. Kweller likes to play the naif. It's a double-edged approach: on the one hand, it's hard not to feel sympathy for his wide-eyed perspective, on the other, he can sometimes come off a bit disingenuous. The love songs here ("Believer", "I Need You Back", "Down", the last verse of "On My Way") are pure, heartfelt, and simple, and for the most part, they work. But you might find the "turtle shell" of "I Need You Back" and the retreat of "My Apartment" overly sensitive. Kweller still looks like a kid, but by Dylan's standard (one he clearly holds himself to) he's already an old man. The refreshingly childlike tone of his early work has begun to be ill-fitting.
The singer: Kweller is gifted with a sweet kid's choir-voice that only becomes more magnetic and galvanizing when he goes nuts. That means that his outros are frequently the most compelling parts of his songs -- when he slips from the plaintive croon of the verses to his climactic tantrums, it carries the authority of the mercurial, Promethean kid down the block. The best example here is "The Rules", a straightforward rocker that's kicked into a higher gear by Kweller's final declamations, delivered in a wonderfully shredded shout. Elsewhere, he tries a falsetto here and there (outro of "Believer", "Different But The Same"). It's better when he's raging and shouting.
The musicians: Kweller has always led superior bands. On My Way boasts a great rock rhythm section -- poised and respectful, but never afraid to tear into the song when necessary. Lead guitar solos are perfunctory, and don't add much to the songs. Kweller himself is an uninteresting guitarrist, humping away at barre chords like your standard rock mook ("Ann Disaster", "I Need You Back"). On the piano, though, he's a transformed man: sure of himself, innovative, ready to take chances. I realize Kweller is already drifting dangerously close to an "Elton John of emo-pop" designation/pigeonhole, but I don't think he should be afraid of it. Kweller's recordings are always better when he plays piano: he contributes an instrumental voice strong enough to sit with his outstanding rhythm section.
The songs: Traditional but undeniable. Kweller bleeds classic pop hooks. He knows how to point a song toward a singalong chorus, how much melodicism to give away in the verses, when to use a relative minor, when to drop the bass under a chord. He's brought his unerring sense of musical poise to On My Way, and much of the record feels like an expression of his harmonic mastery. Yet, to his credit, he's also interested in sounding like a citizen of his adopted city. So next to McCartney-esque ballads like "Different But The Same", he tosses a few attempts at Brooklyn garage rock -- "Ann Disaster", "The Rules", "Down". The best song here ("Hospital Bed") fuses a Seventies art-pop verse with a faux-garage chorus and some very inspired piano playing. It's probably the direction he'll go in, as long as he remains in NYC.
What distinguishes this record from other records of its genre?: The high quality of Kweller's formal musical songwriting. That and his wonderful performances when he's roused.
What's not so good?: Ben Kweller certainly isn't a bad lyricist: at times he can be funny, and he can tell a (limited) story. Yet, too often, he falls back on easy rhymes and, like many power-poppers, he'll go through the motions and use cliched language. He also consistently represents his narrators as uncomplicated, which undercuts their authority, and he puts childlike phrases in their mouths, which undercuts our ability to take them seriously. This places an enormous burden on the musical aspects of his songwriting: he's forced to try to come up with fantastic melodies every time out. He's constantly compensating, and the musical overdrive can become wearisome in its showiness.
Recommended?: I understand why Kweller annoys people. If many of his songs still sound like the theme to the Ben Kweller Show, I think we ought to bear with him anyway. He's a heckuva talent, and melodicists this effective don't come along every day. On My Way cleans up a few of the problems that plagued the Ato version of Sha Sha: some of the slick major-label polish is gone, and Kweller has been set loose to sing the way he surely wants to. I am not at all satisfied that the lyrics are improving, but they've moved with him to New York City, and that's a good sign: he's in touch with his surroundings. On balance, we're lucky to have him.
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: This is the first thing I've reviewed here that you can probably pick up at Sam Goody. Or try the Ato Records site -- but don't get suckered into taking a flier on any of the label's other offerings. Well, to be fair, My Morning Jacket is interesting....
Title: Bloody Tales From The Suburbs
From: Jersey City. At least the frontwoman is; she really is a Friend & Neighbor. Her flat is about a three-minute walk from my front door.
Format: Six songs. Boomslang has also recorded a three-song EP titled Grim Faced Coloured Folks In Fancy Clothes. It repeats "Won't Shed A Tear", a song that's given a better interpretation here. My tracklisting is a little mixed up: "The Next Sound You Hear" is supposed to be last, but it's actually fifth.
Fidelity: Bloody Tales From The Suburbs is very live-sounding. It sounds like somebody hooked up a digital eight-track to a good coffeehouse sound system, captured Boomslang during a gig, and pressed up the resultant recording. The drums feel extremely separated, and high-frequencies are pinched, as they'd be through a stage PA. It sure as hell doesn't sound like radio-friendly, but if Boomslang's intention was to communicate a performance vibe, they've succeeded.
Genre: Acoustic rock. This band goes at it pretty hard, but there's no electric guitar here to muddy up the midrange or compete with the big voice.
Arrangements: Rock drums, a bass that's either fretless or played with such aggressiveness that the strings (and fretboard) is bending naturally, and souped-up acoustic guitar. Karen Davis's six-string doesn't sound like an Ovation or a hollow-bodied electric-acoustic -- just a regular axe run through some kind of chorus. There are no backing vocals, and no overdubs.
What's this record about?: Prevailing oppression, resistance, silences forced and silences chosen, family dynamics, vexed relationships. Davis isn't in a good mood on this record, and her narrators are melancholy when not infuriated. Homes are claustrophobic, advice given by elders and authorities turns out to be troubling, characters cut themselves on the rough edges of their own histories. "Ask no questions", the young subject is told on "Beautiful Girl", before being prodded toward dishonesty and violence. The shutdown continues on "Uninvited": "How can she tell a story", asks Davis "that doesn't have any words?" Davis's characters have had their language to express themselves stolen from them in a shell game, muted in the name of love and concern -- "Walk away, walk away, shut your mouth and close your eyes", she coos to a lover in "Butterfly Kiss". Yet the actors here don't all turn inward -- if the damage is visible and the lies apparent and intractable, there's still room for kicking back. "The Next Sound You Hear" from the plummeting protagonist isn't bottom being hit, but "the striking of the match", and "the shot that's fired first". Even in defeat, her eyes are on revolution, on evening the score.
The singer: Her low, breathy verses sound like Jackie McShee at her most thistledowned, but the bellowed choruses are pure Grace Slick. And not the crooner of "White Rabbit", either, I mean the Slick who gave us "Mexico" and "Greasy Heart", and demanded the motherfuckers up against the wall. Davis isn't the type of vocalist who holds anything back: she shoots the works whenever she can. If that makes her sound strident at times, it always matches the subject matter. There's not a lot of humor in what she does, and the critique on Bloody Tales From The Suburbs is pretty unremittant. Davis can be pitchy at times; when worked up (and she usually is) she has a tendency to pull sharp. You could say the same thing about Morrissey, though.
The band: Boomslang drummer John Hummel is ambitious -- he likes dramatic, tribal buildups, and when in doubt, he throws in a fill. Yet Bloody Tales From The Suburbs contains many, many drum mistakes, and a few of them are jarring. Bassist John Hummel is given plenty of room to explore, and he takes advantage of the latitude; his parts are sinuous, busy, elastic. Davis likes open chords, and usually keeps something droning on the top. More often than not, she strums, and sometimes the patterns get as furious as the singing. The chorus of "Butterfly Kiss", for instance, is strummed at a speed that would make Luka Bloom's head spin.
The songs: In 1971, after she hit with Blue, Joni Mitchell started exploring recicitive in her pop music: the melody and structure followed the words, rather than the other way around. She ceased to repeat herself, and instead saw the verse-chorus structure as a limitation. Acoustic singer-songwriters have, ever since, been trying to import a little of that formal aggressiveness into their own writing. Karen Davis also has too much to say to let herself become reiterative; she'll opt to let a tag-line stand in for the chorus. Verses aren't confined to any particular length, and she'll suspend chords and melodies rather than resolve them neatly. "Alone" is the best example of this approach -- it's elliptical, it flows, it follows the story. But all of the other songs have at least a little bit of sturctural looseness to them. I find Boomslang catchy, and as with Tori Amos's records, it's frequently the weirdest moments here that get stuck in my head.
What differentiates this record from others in its genre? Davis's immense presence and instant vocal I.D., her willingness to take chances, and the coherence of her writing.
What's not so good?: I'm a big believer in bands getting their recordings the hell out there and not being too prissy about mistakes. But if Bloody Tales From The Suburbs was my record, I think I would have spent a day or two in a home studio adding a bit of polish. I wouldn't break the bank or anything; I'd just perform a few tweaks that would make a substantial difference. Here's what I'd do: I'd fix some of the drum mistakes with ProTools, I'd throw some pitch correction on Davis's vocals, I'd try to warm up the snare with a reverb plug-in, and while I was at it, I'd see if I could defrost the guitar tone a bit, too.
Recommended?: This is a very serious record, and I understand that girls just want to have fun, especially on a spring day when the sun is shining. Party music Boomslang is not. It's probably too raucous for the bedsit, too. But there's still a segment of the listening public that likes to sit there and engage with a voice and a perspective, and for us, it's a good thing that artists like Davis and Boomslang exist. As long as they keep it thoughtful and literate, I promise to keep paying attention.
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: No Mp3s available on the Boomslang site, but there's an upcoming events page. The group will be at the Black Potatoe festival in Clinton, New Jersey during June, and they'll instantly be the most aggressive and incendiary act on those stages.
Title: She Went Black
From: You cannot get any more Williamsburg than this. It's the Brooklyn sound with extra layers of artfulness, literary irony, jokes in bad taste, and intellectual detachment. If you could somehow cram the corner of Bedford and Metropolitan into your iPod, this is what it would sound like.
Format: Five-song EP.
Fidelity: Good; maybe a little too good. The Break-Up rose out of the wreckage of Girl Harbor, whose Shine On EP still stands as one of the finest testaments to the intrinsic quality of super-cheapo, trashy NYC digital rock recording. She Went Black is cleaner and more pro-sounding, and much of the white-noise wash that made Girl Harbor (semi) famous has been gated out.
Genre: New York City rock and roll.
Arrangements: Beats lifted from Motown records, hyperactive walking bass, hard-hit electric piano, new wave organ, dispassionate girl backing vocals courtesy of Allison Langerak, a trail synthesizer that sounds like a bratty kid pulling a raspberry, squalling blues guitars, and Jamie Sparber's brash vocals. In Sparber's projects, everybody usually plays at once, and as furiously as they can. But The Break-Up is better at, well, breaking things up than Girl Harbor ever was -- this is by no means a dub record, but there are moments where solo instruments are spotlighted.
What's this record about?: On Girl Harbor's "Ask Me Again", Sparber tells a girlfriend "I'm not the devil, but I guess I'm not that nice". Booze-addled, caddish, witty-snotty, alternately open-armed and catty, Sparber's character dominates his songs. He can sing about "waiting for the snow" and simultaneouly invoke the turning of the seasons and a drug jones; he can wail brattily about his own ambivalence, and then turn his own mystification into glassy-eyed outrage. We watch him stumble through relationships, late-night longings, disappointments: he's reactive, questionable things always seem to be happening to him, and his flailing responses are invariably sympathetic in spite of the nasty edge. Androgyny, inexplicable romantic failure, domination, impatience, miscommunication, boredom: a writer's attitudinous take on city living.
The singer: The transformation of Jamie Sparber into the capable frontman of She Went Black has been one of the most interesting trajectories to follow in New York indie rock. When Sparber and Break-Up guitarrist Jeff Mensch first arrived in New York in 1998, their group was Come On, and they walked the thin line between rock abandon and parodic self-consciousness. Sparber didn't really know what he was doing back then, and shows often devolved into slugging matches and piles of musicians (and audience members) falling over each other. But he had his models, and he had his education, and he had the capacity to apply that education to his performances. What that meant was that in Come On, his Dionysian excursions were almost always "rock", in quotes; he'd scream, because screaming was the appropriate marker to place after a garage-revival guitar solo. There was very little emo in his core: his stance struck a pose of great attitude, but it was an aggressively superficial one. Of course I loved it -- "aggressively superficial" wraps up exactly what was great about the new wave. Throw in a little intellectual remove, as Sparber always did, and you've got the recipe for entertaining me down pat. But Sparber wasn't in this game to entertain me; no, he and the rest of the boys had their hearts set on the Top of the Pops. How frustrating it must have been for Sparber and Mensch to watch Jet, a band that was essentially Girl Harbor minus the wit, humor and intelligence, move their million copies. And as Girl Harbor evolved from garage rock redux to something more like an art-punk band with pop overtones, Sparber's attempts to communicate frustration and impatience began to sound shockingly genuine. By She Went Black, he's singing outright, and when the screams come, they feel backed up by hard experience. It could be a trick of realism, sure, and nobody is ever going to mistake this for Dashboard Confessional. But Sparber the poised ironist has been eclipsed here by Sparber the method actor. He embodies these characters, and that means their emotions, too.
The band: Mensch keeps it bluesy -- the solos are pentatonic, overdriven, at times bordering on sixties-psychedelic. Girl Harbor wasn't always keen on stretching out; She Went Black gives the underrated guitarrist some room to flex. He's sort of the Harold Baines of Williamsburg indie -- you don't always notice him in the lineup, but if you look at the back of the bubblegum card, you can see he's contributed plenty to victory after victory. Greg Altman is another Larchmont rocker, which might explain his deep vocabulary of classic beats: he can switch from Motown to Spazz-town and back in a heartbeat. Either his skills have improved since joining Girl Harbor, or he's just gotten more comfortable with these guys. Former Blue 88s singer Allie Langerak throws the ringer in this collection, adding psych-leads on organ and taking an out-of-control solo on "Waiting For The Snow" that sounds like the Pied Piper after too many vodka tonics. Her Wurlitzer electric piano drives several of these songs, and the organ on "One Little Sign" could have come straight from an early MTV time capsule. The bassist, identified here as Jay H., had big shoes to fill: the supremely talented Jens Carstensen's departure from Girl Harbor prompted the lineup and name change. But the full fury of Carstensen's performances were never adequately captured by prior recordings, and the new guy sounds enough like the old guy (complete with the psychotic sixteenth-note blues riffing) that I doubt any hard-core fans will complain much.
The songs: Blues-rock, garage-pop, Brooklyn-style. The Break-Up dispenses with the formal conventions of the blues, but cling to its harmonic and melodic rules. "She Went Black" establishes a I-III-IV groove, and doesn't deviate from the progression; "Life Of Crime" is built around a wild guitar riff, and it pounds away on it, varying the backbeat at times but mainly sticking to the game plan. Both "Don't Save Me" and "One Little Sign" are verse-chorus compositions that move from angular sections to poppier, more radio-friendly refrains. The former could be a play for mainstream attention, but it's the latter, a J. Geils-in-disguise new wave revival number, that their handlers ought to be pushing. The final number, "Waiting For The Snow", is the most experimental, and the one that best conjures the weirdness the Sparber-Mensch combination has always generated: a guitar lick from some toxic bayou, a slowed-down middle section haunted by Langerak's unearthly vocals, a hypercaffeinated drum track, two false endings, and a concluding series of Sparber's best hellacious shrieks.
What differentiates this record from others in its genre? A close associate of the group recently confided in me that the Break-Up is an art band that thinks they're mainstream. I agree with the former, but with the latter no longer. With She Went Black, these guys have slid into a grudging acceptance of the fact that for better or for worse, they are more intelligent, more literary, and more experimental than most groups stalking this territory. No shame in that, even if it hurts them in negotiations with the label folks.
What's not so good?: I have nits to pick, and they're mostly with the third track. "Don't Save Me" seems to have been mixed according to a strange logic: the EQs don't really match up. There's much too much vocal here -- particularly Langerak's backing vocal, which would have sounded nice pushed back. Upfront, it almost overwhelms Sparber's. It's a one-note part, and it probably shouldn't have been. Sparber's performance on "Don't Save Me" isn't the equal of the rest of them here; he sounds out of control, sure, but his voice breaks a little tunelessly. I think the mix engineer might have thought that the fuzz bass was obnoxious enough that it could withstand burying. Bad call, guy. Elsewhere: the organ (while great) is too loud on "One Little Sign", and "I'm just sitting here waiting for you/I don't know what to do but I wanna adore you" is a dopey, simpleminded refrain by Sparber's previously-established standards. Overall, if it was my beach and I could wave a magic wand, I'd give She Went Black a remixing with a little more emphasis on the chaos, but there's nothing here I can't live with.
Recommended?: You bet.
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: Try the band website.
Title: Cazwell EP
From: New York City via Worcester, Massachusetts.
Format: A seven-song, twenty minute EP. As a bonus track, Cazwell adds his collaboration with electroclash refugees Avenue D, "The Sex That I Need". The women of Avenue D are all over this EP: if you found them annoying and gimmicky in 2002, nothing they do here will change your mind.
Fidelity: Decent. Like many recent underground NYC rappers, Cazwell favors the relatively lo-tech sound of mid-eighties hip-hop.
Genre: Cazwell emcees, and clearly has hip-hop aspirations. But the presence of Avenue D and the nostalgic adherence to the arrangement logic of yesteryear tugs these songs in the direction of the Berliniamsburg and Squeezebox parties. New Yorkers will know what I'm talking about. Everybody else: file under "electroclash".
Arrangements: Ticky-ticky drum machine, sticky synthesizer, a few distant sirens, unobtrusive scratching that sounds sampled rather than performed, the obligatory answering machines. Nice creative use of the "please stand clear of the closing doors" subway message.
What's this record about?: If you don't know, Cazwell is the gay rapper. Actually, he is one of several currently bubbling under the mainstream. Nature abhors a vacuum, but not nearly as much as capitalism abhors an untapped demographic. Cazwell is less obsessed with his sexuality than others working this territory, but if you are looking for explicit descriptions of gay get-downs, you won't be disappinted. Name-checking Speedo and KY-Jelly, respectively, "Do You Wanna Break Up?" and "The Sex That I Need" are the two raunchiest numbers here. Others barely mention sex at all, but concentrate on Cazwell's sub-themes: "City Sounds" and the charming-but-clumsy "Get Up New York City!" both scope Manhattan with wide-eyed, out-of-town bewilderment. Elsewhere the emcee displays a streak less angsty than cranky -- "Moody" and "All I Want To Do" intersperse jokes amid a litany of complaints unusual in their vehemence for hip-hop or electroclash. Tellingly, the best song here is a straight rapper's boast: "Watch My Mouth", performed in tandem with former Morplay partner Crasta Yo.
The vocalist: Cazwell is a very good emcee by electroclash standards, which isn't exactly like being the tallest man in the pygmy tribe -- but considering the competition, it's not a difficult accolade to garner. His enunciation is generally better than his flow, and he favors a rapid-fire, associative delivery that at times is uncomfortably reminiscent of Eminem. When in a good mood, as he is on "Watch My Mouth", he can be sympathetic and and engaging. When complaining about failed relationships (too often), he effects a dismissive affect that sounds more peevish than tough. Some punch-lines are funny, others are overindicated. In sum, Cazwell's batting average is high, but he strikes out too often.
The tracks: Stock but entertaining. Again, "Watch My Mouth" -- with its robotic chorus and Licensed To Ill spastic drums -- is the most successful, but most songs here have memorable choruses and breaks.
The rhymes: Clever, dripping with amusing pop-cultural references. "Moody" name-checks Sister Souljah and Judge Judy in the same line; on "Do You Wanna Break Up?", Cazwell dismisses a boyfriend by telling him "you wanna get peed on/and listen to Celine Dion". Nasty, yes, but funny -- as is rhyming Mother Theresa with "slice you up like a pizza". Like Eminem, Cazwell relies heavily on internal rhyme, assonance, and word association.
What distinguishes this record from other records of its genre?: You might think that being the gay rapper is distinctive enough. It probably is, but in the wake of the success of Queer Eye and programs like it, this territory is about to get much more crowded. Sony Music, for instance, has already reserved www.gayrapper.com for Caushun, an emcee whose debut is set to drop this summer. The forums at gayhiphop.com are filled with starter rhymes by queer emcees with anthems to publicize. Cazwell's wit and balance already place him miles ahead of the pack, but that's just to say his role will probably be one of leader and pioneer, rather than lone voice crying out in the wilderness of boring straights.
What's not so good?: Cazwell is in a difficult position. He is undoubtably at his best when he is attempting hip-hop, but Jay-Z he will never be. Hip-hop culture has not exactly been friendly to boys who like kissing boys. Electroclash is far more welcoming to queer voices, but electroclash audiences demand of their artists a self-dramatizing kitsch completely at odds with the traditional values of the emcee. Cazwell tries to have it both ways -- he writes rhymes and emcees like a rap true believer, but he allows Avenue D and the nostalgic production to drag him toward the campiness of electroclash. This makes the Cazwell EP a schizophrenic listen.
Recommended?: If you are a rap music purist, you aren't going to like this. If you are steeped in hip-hop tradition, and demand from your emcees skills like breath control, flow, and rhythmic precision, you will probably find fault here. But if you're one of the thousands of casual rap listeners who respond best to the cleverness and word-association of rhyming -- if you dig Princess Superstar, Gillette, FannyPack, and don't thrash your CD player when they skid off course --the Cazwell EP would be a solid addition to your electro-rap collection.
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: At the artist's website. The site also features a club-music remix of "Watch My Mouth" that will convince you, if anything will, that Cazwell really ought to be trying to do hip-hop.
Title: The New Beginning
From: Jersey City.
Format: Full-length LP, and oh, is it ever long! Seventy minutes, no skits.
Fidelity: Troubling. Sometimes albums come back from the masterer too "hot"; in other words, the treble sounds overly shrill and harsh. I think that's what's happened here. Many of these songs are fried -- the vocals are pinched, distorted. It doesn't wreck the experience of listening to A New Beginning, but I can't say I don't sit here wishing a remasterer could have a crack at adjusting the EQ.
Genre: Underground hip-hop. Not Hot-97 music -- C-Fury doesn't do R&B hooks. He does give us rhymed choruses, and they're catchy and immediate, but you'd never mistake this for mainstream radio rap.
Arrangements: Programmed drums, sweep synthesizer, some tinkly piano, the requisite explosions, samples of old songs. Most tracks start with the big beat, introduce a bass tone, and build either to a sampled hook or a C-Fury declamation. Picture Criminal Minded with a better synth bank, and you've got a pretty good idea of how C-Fury puts his records together.
What's this record about?: C-Fury believes in family, friends; he believes in New Jersey, and he believes in himself -- his talent, his merit, his drive. He wants you to know how great his eight-year-old is, and he giftwraps one of his best tracks (the Do You Want More?!?!-ish "L'il Tahj") for her to rhyme over. Like most underground emcees, phonies and industry-sanctioned gangsters distress him, but he doesn't attempt to out-tough them: he just wants to beat them in a rhyme battle. Similarly, while he's not above a quick and dirty encounter ("A Hit And Run"), he is much more likely to treat his female characters with respect. While he's quick to assert that family, or "blood" comes first for him, he can be remarkably frank about the social and economic price of following his muse. Like Posdnuos on Bionix, C-Fury surveys a life spent in music from the perspective of a rueful adult, a family man, wondering about the effect on the people around him. On "Believe", the centerpiece of A New Beginning, the rapper self-interrogates with remarkable ferocity ("C-Fury, he's been wasting his time/fifteen long years and he's still writing rhymes?/C'mon, when he think this bullshit's gonna pay off?/Tell him to take a day off!") For C-Fury, it's the magic of musical alchemy that justifies the effort, if not the hours spent bagging groceries. If The New Beginning can feel at times like a hip-hop version of The Meadowlands, well, there are many, many twisted dreams rising out of these Jersey swamps.
The rapper: It takes an excellent emcee to turn "sitting in a tree, k.i.s.s.i.n.g/first comes love, then comes marraige" into a genuine hip-hop hook that holds up under repeated listens. C-Fury is adept, passionate, precise; he has some of Ghostface's crybaby-emotion in his vocals, some of Black Thought's storytelling directness, and some of Acey's compassion. He doesn't bother with hyperactive passages or triplets -- he's straightforward, hardcore, communicative. There's also very little jargon on A New Beginning: sports metaphors are about as esoteric as C-Fury gets. He's a communicator. Consequently, I find his flow outstanding: he's about meaning first, fireworks only afterward.
The music: The RZA may have gotten the mainstream hip-hop audience accustomed to dissonance, but underground emcees had been throwing accidental major and minor seconds into their tracks from the moment they started sampling. The New Beginning has moments of jarring dissonance -- mostly when the borrowed snatches of music are incorporated, and caused by harmonic friction between the played track and the incoming idea. "I'm A Bad Man", for instance, is in F# major -- the body of the song consists of a standard walk-up pattern played on the synthesizer. But the sample introduces a bass note completely out of the chord. Hey, it doesn't bother me. But then again, I'm a polychord kind of guy. If you're the sort of rap listener who requires pristine pentatonic harmony, you may be a little taken aback by the approach.
The rhyming: C-Fury's favorite cadence is one-two-three-four-FIVE, one-two-three-four-FIVE, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four-FIVE. It's a rhyme pattern I associate most closely with the Jungle Brothers -- and, upon reflection, Afrika Babybam is a good comp for C-Fury.
What differentiates this record from others in its genre? The compassion, thoughtfulness, and formal excellence of the rapper. He's the most sympathetic and human-sounding Jersey emcee I've heard in years.
What's not so good?: Though The New Beginning goes sixteen tracks deep, it's pretty consistent -- there's nothing here that screams to have been left off the collection. This would be a very easy seventy-minute listen for a rap fan were it not for the uneven recording quality: the distorted high-end that creates listening fatigue, and the occasionally muffled sound of the drum machine and voice. My "stereo" at home, in case you are wondering, is a twelve-inch Sony boombox; I am not, as a rule, checking for sonics. But I listened to A New Beginning on a nice system, just to see if I wasn't reacting to some kind of a format incompatibility. I wasn't. This album needs to be remastered.
Recommended?: Jersey City's rap subculture may not get a lot of press, but it's there, and like everything else in Jersey City, it offers a less ostentatious, more refelctive, accomplished, intelligent, warm and self-deprecatory alternative to the stuff across the river. If you're looking for a way in, A New Beginning is a great place to start.
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: That's a damned good question. I can't find a website for C-Fury. There's no address on the CD. The record company, The Attack Group, lists a link, but when you access it, you get a "page under construction" notice. You could try the publicist at info@deevel.com, or just keep your eyes posted around Jersey City for an upcoming gig.
UPDATE: Well, what do you know -- several people (including C-Fury himself) wrote to me explaining where to get the album. It's available at Dealtime through Shopping.Com, and also at Amazon. Rock!
Title: Chariot!
From: Jersey City. This record was built at Grisly Labs, a fantastic recording studio on Fifth Street off of Brunswick Avenue, right around the corner from Madame Claude's. You'd hardly know it was there -- it's extremely spacious, but it's located in an unassuming blue aluminum-sided building that I'm sure passing pedestrians mistake for a garage. Really, it's more like the BatCave: when you enter, the immensity of the complex doesn't seem to corroborate at all with the exterior. You feel like you're stepping into an extradimensional space.
Format: Fourteen song album. Only the distorted "Cruise Missile" breaks the four-minute mark. It's a very manageable listening experience, clocking in at a little over forty minutes. Old cassette-dubbers will know what I mean when I say it'd fit comfortably on one side of a 90. You could put both Giraffes records on the other side, open a bottle of Jack Daniels, and have yourself a freakout.
Fidelity: Very good, if unconventional. Chariot! is not trying to make a record that sounds like modern rock radio. They're trying to make a record that sounds like classic rock heard through the speakers of a station wagon in 1973. Since they have the best recording technology in town at their disposal, they succeed.
Genre: Classic-rock revival, garage-rock, Southern rock. Chariot! can boogie like Molly Hatchet. Since that's rarely attempted in the Yankee haven we call Hudson County, they're a pretty anomalous area act.
Arrangements: Twin guitars, bass, drums, acoutrements. To get that authentic gutbucket sound, the Beast spends most of his time on baritone guitar. It's a good choice: the barry doesn't sound all that dissimilar from a toughened-up Telecaster, but it forces the harmonic center of these tracks lower than they'd otherwise be. When venturing into Allmans territory, getting that deep-swamp growl is half the fight. The lead guitar is almost always an overdriven, thick zipper of sound. For a group so committed to punishing rock, there is more organ and synthesizer here than you'd guess there'd be. Huge organ stabs drive "Coke Bottle Girl", and a queasy ribbon of Korg runs through the heart of "Diamond All The Way" (the closest thing here to an acoustic number). The shouted backing vocals never fail to come in the appropriate places, and there's even a little cowbell at the beginning of the title track. Chariot! makes sure to dot the I's and cross the T's.
What's this record about?: Booze, girls, getting booze to get girls, automobiles and trucks, rock and roll cities, horror movie monsters, blowing your thumb off with your own weapon. Chariot! operates with a kind of puerile wit that keeps a cretin like me smiling throughout. This is the sort of writing that is called "willfully stupid" by those who don't realize they're impugning the entire rock and roll tradition. Chariot! can get stuck in reiterative choruses, but when they allow themselves a little narrative flexibility, they're almost always amusing within the tight parameters they've set for themselves. If the message to most of this music boils down to a Seventies-chill "get stoned, crack jokes, and relax as the car swerves out of control", I'm really not complaining about the "Casey Jones" logic: they embody the vibe so well that it becomes as persuasive as it was on Workingman's Dead.
The singer: D-Lux is the principal voice here; it's bemused, caustic, obnoxious, sometimes hilarious. He never exactly sings; he chats, wheedles, decaims and screams his way through the songs, and occasionally verges on total meltdown. At times, it feels like he's challenging the listener to take him seriously -- but just when you're sure he's putting you on, he'll rip into a line-reading that's both immediate and heartfelt. The Grisly Labs producers make sure to filter his vocals through demented distortion, echo, and reverb effects; on "Cruise Missile", it sounds like he's singing through an intercom on a Russian submarine. At times, the result can be incomprehensible, yet they make sure we don't miss any crucial information. The exception is the otherwise bracing (and appropriately-named) "James Gang Bang", which I can't make heads or tails of. It's a series of staccato grunts that might best approximate human language if by "language" we mean early caveman hunting exclamations. Feral for sure, but still: I can't tell you it doesn't work.
The band: Chariot! regularly gets a good, drunken groove going, and while these guys can certainly play, they're never so tight that they dishonor their ramshackle sources or suffocate the essential friendliness out of their songs. "Detroit" is probably the most ferocious thing here, but even on that stomper, they do their best to avoid oppressive guitar midrange. Beast and Buzz, the band's twin guitarists, can get sludge-happy, but they keep it to limited doses: Chariot! is digestible by heavy-rock standards because they're so scrupulous about varying tones. Bassist Maestro gets lost in the mix sometimes, but he's so loose and laid-back -- even when playing ferociously -- that it's his heartbeat that keeps Chariot! so amicable. And Q, the drummer, has a great right hand on the ride cymbal. He slams it hard and lets it ring like Birmingham steel, just like they used to do in the Alabama roadhouses. At least I think they did.
The songs: The album opens with a spirited cover of Link Wray's "Rumble"; later, the group offers a punishing rendition of "Shapes Of Things" by the Yardbirds. "Coke Bottle Girl" includes a quote from "California Girls", and at least two other songs sound like they could morph into "Smoke On The Water" at any point. Chariot! isn't too concerned about original songcraft. Most of the songs here are based around familiar-sounding blues riffs. Yet it's notable that when the group stretches out a little, they prove they've got the ability to craft hooks. "Diamond All The Way" and "All Nite In The Life" start out derivative, but explore avenues away from the main thoroughfare. And "Celtic Sharpie" builds from a throbbing synthesizer and a whipping-post riff to a surprisingly Floydish release. Finally, you could have hung out at Wetlands for months without hearing fake-Dead as convincing as "Henry's Ex", the closer.
What differentiates this record from others like it? Chariot! has a better sense of humor than the Brought Low, and are probably a bit more approachable because they pick their spots to get ferocious. They're much more willing to experiment with recording hijinx than the guys in Bad Wizard are: they're more playful, more elastic. And yes, I'm comparing Chariot! to New York bands. There isn't so much of this stuff in Jersey -- since about a third of our state is actually below the Mason-Dixon line, I think we tend to be more self-conscious in our approximation of Southern-rock. We're either intimidated or overly reverent. Chariot! are neither.
What's not so good?: I have to draw the line somewhere, and for me, it's "Dracula's Baby". I find the metaphor facile (even by mook-rock standards), the faux-horror music choppy, and I'm completely unconvinced by D-Lux's perfomance. Where he's usually effective, here he sounds overly parodic, and maybe even a little whiny.
Recommended?: This is an immensely enjoyable rock record that I've given spin after spin. They don't take themselves too seriously, and they don't ask you to, either. But since Chariot! is so stylized, it's worth asking whether it's exploiting its target: are these guys making fun of boogie bands, or are they a boogie band themselves? I don't really think it matters one way or the other, but I think whatever their original intentions were, they're worth taking seriously as formalists. Loose, cheeky, playful formalists, sure, but authentic revivalists nonetheless.
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: Chariot! is available through Useless Records. The website features a great video for "Detroit", complete with car chases, dancing girls, and old autos doing impossible low-rider tricks.
Title:: Crayon Rosary
From: New Brunswick. I'm not sure if they're Rutgers students, but this is a very collegiate project, so that's my guess. In any case, Crayon Rosary has a sleepy-Sunday dorm room feel to it. Their label is headquartered in Bayonne, so this is another of the many Hudson-Middlesex projects to cross this desk recently.
Format: Seven-song EP.
Fidelity: Passable indie-pop quality. The acoustic guitar here sounds a little rough, and the moments where the louder instruments kick in can get out of control. The two vocals don't always match up properly, either, but that may have more to do with the singers than the recording quality. Nonetheless, if you like pristine harmonies, Crayon Rosary might not be for you.
Genre: Indie-pop, with an acoustic-punk edge to it. Crayon Rosary singers (identified here only as Keith and Brendan) don't croon breathily like most fashionable indie-poppers do these days -- instead, they're whiny, geeky. Coupled with their reliance on big acoustic guitar chords, the vocal approach puts the Rosary closer to eighties lite college rock like Miracle Legion than Marlborough Farms. Give this pair a brogue, and you could mistake them for the Proclaimers.
Arrangements: Broad strumming on acoustics, reedy mini-synthesizer, a few drum loops, toy piano, xylophone and bicycle bell (or something that sounds quite like one), a sparingly-used fuzz electric, voices in unison and in harmony. "Fisherman", the lead track, brings in a full drum kit -- perhaps as a consequence, it's the least successful recording here. Nonetheless, Crayon Rosary is at their best when they've got some kind of beat to play to: the Casiotone rhythm tracks might sound puny, but they do hold the songs together.
What's this record about?: Romantic longing, mainly; not the sort that singes the fingers, but the gently simmering kind. The boys of the Crayon Rosary present themselves as good eggs, shy around the girls, but mainly earnest in their desire to be helpful. They're after women, sure, but they also seek to measure up to propriety. They frame themselves as precocious juveniles, after their rewards but also a bit concerned about maintaining approval of the grownup world. On "A New Book", Keith and Brendan fret about becoming gentlemen -- and "New York City" is big, loud and terrifying, no matter how much the objects of their affections might like to stay there. "With the sunrise behind you/you make a beautiful skyline", they coo, relishing the innocence and incongruity of the statement. These just aren't anguished souls, and they're more than capable of kicking out a pure and heartfelt ballad like "Loving You Back". Curses are mild -- a "sucked" here, a "goddamned" there -- and language is precise and measured. They're worried about the effects of their own moderation, as "Siren Song" suggests, and maybe a little jealous of those who can unironically affect a "rock and roll swagger", but not enough to do anything about it. Keith and Brendan stretch out a bit on "Fisherman", and attempt a dialogue, and while it's engaging to hear the Rosary interact like this, it's a little hard to follow.
The singers: One of these guys (I don't know which is Keith and which one is Brendan) handles the high, straightforward parts, while the other is deep and bluff, and mutters his lyrics onto the tape like long-held secrets. The low vocalist has an interesting vision and microphone approach, but he cannot hold pitch. This isn't such a problem when he's singing by himself, as he does on "Beehive" or the very good "Your Bed (Again)". But when he joins his partner in unison or harmony, his tonal inaccuracy can be seriously disorienting. The high, whiny singer is a much more conventional college-rock weenie, but he nails most of his marks. I like him.
The band: The acoustic guitar passages are strummed with some fervency -- there's not much finger-picking or weaving here. Instead, Crayon Rosary spills out six-string barre chords, and can usually get them close enough in time with the drum loops to keep things propulsive. The synthesizer is the descant instrument, and just about everything played on it is right on the money. The Rosary stretches synth melodies over the chord progressions in classic eighties lo-fi style, brightening what would otherwise be folksy arrangements, and making sure that the songs read as playful and as childlike as possible. In case the Casiotone doesn't do the trick, Crayon Rosary has on hand their toybox filled with cheap toddler-rock percussion instruments, and they're used here to successful effect. The duo is a little young to be so nostalgic for their childhood, but hell, it beats cashing in their chips and becoming bankers, right?
The songs: The three songs sung by Keith differ notably from the four sung by Brendan. (Mind you, I'm guessing here with the names -- it could be the other way around. I just think that Keith is a lower-voiced name than Brendan.) Keith's compositions, particularly "Beehive", have an ebb and flow to them, and don't conform strictly to verse-chorus expectation. Keith is willing to write hooks, but he's not obsessed with foregrounding them -- his songs wade in, build to tension points, and then wade out. Brendan, by contrast, is a tight, epigrammatic composer: his phrases are usually succinct, direct, and melodic. His four tracks are immediate and catchy, especially "Siren Song". He doesn't sing unusual intervals, but he will pen melodies that take big leaps from note to note. Luckily, he's got the vocal precision necessary to realize his ambitions. Because Keith and Brendan often sing together, the dissimilarity in their writing approaches never feels jarring. If the pop-punk directness of Brendan's four songs leave the other three feeling like something of an afterthought, the Keith-sung ones manage to sink in over repeated listens, and provide a respite from the hyperactive, ingratiating tone of his partner's more memorable numbers.
What differentiates this record from others like it? I think Crayon Rosary would like to be defined by their use of children's instruments, but there isn't quite enough of that stuff here to turn the trick. The acoustic guitar dominates most of these tracks, and the toys and gadgets usually feel like ornamentation. Pianosaurus they are not.
What's not so good?: I'm a Grateful Dead fan, which means -- among other unpleasant things -- that I have an awfully high threshhold for out-of-tune harmonies. The Crayon Rosary cross that threshhold. Pitchy singing can humanize an otherwise slick and distant project, but the Rosary aren't slick. Next time out, they need to go back and revisit their vocal parts, and make sure there's more harmony in their harmonies. What's more, when two singers are in unison, their voices absolutely must mesh; otherwise, it's just carnage. Keith and Brendan manage to get in sync most of the time, but when they don't, it can be ugly.
Recommended?: I don't know these guys at all, but my gut tells me that they won't be working together for long. Their styles and proclivities are not an obvious match, and I can already feel them pulling in different directions. That said, it's worth catching Crayon Rosary while the duo is still hanging together. It's rough, and there are mistakes galore, but this is nonetheless an interesting act, and one to watch. Their songwriting is, in most cases, skilled, and they've put out an EP of engaging pop recordings with well-crafted melodies. They're young enough to be on the Jersey scene for awhile. If this is a starter project for these guys, it's an awfully well-realized one.
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: The Crayon Rosary album is avaliable through XOXO Records. Also, I didn't know where to mention this, so I'll put it here: if the name of the group sounds familiar to you, you're probably an S&G fan. It's taken from a line in Paul Simon's "Poem On An Underground Wall".
Title: The Spirituality
From: Brooklyn (I think). Brooklyn bands sometimes give Manhattan addresses, but it's rare that a non-Brooklyn band would give a Brooklyn P.O. box. But this isn't "Brooklyn-sound" -- even if the Desert Fathers live in Williamsburg, they make music that would sound at home at avant-garde lower Manhattan spaces like the Knitting Factory.
Format: Short full-length. Ten songs, three of which clock in at less than two minutes.
Fidelity: The Spirituality was recorded by Steve Albini, who merits his own fidelity category. As Nirvana fans know, Albini does a superior job achieving balance between several grisly guitar tones: he can meld a belch with a skronk with a nails-on-the-blackboard scrape better than anybody. The guitars on this album sound fantastic, if by "fantastic" you mean go-for-the-throat visceral weirdness. If you're looking for clarity, pick up a Shaun Colvin album.
Genre: Art-rock/experimental. A few of these tracks ("A Practical Joke", "Peace In That") are legible as extremely warped pop songs of the early-Laswell variety, and one of them ("Gloria in Excelsis Deo") is a legit hymn. Albeit one built out of feedback.
Arrangements: Huge, dirty bass, big rock drums, the ambience of ringing strings, treated vocals, and springing guitar overdub after boinging guitar overdub. Much of The Spirituality suggests what it would sound like if I somehow plugged my old boxspring into a amplifier and then jumped vigorously on the bed. If a bunch of Slinkys got together and formed a rock group, this would be it.
What's this record about?: In the middle of the The Spirituality, there's a gag ("Evolution"), and it's a pretty funny one, too. In the voice of an old fogey professor, one of the Desert Fathers does a spoken-word bit about monkeys: "up in the trees, running wild, throwing coconuts at each other... and then one day, they turned into people!" This irreverence is extended throughout The Spirituality: many of these songs approach religious and scientific questions from skewed angles. My best guess is that most of this writing casts a skeptical eye at reason, but it's not possible to know for sure -- the Desert Fathers might be satirizing spirituality, too. The pitbulls on the cover are misleadingly cute: on the record, they represent entropy and a kind of anti-social savagery.
The singer: The liner notes list the members of The Desert Fathers as: "Acquaman", "the Real", and "Levitas". I'm not sure which one of those guys -- if they are guys, and not states of mind or emotional conditions -- is responsible for the vocals. The Desert Fathers don't scream, but they do testify. The lead vocalist sounds, at times, remarkably like Adrian Belew on Discipline: that intellectual's primal howl.
The musicians: Outstanding. The rhythm section is exacting and powerful, and the guitar playing is imaginative enough to stand with its sources. I just played The Spirituality back to back with Larks Tongues In Aspic. It suffered by comparison, but what wouldn't? It's in the same ballpark, though. It's hard to make that claim for other recent entries in the art-rock sweepstakes.
The songs: Built around riffs or guitar phenomena, mostly. This isn't a songwriter's record. Yet it's notable that when the Desert Fathers get down to writing a poppier piece, they've got the capacity to be tuneful, even if they're never exactly hooky. "Peace In That" is a well-built song that probably wouldn't fall aprt if you tried to render it on acoustic guitar. And some of the feedback washes -- particularly "Life After Life Everlasting" cohere as formal songs through the force of their beauty.
What distinguishes this record from other records of its genre?: Much. The Spirituality isn't wanna-be art-rock, it's the genuine article. Art-rockers sacrifice commercial potential for a wider latitude of personal expression. These guys take advantage of the freedom. The guitar sound here is unusual, bracing; the address is wry, ironic, intelligent.
What's not so good?: I have come to think of the Desert Fathers (and, to a lesser degree, their labelmates/compadres in the Forms) as Material redux. But while I never knew what the hell Material was singing about, I have a pretty good idea why the Desert Fathers howl and rage as they do. This is a conceptual project, and try as you may, you can't express a concept through sounds and tones. You've got to use words. The Desert Fathers do -- but the guitarrorism here is so all-encompassing that it's frequently impossible to make out what they're saying. Next time out, I want them to pay lyrical clarity a little attention. It's not like they don't have anything to say.
Recommended?: Yes. The Spirituality is a challenging, ballsy record; funny at times, and never uninteresting. If you dig art-rock and you don't mind noise excursions, The Desert Fathers should go to the head of your list of new groups to check out.
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: The Desert Fathers are part of the Threespheres collective of likeminded rock and roll maniacs. They just came off national tour, so ideally, the best time to have written this was two months ago. Well, I had some things to finish up. I'm back now. A review a day -- 'til I make some kind of dent in this pile to my right!
Title: Peppers And Jelly
From: The mountains of West Jersey. During one of the many spoken interludes on Peppers And Jelly, Alex Radus mumbles something that sounds like he's saying he's from Flemington. Duende is probably better known in eastern Pennsylvania then they are in Jersey, but there's a thick crop of folksters growing all over the Hunterdon hills. Those of us who know New Jersey only as a series of Turnpike exits are missing out on the reason we're called the Garden State.
Format: Long LP recorded live at the Sidewalk Cafe, the Kendall in Cambridge, and a place called Home Sessions in Sparta. That's probably somebody's house. Hell, it could be their house. Tracks six, ten, and twelve are Radus's stage banter, so that's ten songs (plus the requisite hidden encore) spread out over seventy minutes. Duende is unafraid to do long songs -- the title track is eight and a half minutes, "West Virginia" storms on for over ten.
Fidelity: Pretty good for a live indie CD. The quality isn't discernably poorer than it is on Duende's well-recorded studio album. The guitars are a little boingy, but I think that may just be the way Radus and Maria Woodford play. Once you cross over South Mountain and you're out of the WFMU broadcast range, you're dealing with entirely different sonic standards, and ones I don't always immediately understand.
Genre: Folk-rock, singer/songwriter. These aren't traditional ballads, they're Radus and Woodford's own compositions.
Arrangements: Two acoustic guitars, two voices, some comments and chuckles from the peanut gallery. Frequently one guitar will bang out chords while the other riffs up at the top of the neck; not an unusual division of labor, I know, but Radus and Woodford are accomplished guitar players. They don't sing in harmony quite as often as you might like, but when they do, Peppers And Jelly takes off.
What's this record about?: Hardships and bemusements of the touring life. Radus tackles the bemusement -- the wistful, half-spoken "Peppers and Jelly" is a winking, road-weary travelogue complete with coyotes, flats on the highway from El Paso, and appreciative crowds making the hassle worthwile. Woodford covers the hardship department, and her stories of loneliness and alienation on tour (check "Travelin' On", one of the higlights of the set) are straightforward and heartfelt. This is not groundbreaking stuff. But for the most part, they don't embarrass you. "The BBC" is a topical piece about news junkies and car radios -- it has a very bad (bad meaning silly, not naughty) off-color joke in it, but the song is pretty amusing nonetheless.
The singers: Alex Radus sings in a small, friendly campfire deadpan, reminiscent at times of Dave Weschler from Pinataland. There's very little dissonance between his singing and his speaking tone, and he takes advantage of the similarity to slip between modes a la Harry Chapin. The quieter and chattier his singing is, the more approachable his songs become. Maria Woodford has a much bigger voice, and will shoot the works when necessary: her blues-roots explorations here ("Overboard", parts of "West Virginia") are authentic and forceful. Yet, like Radus, she's most effective when she restrains herself -- her low, plaintive performances are more intimate, and more personal, than the shouters. But Radus and Woodford really shine when they sing together: their voices blend like siblings, and the harmonies they find are gorgeous and often haunting. Because Radus does so much speaking on Peppers And Jelly, his voice, and by extension his perspective, dominates the set. Some old folkies out there might know what I'm talking about when I say it's sort of like the dynamic on Pentangle's Sweet Child: Bert Jansch does so much talking to the audience that Jacqui McShee starts to feel a little marginalized.
The players: Extending the Pentangle comparison further, Radus and Woodford are, like Jansch and Renbourn, well-trained and technically proficient acoustic guitarrists with a penchant for incorporating blues and jazz into their extensive folk workouts. Yet while the Jansch and Renbourn had an ace rhythm section supporting them, Duende go it alone. This means they end up strumming more -- and with greater speed and fervor -- than they'd probably like to. "West Virginia" blows by like a ten-minute thunderstorm: chords up on the neck, breakneck riffing, some musical quotes from popular songs, doubletake-inducing fretboard acrobatics. Its bracing, but it threatens to overwhelm the vocals. Yet to be fair, however much Woodford and Radus burn to strut their stuff, the songs are never excuses for guitar excursions -- there are built-in showcase sections, like on "Reflections" or "Overboard", but you never feel like you're listening to launching-pads, or marking time between the solos. When they do come, they're always worth it: they'll have you pressing rewind, or scanning backward on your CD player, to marvel at the gravity-defying phrases.
The songs: Traditional folk exercises and adaptations. Duende is not about expanding the song form: there are verses, there are choruses, there's a handful of basic building blocks, and there are very few departures. Radus is the Dylanesque writer, and by that I mean his songs are very logically built according to time-honored folk models. Woodford has a wider chord vocabulary (check "Indian Summer", for instance) and a better ear for melody, but she's not the hook-writer that Radus is, and she's much more prone to come up with lyrics that are mere placeholders. "West Virginia" and "The BBC" are co-credited, and they're two of the best things on Peppers And Jelly. Like everything else about Duende, Woodford and Radus are at their best when they work together.
What differentiates this record from others like it? If you're a frequent reader of this space, you probably know I don't exactly care for the sound of the acoustic guitar. When it's left dry, it's never sonorous enough, and when it's souped up, it's the most frequency-spectrum saturating element in the lexicon of popular music. Two acoustic guitars are, generally, two too many. But there's no way to deny the excellence of these two players: while I might like it better if they didn't strum so much, or if some of the rhythmic responsibility could be delegated to an actual rhythm section, I acknowledge that the two members of Duende are good enough at their instruments that they can play them for seventy-one minutes and not bring about listener fatigue. This is extraordinarily rare on folk or singer-songwriter records. Usually by the second song, I am sick to death of both the guitar tone and the limited bag of instrumental tricks. Duende's reserve of ideas on their instruments seems inexhaustible.
What's not so good?: I don't mind all the talking and stage-banter that Radus indulges in; as I mentioned, it diminishes Woodford's status somewhat, but he's self-deprecating, and in a few places, it even helps to ground the song. What drives me crazy is the audience response. Cackling, inappropriate laughter, stupid comments, applause in inappropriate places, general coffehouse irritation, all preserved for posterity. Peppers And Jelly reminds me exactly why I hate going to folk shows -- it's not the bands that bother me, it's the aggressively comfortable middlebrow attendees. Give me the Court Tavern any day.
Recommended?: As a Hudson County resident, I often forget about the parts of New Jersey west of the Hackensack, let alone the fist line of ugly-stepchild Appalachians that separate the coastal plain from the Somerset hills and Hunterdon highlands. It's tempting to level a class critique against the whole region -- Morristown is posh and suburban, and therefore whatever's going on over there couldn't possibly be worthy of the attention we ought to bestow on the latest dirthead band from Passaic. I hear that critique all the time: maybe not spelled out in such vulgar terms, but still pretty evident in the cloaked justifications that the coastal media uses to ignore the western counties. Hey, I do it, too. But while Somerset boasts that Wegman's supermarket on 202 and Morris may have the highest median income of any county in America, there are huge pockets of working-class semi-urban communities in these hills. WNTI broadcasts from Hackettstown, Jack Devaney does his proletarian festival every year in Clinton, many of the best bands in the state make the trek to Krogh's in Sparta, even Morristown and Flemington has their share of raucous nightlife. Beyond that, who's to say that rich people can't rock? You'd have to disqualify half of Williamsburg if you started eliminating trust-fund kids from this game. Duende are not trust-fund kids: they're from West Virginia originally, and they seem to epitomize improvisational rock 'n' roll living. Their success, aesthetic and otherwise, is profound evidence of the thriving folk and roots music scene located just a forty-five minute drive into the woods.
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: I ought to set up a macro for this: try the band's website. Check for upcoming dates, too; they tour constantly.
Title: G, or Gentleman Never Tells
From: Brooklyn. Singer Aaron Lazar draws heavily on the horror of his post-industrial Ohio upbringing, but the Giraffes are as blackhearted and toxic as the Gowanus Creek.
Format: Six-song EP. It's a bit of a cheat, though, since the bookend tracks are instrumentals. As wonderful a guitarrist as Damien Paris is, The Giraffes just aren't the Giraffes without Lazar's sociopathic stories and performances.
Fidelity: Standard indie rock.
Genre: Surf-rock/metal. No, really. Imagine Uriah Heep or Deep Purple doing Ventures covers. There's an undercurrent of carnival music here, too; the Romany feel of some of the interludes add to the "bloodstained funhouse" atmosphere.
Arrangements: The Giraffes stick to the basic Van Halen arrangement logic: one drum kit, one bass guitar, one hyperkinetic guitar guy riffing and (rarely) chording, and a big-voiced singer over the top. There are occasional backing vocals, and some very intermittent organ, piano, and accordion. You could probably count the overdubs on this EP on one hand.
What's this record about?: First, it's important to get it on the record that I know these guys personally, and they're all generous, courteous, thoughtful, and good to their girlfriends. In my experience, it's the gentle indiepop people (like me) who are trouble, not hard-drinking, cussing, hell-raising motorbike bands like the Giraffes. Okay, now that I've cleared my throat: the Giraffes sing about murder, violence against women, emotional blackmail, and abduction -- from the perspective of the murderers, blackmailers, and abductors. Certainly Lazar's poetry is best understood as exorcism of the demons of bad male behavior, but still, this is an unremittingly sinister listen. "Don't cry/don't fight/you're mine/you know I've got the right" he purrs in "On Lover's Lane", and it gets scarier from there. "Get In The Car", grainy as a snuff film, is a hitchhiking-gone-wrong story; "Help My Blood Count" a barroom rant that simmers with rage. "There's no hell like me", he sings to his unsuspecting victim. You believe him.
The singer: To make matters more terrifying, Lazar rarely sounds like a hellion. He comes off as a disturbed but compelling next-door-neighbor; seductive, ambivalent, and very, very dangerous. You know that the guilt expressed is legitimate, and what's more, you know the characters aren't going to let that guilt check their worst impulses. On Helping You Help Yourself, the band's 2002 LP, Lazar was a towering figure, bellowing in a lucid, melodic tremolo rare for this type of music. On this EP, his voice is cloaked in a heavier reverb, and he saves his most tender and tentative reads for his most disturbing lyrics. Lazar is still capable of holding a quavering, operatic note for fifteen seconds -- as he does at 2:20 of "Lover's Lane" -- but the new subtlety he's cultivated makes those explosive moments all the more demented.
The band: Guitarrist Damien Paris is one of the most protean instrumentalists in New York City, but here he sticks to his self-imposed genre limitations: this is the dark side of surf-rock he wants to explore, and he does so with letter-perfect Ventures reconstructions. He sets up Lazar's narratives with twangy, low-string riffs, and only rarely does he combust into the sort of incendiary leads that have made him semi-famous. To his credit, Paris manages to sound huge while never choking the singer with big chords -- his sinuous and percussive lead lines are winding enough to carry the treble. Likewise, powerhouse drummer Andrew Totolos checks his snarehead-breaking tendencies in favor of complicated paradiddles, marches, rolls, and "Hawaii Five-O" builds. And his stuttering tango of "Help My Blood Count" evokes the rhythmic exploration of Tom Waits's later records.
The songs: Blues with a twist. Perhaps its the surf-rock influence again, but The Giraffes borrow standard progressions from European traditions (flamenco, gypsy music) as well as American standards. Nothing they do harmonically will surprise you, but the songwriting syntax can be unusual: The Giraffes don't shy away from multi-section compositions, shifting feel and time-signature when necessary. But they're also keen on juxtaposing epic tracks with other, more elliptical songs (like "Of This Transaction") that wrap suddenly and leave open questions.
What distinguishes this record from other records of its genre?: While The Giraffes have refined and complicated their approach from the ham-fisted (but exhilarating) metal of Helping You Help Yourself, Lazar is still the selling point of this group. His characters are so intensely believable in their daily evil that it's impossible to walk away unscathed from an encounter with his writing and performances. But that's Brooklyn for you; in a borough that oozes poetry, even the homicidal maniacs are literati at heart.
What's not so good?: Especially when arrangements are as straightforward as these are, I require more bass guitar in my mixes. Too frequently, the bass parts are swallowed up by the toms and spaghetti-Western guitar -- but there are other moments where the instruments clear away, and you still can't hear the bass.
Recommended?: I strongly recommend this recording to the PMRC and to Tipper Gore, because I want to see the looks on their faces when they listen to "On Lover's Lane".
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: Apesauce is the studio and the label (and home away from home for drummer Totolos, who handles the recording), but I don't think they've got their own website. Oh, wait a second, they do! The Giraffes have a site, too, and here's a sampling of some of their poster art. Bands don't always sound like their fliers, but when an aesthetic is this consistent, you know you're facing some conceptual coherence: so check it out.
Title: Macadamia Cuts
From: This isn't the Higgins from Weehawken. This is the South Jersey Higgins. Macadamia Cuts was recorded in Audubon, and the Haddon Heights Police Department is thanked in the liner notes. Because I am a smartass, I wanted to review both Higginses, or Higgi, together. But the North Jersey act never seems to have a copy of their record on them.
Format: Three-song EP, a little over ten minutes long.
Fidelity: Solid indie. The drums are a little bit thuppy for my taste, and the vocal reverbs are chilly, but it's a safe bet this EP was not recorded on top-dollar hardware. In general, this is another good job done on a shoestring budget. Everybody else can learn a lesson in frugality from indie rockers.
Genre: Modern rock.
Arrangements: Two guitars, recorded relatively clean; "The Drone" gets a little distorted, but Slipknot this ain't. The drummer keeps things straightforward, but will throw in some march measures for Larry Mullenesque effect.
What's this record about?: The opening song, "Kamikaze", does not appear to be metaphor -- it's a psychological exploration of a suicide attacker. I guess the language could be figurative, but I'm hoping it isn't. On closer inspection, the straightforward reading holds up better than the symbolic one: "glass of champagne/the only thing I have to my name", sings Michael Diemer, "strap me in today/not tomorrow/I'm ready now, but tomorrow I just don't know". The sympathy-for-the-devil move works well, even if Diemer's voice is an unlikely fit for a holy warrior. "Ben 4" is a little more inscrutable, but still evocative -- it could be a long-distance relationship song, a small-town sketch, a nonchalant statement of cool, or none of the above. "The Drone", the last song on the EP, is a bad-boy come on; the figure of Death speaking though the lips of the arrogant rocker. Throughout, Higgins seems interested in decay, compulsion, and the cruelties of fate. The lyrics here aren't a thicket of associations, but this is not a thematically light band.
The singer: Michael Diemer tries a few different voices here -- on "Kamikaze", he's soaring, questioning, powerful, "Ben 4" he's gruff, seedy, and slightly dangerous. Sometimes he works against his subject matter, (ostensibly) on purpose. "The Drone", which, on paper, calls for tough-guy tactics is sung in a weird, strained holler. I like it, I like it. The "Kamikaze" performance might be more radio-ready, but isn't as interesting.
The band: I beg your pardon if you've heard this lecture before, but since New Jersey Online is a relatively new platform for me, I feel the need to reiterate one of my central rants, for the sake of the uninitiated. When rock started out, and guys like Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis and Fats Domino were making the records that still stand as the templates for three-minute recorded art, there was no big rhythm guitar dominating the mixes. You had a singer (usually a mammoth presence) an electric or standing bass player who steered the song, and a drummer, whose kit was never close-miked piece by piece. Treble instruments were for soloing, coloring. What's happened to rock since 1959 has been a subtraction by addition: as recording techniques have improved, the urge to stick a microphone on everything and everybody, just because we can, has increased. As a consequence, recorded drums no longer sound like a kit -- they sound like gigantic, bassy, whopping thunderheads. Great if you're trying to piss off your neighbors, but useless at The Hop. And since everybody wants to strap it on and play guitar, the rock group has expanded to accomodate two, and sometimes three, guitar players. It's extremely difficult to make a two-guitar lineup work. That's because guitar is a frequency-spectrum saturating instrument -- once you've added one rhythm guitar, there's hardly any room for additional sounds. I don't mean to single out Higgins here, because they're no different from anybody else stalking this modern rock territory. But they are an object lesson, because the bass player here is driven by the treble section -- and to some degree the drummer -- to hug the roots of the chords. That's all he does. On "Ben 4", for instance, one of the two guitars opens with low line that crowds the bass part to the periphery, and the drum solo on "The Drone" is so bottom-ended that you'd swear the bassist is playing along. He's not -- as K-ROCK listeners know, that's just how modern rock drums get mixed. If you're a modern rock fan, and you're used to this approach, you probably won't even notice. But me, I have always argued that great musical recordings are, at essence, duets between a lead instrument (usually a singer) and a bass instrument (usually a bass). Higgins needs to free up some space for their bass player to interact with their singer. (Just like every other indie band in the state.)
The songs: Not iconoclastic or anything, but Higgins is willing to experiment with form. The group isn't bothered by open-ended structure. "Kamikaze" starts with a guitar pattern and vocals, and opens up into a release that feels like a chorus. Yet that section is never repeated: instead, Higgins returns to the verse and builds to an entirely different release. The shifting architecture of the song mirrors the instability of the narrator, and traces the pattern of his flight. "The Drone" repeats one chromatic change over and over, before moving to a walk-down pattern on the choruses. They're flexible.
What distinguishes this record from other records of its genre?: I don't think Higgins is trying to be particularly distinctive. But nor are they hemmed in by generic conventions. They don't shy away from challenging subject matter, and this three-song teaser suggests an interesting, if nascent, perspective.
What's not so good?: Higgins must use its bass guitar better, or convince the guitarsts to play chords other than those implied by the bass root. I know, I could probably say the same thing about 90% of the groups in New Jersey, but theirs is an exaggerated case.
Recommended?: Higgins plays far away from the town I call home. Yet if I was a South Jerseyan or Philadelphian, I would definitely go out of my way to check this group out.
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: Try the band's website. They've got MP3s there of all three songs from the EP.
Title: Julia
From: St. Petersburg. Russia, not Florida. Though it's pretty clear her base of operations is now Jersey City.
Format: A five song EP. I could be wrong here, but I think it's a teaser for an upcoming full-length.
Fidelity: Relatively lo-fi, but you'll never notice. This is singer-songwriter music, and Vorontsova's performances are so quietly intense that the last thing you'll be concerned about is sound quality.
Genre: Folk. By any definition, this is world music, too.
Arrangements: One young woman, one guitar. My guess is that her axe is a nylon-stringed job -- its tone is delicate, faraway, naturally compressed. Vorontsova rarely strums; instead she picks at the instrument in hypnotic, circular patterns. Both her voice and guitar are suffused in a misty reverb.
What's this record about?: Vorontsova sings her songs in Russian. I can sound out the cyrillic writing on the CD cover, but that's as far as I can get. Anybody got a translation? An account with Babelfish?
The singer: Her press materials report that Julia Vorontsova is eighteen years old, but you'd never know that by her voice, or, for that matter, her performances. Vorontsova sings in a heavy, world-weary whisper; it's intimate, aching, intoxicating as brandy, and twice as addictive. My CD doesn't have a clear tracklisting, but it hardly matters -- Vorontsova's breathy, husky alto is consistent from track to track, bending acrobatically from note to note, gracing these melodies, pleading, persuading. This is a turn-out-the-lights-and-stare-out-the-window voice, an introspective voice resonant with lived experience. Of course, without a translator, I can't tell you what that experience is, but these letter-perfect folk performances are resonant with tantalizing clues.
The guitar: Usually a pitter-patter of notes or a scrape of strings in a dusty corner, but sometimes an elegantly-weaved pattern or a gently percussive, insistent thrum. Julia's production reminds me of that of the Nick Drake's outtakes that became Time Of No Reply, and Vorontsova communicates some of that same austerity -- that same disturbing calm. This is about as far from rock guitar patterns as you can get, but any six-string fan can surely recognize that Vorontsova's approach to her instrument is steeped in folk idiom and subtly accomplished. She never loses her poise, her inner sense of rhythm, or her grace, and she is as good a guitar player at eighteen as any young singer-songwriter I've ever heard.
The songs: Built around descending chord patterns that sound foreign, but never unfamiliar. A fragile melody escapes from the chords of the opening track ("Rome", I think it's called -- I am guessing with these based on some light-type words printed across the back of the sleeve); "Love", another minor-chord ballad, alternates between low, muttered phrases, and transparent, fragile held notes on its angelic release. Both are repetitive -- as folk music generally is -- but they're also relatively short, surprisingly propulsive, and consistently compelling. "Picnic", the most aggressive song here, is also the most identifiably Russian -- even without Vorontsova's vocals, this melody and accompaniment would get you halfway to Red Square. "Faberge" is short and luminous, and functions as preparation for the final track: a killer called "Grandfather" with a bleak verse and a gorgeous chorus that swings open like an iron gate. I don't know if Voronsova wrote these songs, or if they're adaptations, or if they're straightforward traditional material. If they're hers, she's a hell of a tunesmith -- if they're not, she's a terrific curator of her own aesthetic choices.
What distinguishes this record from other records of its genre?: I know there's plenty of traditional Russian music, but it's safe to say that the vast majority of it is in Russia. Most critics and other amateur musicologists like to feign a great breadth of multi-culti knowledge, but honestly, this is the closest most of us rockers and folkies are going to get to Moscow spring.
What's not so good?: I can't think of anything to say here. Somebody help me out; knock Julia Vorontsova for something, anything. She's just a kid, we don't want her getting a swelled head. Hmm, I suppose the EP could have been mastered more effectively -- the third track comes in a little too softly, and the reverb bath on the second song could have been better compensated for, too. Man, talk about your minor quibbles. When all you've got to complain about is the mastering, you've just got to give it up to the artist.
Recommended?: I remember back in 2002 I was in Greenpoint before walking to practice, and I went into a Russian juice bar. The guy behind the counter was playing these Eastern European rap records, and they were amazing -- musically innovative, attitudinous, posturing, hypnotic. I stayed in the bar for an hour, just listening to the emcees and wishing I knew what the hell they were saying. Now, I don't usually do that well with instrumental music, and you all know I like to throw stones at abstract art: if it doesn't have words I can follow, I generally want to leave it at the counter and go and put on a Randy Newman record. Julia Vorontsova's music does have words -- they're just not words I understand. Like the salseros and merenguistas in my old neighborhood in Union City, she sings so well that she draws me into her songs -- her universe -- anyway. In so doing, she's managed to accomplish what all my professors could not: she makes me wish I knew Russian.
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: Vorontsova's music is being released through Jersey City-based Abaton Book Company, a small local label that knows a thing or two about startlingly talented teenagers.
Title: We Could Connect Or We Could Not
From: Jersey City. Our town isn't known for chic electronica. Look at the roster over at Uncle Joe's -- it's all brawny, big-shouldered blue-collar rock and roll. Sometimes it seems like we're laboring under the misapprehension that this is still an industrial city. Those are big glass towers over on the waterfront, not stockyards. And every day, a new cosmopolitan restaurant opens downtown. Lismore is certainly not the sound of Jersey City, but they're probably what modern Jersey City should sound like.
Format: Twelve songs, fifty plus minutes. Many of these songs push the five minute barrier.
Fidelity: Very good, very digital. Coming from the three-inch speakers of my crappy Sony boombox (and yes, that's what I listen to your record on -- if you want to be reviewed by an audiophile, look elsewhere), We Could Connect Or We Could Not sounds as crisp, bright and thin as any of the landmarks of mid-nineties living-room electronica. And yes, I am using "thin" as a compliment. Takashi Murakami, Japanese artist, imagines "superflat" as an aesthetic of radical class flexibility and equality. Electronica artists in the go-go nineties attempted to craft soundscapes as flat as Murakami's manga-influenced art. This was cultural production bearing the flatness of a computer screen, technologically advanced, acclerated, deliberately ephemeral. As the Clinton nineties crashed into the meat-and-potatoes Bush years, "superflat" records were replaced by albums that fetishized depth of sound and classic values. Hooverphonic left the critic's shelf, replaced by stuff like Wilco. Anyway, this is all a convoluted way of saying that if you're missing the plastic, hyperelectronic sound of pop music of the boom years -- a sound with no pretense toward two-inch tape realism -- Lismore's got that for you.
Genre: Trip-hop, late night chillout electronica. There's a style of electronic music that's meant for the dance floor, there's a kind for the afterparty crash, and then there's the chic cocktail party soundtracks. Lismore's much too interesting to be simple brunch music, but this isn't a disco record. If you remember Extra Virgin, the magnificent, frosty debut by Olive, you've got a pretty good idea of what We Could Connect Or We Could Not sounds like.
Arrangements: There are two different kinds of Lismore songs: there's the straight electronica numbers like "Tonight", which are almost entirely programmed, and then there's the hypercompressed rock band ravers like "Un Ancien Ami". The rock songs don't sound any more natural than the ones crafted on sequencers, but they do feature live instruments. The usual computer-music tricks are present here, but Lismore also has a taste for the lo-fi, and so they give you cheap Casiotone drums, vocoder, clattering real-time percussion, dime-store analog synth, and ragged, unprocessed six-string. There's much more guitar on We Could Connect Or We Could Not than what's you'd probably expect from an electronica act, Lismore uses prominent electric piano, too. Some of the drum programming -- particularly the stuttering iPod-error part from "Tremolo" -- is jungle influenced; live drums are surprisingly straightforward. Penelope Trappes sounds much more comfortable in front of straight beats, but you could probably say that about every singer on earth.
What's this record about?: Like Hooverphonic's Geike Arnaert, Lismore frontwoman Penelope Trappes sings lyrics that feel like they're in translation. Arnaert's aren't either, but she has her status as a Belgian citizen to hide behind. Trappes just seems like an American with a funny sense of diction. "This Time", a simple statement of desire, has a verse so fragmentary and allusive that it positively resists examination. It makes perfect sense if you're following along, but if you try to transcribe the words on paper and read them back, they'll probably make your head swim. As a trip-hop auteur, Trappes feels it incumbent to pose as a pococurantist: in many of these songs, the narrators are positively fainting with dramatic ennui. The scenarios are invariably romantic, but Trappes labors to deaden herself to emotion and become more impassive in the face of the inevitable tragedy to come. "I don't like this feeling/hope is just a game", she sings on the torchy "Cut", daring herself to step outside of her introspection and melancholy, but certain that the alternative couldn't be anything good. The doors are shut once again and extravagance is lost on the creepy "One Room House"; here, there are no windows in the walls, and nobody around to witness the narrator losing the thread. Behind the studied control and the jaded dismissals, these women are quietly losing their minds. Their language frays, their sentences deteriorate, their utterances become smaller, more desperate. "Turn down the noise", begs Trappes on "Finest Hour". It's a love song, sure, but is anybody listening?
The singer: Trappes is probably the least blues-oriented of any singer working this territory -- she won't bend notes, and she'd probably sooner give out a heavy-metal shriek than pose as ethnic. It's a commendable decision: this chanteuse knows her way around the jazz scales, but she feels no need to show off her expertise. Refreshingly, there's very little Billie Holliday in her delivery. She can be showy and theatrical, but never Broadway; alluring, but never sultry. She coos, purrs, whispers, lilts gracefully from note to note. Yet there's poison on those lips: this sugarcube is spiked with something nasty, trippy, mind-altering. She's the second Jersey City singer I feel the need to compare to Grace Slick. But while Boomslang's Karen Davis recalls the most stentorian moments of Slick's delivery, Trappes reminds me of the diffuse, acid-drenched, scalpel-sharp commentary of "Triad" and "Lather".
The band: Stephen Hindman is an extremely winning guitar player. He likes scratching out chord patterns and riffs and compressing them so much that he can stick them in the corner of the mix, or -- as he does on the noisy "Un Ancien Ami" -- saturating the track with a digital guitar tone and allowing it to dominate the song. Hindman (the former DJ Kingsize, for local drum 'n' bass fans with big scorecards) often puts together perfectly manicured electronic backdrops, and then devilishly scribbles all over them with his sandpaper-rough six-string. He likes letting the guitar track bleed over the outro -- listen to the drugged strumming at the end of "Blood Bank" or the gorgeous bed of acoustic that concludes "Finest Hour". He does it to remind us that it's there; that he's going for a hybrid of the synthetic and the spontaneous-erratic. Which isn't to say he ever lets you forget that he's running his guitar tracks through his Mac. Many of the tracks are fed into the digital Cuisinart and chopped into pieces, just because. These guys might want to rock, but naturalists they ain't. Live bass and drums are played acceptably but unspectacularly by Peter Kaufmann and Claude Coleman: on "This Time" and "Cut", they capture some of the rainty-night grandeur I associate with Moloko's landmark "Could've Been, Should've Been". Coleman, a member of Ween, seems to be in about forty thousand bands, all of whom want you to know that they feature a member of Ween. As far as I can tell, Coleman is keeping the Ween name alive; better than Quebec did, anyway. His tone leaves a little something to be desired -- it can get obtrusive -- but his parts are always tasteful.
The songs: "Tremolo" and the more predictable "Tonight" are the most far-out and junglized pieces here. The mounting, modulated synthesizers of "Tonight" will be familiar to anybody who has logged any time in a disco, but on "Tremelo", Hindman gives Trappes an intricate paper snowflake of a track to sing over. Spiked with sudden stops and reversals, "Tremelo" refuses to settle into any conventional structure. Harmonically, it's tricky, too -- the melody and chords flirt with resolution, but dance away from it, allowing the vocodered voices on the choruses to deliver the hook. We Could Connect Or We Could Not never again reaches the experimental heights of the kickoff track -- its wild, stuttering rhythmic variations aren't even approximated elsewhere -- but much of the rest of the record shares its sense of adventure and complexity. But while it's fun to listen to Hindman and Trappes surmount musical obstacles and craft imaginative tracks, what's most impressive about Lismore is their stealth balladry skill. With "One Room Home" and "Finest Hour", the group delivers back-to-back downtempo showstoppers. Neither are power ballads, exactly, but they're traditional songs with memorable and unusual melodies, and they both give Trappes a chance to work her magic.
What differentiates this record from others like it? The amount of guitar and analog instrumentation, the emotional imbalance and sympathetic neediness of the narrators, and the duo's ability to turn out big pop ballads that don't sound at all discontinuous with the rest of the project. The balladry doesn't dumb down Lismore, either: they're every bit as challenging as the rest of the record.
What's not so good?: Lismore runs out of ideas before We Could Connect Or We Could Not ends. The last three tracks (four, if you count the amusing but interlude-ish "Blood Bank") aren't up to the high standard set by the first seven. "Aika Miura" goes for seductive but ends up soporific, and "Tonight" rehashes many of the electronica cliches that the rest of the album works so hard to avoid. Closer "Angelize" recaptures some of the experimental vigor of the lead track, but doesn't add much that we haven't heard before. For me, the album effectively ends with "Come Undone" -- the rest of An Uncertain Missed Connection is pleasant, but not essential.
Recommended?: Has any movement in the history of mankind ever gone downhill faster than trip-hop did? When trip-hop first established itself as a viable subgenre, every album that was released felt groundbreaking. It didn't matter how you felt about Maxinquaye, Portishead or Do You Like My Tight Sweater?; the sheer amount of invention that went into those albums made them formidable, impossible to dismiss. Two years later, you had in their place crapola like Morcheeba and Esthero -- brainless acts importing the style and some of the sound, but completely evacuating the substance. The great tragedy is that audiences didn't seem to mind, or even notice: the same people dancing, or chilling out, to Moloko in '95 were happily grooving to the Sneaker Pimps in '97. The death blow came shortly thereafter, as a massive wave of singer-songwriters, desperate to update their sound, started importing trip-hop tropes, and fusing their otherwise traditional songs to these found beats. These days, fetishistically replete realism is the fashion, and singer-songwriters don't try to get funky anymore. Those who did got buried in the great trip-hop crash of '99; if it wasn't as spectacular as the come-down of the NASDAQ, it was still pretty intense for everybody involved. Every now and again, a new singer-songwriter will come along with a trip-hop groove, but they immediately feel as anachronistic as the desperate salesmen peddling worthless shares of former Flatiron District start-ups. But Lismore aren't singer-songwriters. Some of these songs may lean toward traditional compositional logic, but don't be fooled: this duo does authentic electronic music. I'm glad they do. I'd like to see a revival of this sort of thing. I'd like us to have another crack at it, and I would like to have it done right. No Mercury Prize for Roni Size's indisciplined ramblings, no overrated Everything But The Girl crossovers: instead, some back-to-the-top extrapolations from the experimental, intellectual template handed to us by Massive Attack, Tricky, Portishead, and especially Moloko.
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: We Could Connect Or We Could Not is available through Cult Hero Records. Lismore has a site, too: it contains, among other things, video clips shot at Uncle Joe's. The performances there are much more "rock" than the versions on the record, but they're still recognizably electronic. See, even our brawniest local bars can make room for the sound of superflat. We're urban sophisticates after all.
Title: i
From: The Lower East Side. Stephin Merritt's the luckiest guy on the Lower East Side, because he can put out a side-project album of coughing and sneezing, and he can count on local critics falling all over themselves to praise it as visionary. But this isn't a side-project -- this is the Magnetic Fields, center ring. And that means it demands more attention than what you'd give the Gothic Archies, or the Eban & Charley score.
Format: Fourteen song LP. The songs are presented in alphabetical order, and all of them start with the letter "I". This might lead you to believe that Merritt has a comparable album for every letter of the alphabet -- and considering the compositional landslide that was 69 Love Songs, you might believe that "j", "k", and the rest of the 26 are sitting in a dresser drawer somewhere. But of course he doesn't: Merritt's more inclined to write "I" songs because he's a habitual first-person narrator. Even the alphabetical sequencing is something of a conceit, since the album is flawlessly sequenced -- fast songs after slow ones, minor key after major, and a letter-perfect closer.
Fidelity: Magnificently-recorded indiepop. I doubt the program director at Z100 would agree with me here, but I think that Magnetic Fields records sound better than almost anything recorded these days. Instruments are given the exact amount of reverb necessary, the synths and strings are bright but never overwhelming, and best of all, the backing vocals are otherworldly, but always intelligible. All of the twinkly stuff is madly effective, too.
Genre: Indiepop, synthpop (but not very much of it), Brill Building aesthetics, show tunes. Merritt often draws inspiration from pre-rock sources and forties soundtrack music -- he's more likely to evoke Richard Rodgers than Nick Drake or the Beatles. I have also always thought of Merritt as a stealth Springsteen revivalist, but more on that later.
Arrangements: On records like The Charm Of The Highway Strip and Get Lost, The Magnetic Fields presented themselves as a synthpop act, getting whatever mileage they could out of cheap old electronic instruments. 69 Love Songs was loaded with synthesizer, too, but much of the drum and instrument programming felt indifferent. I got the sense there that Merritt -- a notorious non-naturalist -- was getting uncharacteristically frustrated with beatboxes and Casiotone. Perhaps he was; i uses synths for texture, but pushes them to the margins in favor of dramatic soap-opera piano, banjo, copious string settings, standing bass, brushed drums, ukulele, delicate electric lead lines, and crooned vocals. With the electronics stripped away, we're left with Merritt's Broadway turn: spotlight soliloquy after production number, and gestures aside to the orchestra pit. Songs like "Is That What They Used To Call Love", "In An Operetta", and "I Wish I Had An Evil Twin" matches typical thirties witticisms to melodies and arrangements deliberately meant to evoke Great White Way romanticism. It's as if Merritt heard Colin Meloy and the Decemberists, and thought to himself, "hey, I was meant for the stage, too!" If the result is often more "Shot With His Own Gun" than Cole Porter, Merritt's expansive knowledge of musical history is usually enough to get him to the finish line.
What's this record about?: Artfully-constructed love songs are Merritt's stock in trade: he's uses a succinct, economical address, copious internal rhyme, and percise diction to keep you smiling throughout his records. He's a witty guy, and always has been. But i doesn't feel like love songs 70 through 83 -- it's a separate project, with separate aspirations. My deep suspicion is that Merritt has always been trying to make Tunnel Of Love -- or an updated, androgynous version of it -- and here, I think he's succeeded. He wants to communicate those haunted suspicions of the heart, that Spectorian boardwalk longing, the pithy, literary short stories of heartbreak and faith, those filmic references, those wide-angle portrayals and emotional freeze-frames, that footlight and greasepaint intoxication, that strip-mall earnestness. By distilling the wild romanticism (not to mention the grand theatrical homoeroticism) at the heart of Springsteen's project from the Turnpike bombast, Merritt has become one of the few writers capable of extending and refining the Boss's vision. I know you're probably thinking that music as fey as the Magnetic Fields could never be appealing to a standard blue-collar Springsteen fan, but that's to ignore the massive gay following that recognized in "Born To Run", "Tougher Than The Rest", "Racing In The Streets", and the rest of it, an implicit recognition of rough trade and male bonding. Merritt, to his infinite credit, addresses Magnetic Fields love songs to both boys and girls -- he does this with little fanfare, as though it's a natural consequence of life, which of course, it is. Yet he can be political, too: he came out in favor of gay marriage in the liner notes to 69 Love Songs, and he's always been a progressive thinker. So while a song as universal as "It's Only Time" can be heard as a statement of commitment, it's more likely that when he gets to the refrain, you'll catch a different significance. "Marry me", he sings, as straightforwardly as he can -- and in so doing, he creates the year's most touching topical song. Somewhere, the Boss surely approves.
The singer: I have, at times, loathed Merritt's vocals. His is a low baritone, and he's prone toward exaggerating its deepness. Surely self-consciousness can be blamed, but what's to excuse the awful Johnny Cash impersonations that stagger prior Magnetic Fields records? On 69 Love Songs Merritt ducked the issue by bringing in, Jacques Brel Is Alive And Living-style, four singers even more irritating than he. Well, perhaps he didn't see it that way, but I sure did. Anyway, i finds Merritt taking the reins and discharging all of the tracks himself, and instead of "singing", he actually tries singing. Of all of the experiments he's ever conducted in a long recording career dotted with experiments, this one may be his single most successful. Merritt, stripped of his desire to artfully approximate the vocals of others, turns out to be a warm and engaging performer -- a little tuneless in places, but always conversational. The sheer number of would-be show tunes on the album probably forced him to take his vocals more seriously: even an unreconstructed card like Merritt must have realized that the deliberately over-the-top "Pretty Girl Is Like..." approach was unsustainable over the course of an entire full-length. Instead, the frankness of the crooning here seems less like arch metacommentary and more like sympathetic devotion to the Broadway aesthetic. I can dig it. And i becomes the first Magnetic Fields album where the vocals are a legitimate positive.
The band: Capable, but fundamentally irrelevant. Like most legit songsmiths, Merritt is losing interest in textures and sonic excursions as he ages. There's nothing poorly played here, and the banjo in particular sounds awesome, but then everything on i sounds awesome. Performances are built to bear the weight of the harmonic and melodic structure.
The songs: Several rock critics, including Jesse Fuchs and Glenn McDonald pointed out that 69 Love Songs was a compendium of twentieth-century styles; a millenial, retrospective work that marked the definitive closure of an era. That might seem like a lot to ask of a pop singer, but Merritt has the erudition to back it up: when he attempts to write in Brill Building or Tin Pan Alley style, he's heard enough records from those sources to do it fairly and respectfully. Merritt is, fundamentally, a great restorer; a firm traditionalist in a thousand different traditions at once. He can read genre conventions quickly, penetrate the semiotic code with insight, and approximate those conventions and codes with skill. He's also congenitally, and cleverly, referential: when he subtly folds "Someday My Prince Will Come" into "I Die", or evokes "Don't Sit Under The Apple Tree" during "It's Only Time", those connections enrich both the source text and the reinterpretation. i is loaded with such moments.
What differentiates this record from others like it? I saw Assassins at Studio 54 a few weeks ago, and came away impressed as always by Sondheim's score, but again disappointed by his choice of collaborator. He could use a writing partner who brought a little more theoretical (not to mention political) sophistication to the stage. Who better, I now think to myself, than Stephin Merritt, the author of the Gravity's Rainbow of indiepop, and confirmed appreciator of the Great White Way? You'll never find a contemporary pop album more indebted to the greats of American musical theatre than i, and you couldn't find an established theatrical composer more interested in modern rock and pop experimentation than Sondheim. Let's get these crazy kids together.
What's not so good?: At least one song on i -- the semi-absurd "Irma" -- is a piece of storytelling. But for the most part, Merritt sticks to his pattern: first-person narratives, quick, pithy verses with wry commentaries, clever rhymes, one-liners, and singalong choruses. It always works and it's never less than smart, but for me, that's not the point. For a writer so willing to try on different hats when constructing songs, Merritt can be shockingly formulaic when it comes to his lyrics. I'd like to see him take a few chances there.
Recommended?: Fifteen years into the Magnetic Fields story, I'd given up on Merritt releasing an album that wasn't rife with filler tracks. 69 Love Songs juxtaposed some of the greatest pop compositions of the twentieth century with other songs and performances that were, to be frank, total garbage. I recognize that was part of his point, and he said so in "Book Of Love": "some of it is transcendental/some of it is just plain dumb". That's fair. But I think Merritt has had the tendency to go a little heavy on the "just plain dumb" half of that equation. (My Critics Poll voters disagreed, giving the three-album set top honors for 1999.) i smooths out the experience somewhat: there's nothing here that scales the heights of the best of the 69, but there's also nothing that would cause you to rush to your CD player and press the "skip" button. Not every song works perfectly -- there are still a few bumps in the road. Yet by insisting on a unprecedented level of quality control, and by singing everything in his own plaintive voice, Merritt allows i to gather something that has eluded many of his prior efforts: emotional momentum. By keeping the listener firmly within the experience of the record, he can build to the more complicated pieces in the second half, and the revelatory final track.
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: Stephin Merritt once said in an interview that any record that moves more than 6,000 copies has tapped into some fundamental social conservatism. I think he's absolutely right about that; if anything, I think the number is lower. Magnetic Fields albums sell more than 6,000 copies for sure -- it might give Merritt some pause, but I doubt he's returning the royalty checks. At any rate, you can find them at most good record stores. If your town's spot doesn't stock Magnetic Fields music, you can try Merritt's website, House Of Tomorrow.
Title: Pork
From: Union County, New Jersey. Not quite urban, not quite posh. This is strip highway music, not tenement rock, or gated-community rock.
Format: This is a reissue of a 1991 indie LP that was given only an extremely limited cassette release. Interest in MC Dufus's writing has gathered slow momentum since then, and culminated in a digital transfer of one of the few remaining tapes.
Fidelity: Terrible. Pork was recorded on an analog Tascam four-track by a guy who didn't really know how to use it, and then output to crappy cassette masters. Mastering happened only after more than a decade of continuous play and/or gathering dust in closets. Beyond that, instruments drift in and out, the samples don't always take, vocals are either overdriven or too soft, and tape hiss and decay is apparent, and occasionally oppressive. Pork puts the "lo" in lo-fi.
Genre: Lo-fidelity/experimental. But Pork is probably best classified by its literary genre: this is satire. Not formal satire, because that would require sound-fidelity and mimicry, and MC Dufus doesn't have the patience for that. This is freewheeling and mercurial satire, stomping from subject to subject with irreverence and total disregard (and implied disdain) for convention.
Arrangements: Much of Pork is built from analog samples, laid down manually by pressing the black tabs on a stompbox delay. If that sounds rhythmically imprecise, well, it is -- but for the most part, MC Dufus and friends keep the grooves going. The sample selection helps, because he bites here from only the most propulsive new-wave records: Elvis Costello's "Lover's Walk" and "Temporary Modern", "Natural's Not In It" by Gang Of Four, Donald Fagen's "New Frontier". Sampler shenanigans and odd reverberations throw shadows and weird gel-lights on the backing tracks, and the Dufus runs almost all of the vocals through the Echo Plus, allowing for some extreme modulation and pitch manipulations. He loves to throw them in mid-song, and manually oscillate the lead vocal from speaker to speaker. Basically if you give him a knob, he's going to twist it; this isn't music for people who like to sit still. The live instruments here -- guitar and synth on "The Hill", "She's Permanent", and "The Pulaski Skyway", treated harmonica on "Always Open" -- are so puny as to be near-parodic. They aren't. But mix primacy is always given to the hooting, snarling, howling, groaning, and disgusting tongue-twizzling lip-smacking backing vocals. "So In Love" (an a cappella number nobody will every mistake for Bobby McFerrin, sung as a duet with Hallie Leighton) "Nature Endowed Me", and the brain-frying "Theme From 'Pork'" are built almost entirely from insane analog-delay voice experiments. The great exception is "L. Ron of Melvingbone", a bizarre stab at dream-pop: babbled and read lyrics, whispers, a wall of processed guitar, snaky analog synthesizer, and a sudden ending with the raving Dufus demanding an explanation from his collaborators.
What's this record about?: As I said before, this is satire, but not formal critique. There's a little bit of making fun of pop conventions here, but for the most part, mocking something as trivial as musical trends is totally beneath the Dufus. It's human relationships he's sending up -- the very notion of sexual attraction and romantic love. The album opens with an absurd sexual boast -- "my love is like a natural thermostat" -- and gets weirder from there. To MC Dufus, man is matter, and the idea of sexualizing the human body, with its irregularities and its excretions, its corporality and pork, is worth commentary if not outright ridicule. By extenstion, the writer sees the relationships founded on attraction and romance as similarly ridiculous: like Joseph Heller, he wants you to know you're holding hands with a pile of bones. To the uninitiated, the lyrical emphasis on body parts, contortions, and odors might seem juvenile. But if the associations in Beck's lyrics often dissipate on close examination, there's always more to MC Dufus's writing than there seems to be at first blush. Sub-themes abound: Dufus seems to argue that all political and religious disputes devolve into violent entertainment (not that he really complains), and views economic transactions as a kind of sublimated violence. "Cancer sticks sucked down like coke/Marion Barry ain't no joke/he's the prophet of the next group of leaders/they're all really funny, and they all smoke cheebah", insists the Dufus on "Ms. Accardo's Getting Married", before skidding into feral screams. History has borne out the spirit, if not the letter.
The singer: It's not unusual for bands -- even indie bands -- to blow most of their budget on vocal production costs. Producers insist on certain microphones, specific compression equipment, and spend hour after hour comping takes, pitch correcting, and slathering just the right amount of effect on the lead singer's tracks. But MC Dufus, armed with nothing but a SM58 and a crappy Boss guitar sampler, proves that immensely effective singing and rapping can be recorded under the worst conditions possible. Part of this is the Dufus's performing ability: the voices and inflections he uses on "Theme From 'Pork'" and "Ms. Accardo's Getting Married" make immediate resonance, and are worthy of any cartoon actor or spoken-word oddball. But when he uses his sampler, it's almost always to wildly successful effect. The slapback on "Ms. Accardo" is really chilling, and the distortions and pitch-bends in "Nature Endowed Me" are stomach-lacerating and vertiginous. When he chooses to sing, he does so in an open, honest, and winsome voice that somehow manages to communicate innocence and enthusiasm even when singing lines like "vestibules of rotting corpses/she likes the smell of dirty horses" (from "She's Permanent", the closest thing here to a normal song). The Dufus gets a big hand from Leighton, who functions simultaneously as a confessor and a straight-woman: her pro-quality singing contrasts brilliantly with his raving, and reinforces the record's central conceit. She represents the disembodied romantic ideal, he croons roughly from the perspective of the gremlins inside our skin. When she tries to lead him, as on "Pork Is Out Of Style", he demurs and impishly sings his own interpretation instead. By the end, she's cooing out his demented lines, giggling a little, but still singing about burning onion fields with a sultriness that points out its own absurdity. The twisted logic is communicable, it infects everything.
The music: The instrumental performances are larval (to use a word MC Dufus would probably be comfortable with) at best. "She's Permanent" features an acoustic track that sounds as if the guitarrist had just picked up the instrument a few weeks before recording -- which in fact he had. The synths on "L. Ron" aren't much better, but at least they don't wash in and out of focus. Yet Al Simmons's guitar on "The Hill" is at least bar-band quality, and stands out as jarringly competent. MC Dufus does his best work when determining how to situate samples: he's never content to sit back and rhyme over an unaltered reference. On "Always Open", he flips the "Secondary Modern" groove into a minor key; on "Ms. Accardo", he spikes the Gang Of Four riff with wild exclamations from the Firesign Theatre. There's nothing so sacred that it can't be fucked with. In fact, nothing is sacred until it's fucked with.
The songs: Pork contains four sung compositions, three rhymed pieces, one off-the-wall cover, and six other tracks that can only be evaluated as experimental pieces. On that score, they succeed brilliantly: if you've ever heard anything like the synapse-frying "Theme From 'Pork'", contact me immediately. Straight songs are rudimentary verse-chorus blues-rock, simple but often inspired. The bass guitar on "The Pulaski Skyway" sounds like the ramblings of a drugged tuba player, yet somehow there's a majesty to it; it's sluggish and meandering, like the Hackensack on a hot summer night. "The Hill", a blues workout, is the most conventional composition here, and has the most logocentric writing, but the vocal, predictably enough, is muted, and it's next to impossible to figure out what the Dufus is saying. No such problem with the raps -- they're front and center, and there it's the backing tracks that seem barely present. The lyricism is almost absurdly dextrous: associative, wide-ranging, referential, aphoristic, vile, poetic.
What differentiates this record from others in its genre? Four-track weirdo experimentation is a crowded field -- every high school in New Jersey has its Dean and Gene Ween, guys holed up in a bedroom screwing around with an effects processor. But MC Dufus isn't a sound-to-tape junkie; he's a writer with fixations and neuroses, a cracked and often brilliant personal logic, and a yen to share his dementia with the rest of the world. There has been no attempt made here to conform to any professional or conventional standard of music-making. Let me repeat that, for emphasis: There has been no attempt made here to conform to any professional or conventional standard of music-making. It's not that MC Dufus doesn't listen to the radio or pay attention to popular culture; obviously he does, since Pork is lousy with topical references to pro singers and entertainers. It makes it all the more astonishing, then -- a writer steeped in pop traditions and recording standards who nonetheless proceeds with total disregard for any of them. Does he feel they're unnecessary? Overly pedantic? Just downright stupid? MC Dufus doesn't say. But on days when the entire catalogue of popular music seems to speak with the same monotonous voice, here is a legitimate alternative to spin, and go nuts with.
What's not so good?: See "fidelity". Pork sounds horrible, and there's no way to sugarcoat that. If you have even the slightest intolerance for sonically-challenged albums, run in panic from this one.
Recommended?: I've been tempted, in this review, to grab lines out of their context. But it's impossible -- even at its most aphoristic, Pork resists pull-quoting. The lyricism may take you a few minutes to begin to internalize and process, but by the time you reach the "Theme From 'Pork'", you ought to be thoroughly interpolated. And if you can listen to that towering rant and remain unaffected by its persuasive insanity, you're probably too normal to be getting anything worthwhile out of this page.
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: Since recording Pork, MC Dufus has been difficult to pin down. He's played supporting roles in a few bands, but his true skills are as a frontman, ideologue, and lyricist. It's anybody's guess why he never followed up Pork: it couldn't have been taxing to make, nor did it get a wide enough release for him to feel like his professional ambitions (whatever they possibly could have been) had been frustrated by rejection. He does still write -- though almost never to music, experimental or otherwise -- and I've been trying to convince him to read his poems at the Waterbug open mike in Jersey City. I think that crew might respond well to the barbed syllogisms. In the meantime, he's got a tiny toehold on the web, and it is possible to get in touch with him through the e-mail link on that site.
Title: The Things You Miss
From: Philadelphia, but with a strong Jersey connection.
Format: It's a six-song EP, and the first legitimate release by this duo. Method & Result consists of the two principals from Blinder (Megan & Mason Wendell). I liked Blinder, but this is a huge improvement. Blinder was a rock and roll band, and the electric rhythm guitar was noisy and didn't add much to the songs. Getting rid of it feels like a liberation.
Fidelity: pretty high, for an indie release. Commercial radio quality it is not, but The Things You Miss sounds pretty damned good.
Genre: Synth-pop/singer-songwriter. The emphasis is more on Megan Wendell's voice and perspectives than on the synthesizer textures. At heart this is a singer-songwriter record.
Arrangements: Machine drums, electric bass (some of which sounds fretless enough to evoke Sade), scratchy and untreated guitar in a few places, and lots and lots of digital synthesizer. Megan Wendell runs her voice through some extreme but recognizable filters and effects. The drum programming gets frantic, but never achieves breakbeat velocity. Imagine a more communicative, less experimental version of The Blood Group, and you're on the right track.
What's this record about?: Relationships. Megan Wendell's songs are missives sent to love objects. In keeping with recent Jersey tradition, the sequence of songs traces the development of a relationship; "Party List" explores the initial encounter, "No One's Ever What They Seem" about the confusion and insecurity of new discovery; "I Will Not Demand What I'm Worth" is an ambivalent mid-relationship exploration; "Safety Scissors" an impassioned, metaphoric, but unmistakable downer; and "Everything Old Is New Again" says... well, you know. Wendell is very intelligent and her narrators are, too -- while their observations are sharp, they're never anything that a bright teenage listener couldn't identify with. T
he singer: Freed from the arrangement difficulties of Blinder, Wendell's voice is allowed to soar. But while she can be expansive, she's not Bjork -- content almost always takes precedence over form. She chooses the strenuous-yet-thoughtful words-first approach I associate most closely with Alanis Morissette. At times she communicates the studied smallness of Laura MacFarlane from Ninety-Nine. These are both compliments, by the way; Morissette and MacFarlane are both fine singers, you mooks.
The band: The instrumental performances are unobtrusive and generally excellent. The addition of a humble electric guitar to "I Will Not Demand What I'm Worth" is a nice touch. Synthesizer sounds are usually stock, but never uninteresting.
The songs: Traditional. The Wendells like verse-chorus structure, and it's the framework of all of these compositions. (The exception is the instrumental track, but even that one could easily be reintepreted on acoustic guitar.) Method & Result's departures from expectation are more modal than experimental. Megan Wendell likes to finish phrases on unresolved notes, and harmonies are rarely sung or played thirds; in "I Will Not Demand What I'm Worth", she channels Hejira-era Joni Mitchell with a sophisticated vocal break. But she doesn't monkey around with dissonance or recitation. Nor do the songs have lengthy outros or instrumental sections.
What distinguishes this record from other indie records in its genre?: Megan Wendell presents a fully-formed, consistent character and attitude. She maintains the same narrative voice throughout -- you could drop a line from "No One's Ever What They Seem" into "Safety Scissors" and it wouldn't be jarring. The presentation of ideas is professional, accomplished, polished.
What's not so good?: There's a moment or two in every song where Wendell breaks character with a showy, big-voiced belt. It's not that it doesn't sound good -- it does -- it's that it knocks the listener out of the story. The instrumental track is pretty, but without the presence of a narrator, it drifts uncomfortably close to Enya territory. The final track is a little messy by the standards set on other songs. I would like to see Megan Wendell write from a perspective other than first-person; everybody does first person, and Wendell is too imaginative to do what everybody does.
Recommended?: Enthusiastically. On my Critics Poll form for 2003, I predicted that Philadelphia would be the location of the next big indie rock boom. Method & Result are a big part of that prediction.
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: It’s a co-release from The Losing Blueprint and KiraKira Disc. Or just go here.
Title: He Keeps Silent And Sacrifices Himself
From: Mezzanine~C14 is a Jersey City band, but this was recorded in Williamsburg -- and it sounds that way. I don't know how the engineer handled the rhythm tracks, but I bet the drums weren't close-miked. This is a remarkably organic, live-sounding album.
Format: He Keeps Silent And Sacrifices Himself is a full-length: ten songs and an extra something-or-other. While it feels substantial, the album flies by in a New York minute.
Fidelity: Surprisingly high. For an album that gives the impression that the group hung a couple of microphones from the rafters of their practice studio and pressed "record", these mixes are never imbalanced. There is sludge and murk here, but it's extremely clearsounding sludge and murk.
Genre: Fans of Shellac and other Albini projects will recognize this as post-hardcore. Others will call it hard rock. One thing is for sure: this was recorded at a deafening volume, and you're expected to play it at the same. Listen to it with the lights out and you might just scare the hell out of yourself.
Arrangements: No wall of guitars here -- this is power trio music. One electric six-string, one electric bass, one kit, and three musicians going at it as hard as they can.
What's this record about?: Murderers, arsonists, rats in the walls, victims in pain, grown men behaving badly. When Will Walker's characters aren't in mortal peril, chances are they're inflicting harm on somebody else. This is a bleak world illuminated by dull red light; a threat lurking in every shadow and blood spattered in every corridor. Think of the stance taken on Atomizer, and substitute some good old fashioned Jersey resentment and fury for Big Black's midwestern hopelessness. Even at their most dissolute, strung-out and degenerate, there's a fighting spirit to Mezzanine~C14 -- and that might be the most frightening thing about them.
The singer: Walker screams like a man on a torture rack. He's self-possessed, though, and he might be enjoying the pain a little too much: he's under control even when disgorging his lungs. While it would be inaccurate to say he ever sounds vulnerable, he does have more emotional range than most vocalists working this territory. As any degenerate knows, there are many shades of fury, outrage and debauchery. Walker covers them all.
The band: Solid, tight, muscular. Mezzanine~C14 enjoy their occasion al mathy breaks and ominous buildups, but for the most part, they keep four on the floor and discharge their songs in a rush of adrenaline and agression. This is the kind of group that compels reviewers to use words like "blurt" and "blast". The bass is metallic, overdriven, and played with the obsessive relentlessness of a feeding wolf; at times, you'll swear you hear strings snap. The guitar is treated with the requisite pre-amp distortion, and slashes like a dull, rusty knife.
The songs: Inconsequential. In music like this, songs are exercises; platforms for the performances and for the disturbing stories. There are some non-accidental melodies here, but they're rarely carried by the singer -- what's more, they're almost never the building blocks for the track. Mezzanine~C14 paints in rhythm, sound, sweat, and ghastly imagery. If you require your indie rock to sound like James Mercer's record collection, this is not for you.
What distinguishes this record from other indie records like it?: He Keeps Silent And Sacrifices Himself is a genre exercise. Its appeal comes from its excellence within the formal parameters of post-hardcore and Albini-influenced music. Everything here is discharged with uncommon dedication and intelligence.
What's not so good?: Wilson is such an interesting lyricist that I often wish he'd stop shouting for a moment and make himself clear. I know that howling like a monster is part of the project, but some of these lines are shredded to the point of incomprehensibility. That's not mysterious or ominous; that's just a missed opportunity. Bands that don't possess an interesting perpective sometimes garble the lyrics on purpose to hide them from the listener. But much of Mezzanine~C14's project is bound up in their paranoid worldview. Enunciation is not just a value for Pavarotti. It helps everybody with something to say.
Recommended?: Not to grandma, that's for sure. But if you are looking for a bone-shaking representation of the Jersey industrial wastelands, it's hard to imagine you could find a better one than this.
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: Mezzanine~C14 puts out their records through the Breakeven collective, a non-profit indie based in Philly. Closer to home, you can find these guys at zip code 07306, 870 West Side Avenue -- the most Mezzanine C-fourteeny street in Jersey City.
Title: This Is A Stickup
From: Northern New Jersey.
Format: Full-length LP. The Milwaukees keep it old-school by throwing an imaginary side break in the middle of their tracklisting.
Fidelity: Terrific. You could play "Lighthouse Signals" or "A Harpoon" on K-ROCK, and it would sound as good, if not better, than most of the rest of the set. Now, the Milwaukees are a great-sounding rock band. But some of the credit here has to go to producer John Agnello, who's had some experience helping ambitious indies (Chavez, Errortype:11, American Standard) achieve a big sound.
Genre: If you hang around New Jersey long enough, you'll hear people refer to the Milwaukees as an emo band. While Dylan Clark's vocals are undoubtably Dionysian, this quartet writes in a slightly older hard-rock tradition. This isn't to begrudge them their emo following: if you like emo, you're going to dig this. But The Milwaukees are more Black Sheets Of Rain than Mineral, more early-nineties uncompromising college rock than Chris Carraba. This group is far too artful to indulge in primal release: theirs is a structured vision.
Arrangements: Two distorted guitars -- one that usually keeps time with the bass drum, and another spinning arpeggios and riffs over the top of the mix -- huge, muscular bass, and slammed rock drums you can feel in your chest. Clark and Jeff Nordstedt add tasteful organ and piano here and there (the plaintive intro to "Jet Clipper" might remind you of the piano work on The Meadowlands), but This Is A Stickup is most certainly a guitar rock album.
What's this record about?: Clark is an extremely impressionistic lyricist, but his writing is internally consistent and rule-governed. His songs are written from romantic pain; he's always choking, shaking, or trembling. Elsewhere, the narrators are cutting, smashing, screaming, escaping, pulling back, burning the film. It's raining. Yes, homie likes gerunds -- these are active and present emotional states he's trying to convey. Clark ratchets up the intensity by writing the disaster, song after song. Frequently the danger is metaphorical, but it's always there; in deserted basements, on frozen lakes, on wet asphalt. In "Angel With A Knife", the he's tracked through bloodstains, in "Madicine Hat", he's taking cyanide; "Call An Ambulance" could be a drunk-driving scenario. Throughout, Clark returns to a few stark and consistent images: paintings, the beach, broken glass, air travel. The songs are internally referential, and the focus shifts like the target of a restless but intense photographer -- the lighthouse signals in the third verse of "Jet Clipper" become the subject of the next song. Three songs later, those flashing lights mark the approach of a squad car. Clark respects the parameters of his own vision, and never breakes charater -- the result is an elliptical, hallucinatory, and self-contained cycle of compositions.
The singer: Dylan Clark is probably the most radio-ready singer in modern Jersey rock, and that includes those Jersey rockers who are already on the radio. Clark possesses an enormous voice, and for much of this album, he sings at the top of it -- rendering hurricane-force performances that all the guitar thunder can't lay a glove on. Notably, he rarely screams: even when he's bellowing his lungs out, he's tuneful, melodic, in time. Like his lyrical approach, Clark's singing only appears to be suffused with mad abandon. Look harder, and you can see a master of ceremonies -- always under control.
The band: The rhythm guitar chugs along in perfect lockstep with the drums; the lead instrument thinks rhythmic precision first, and showiness only after that. The Milwaukees are tight. Bassist Dave Post operates brilliantly within the tight framework: never content to lay back and let the song come to him, he picks his spots and contributes melodic explorations that work perfectly with the guitars and vocals. You can forget about straight beats when drummer Brian Stoor is playing -- he's about as likely to put a standard rock four-on-the-floor as the Milwaukees are to put out a record of flute instrumentals. Yet no matter where he places the backbeat, he drives the band with a firm hand. Again, there is fury here, but no recklessness -- this is a well-wrought project. Check out the outro/bridge from "Berlin Wall" for a perfect example of a hard-rock group operating at the very highest level.
The songs: Dylan Clark's internal metronome ticks in three. For a hard rock band, the Milwaukees are always ready to waltz. Other songs trot out more unusual rhythms: "Jet Clipper", "Jazz Is". I hesitate to specify the time-signatures, because I think it's more a matter of feel than design: when a band is this tight, they can shave off a measure here and there without worrying whether they're going to lose the groove. Even the songs in four place rhythmic emphasis on intermediate downbeats -- you could count out "Angel With A Knife", but you'd be working against Stoor to do so. Nordstedt is a characteristic guitarrist with a nice harmonic signature -- like many modern rockers, he loves suspended chords, but he's picky about where and when he chooses to resolve them. The Milwaukees know when to leave a melody, or a song, unresolved.
What differentiates this record from others in its genre? I don't know if This Is A Stickup is a play for mainstream radio acceptance. Bringing in John Agnello as producer and further tightening an project that was already taut could be seen as blatant moves on the charts. But then again, all of the Milwaukees' propensities were aiming in this direction anyway. In many ways, this is not an underground band: they're not about chaos at all, they're extremely structured, ordered, logical. The only difference between This Is A Stickup and, say, Missile Command, is that Clark has further refined his ability to communicate his core concepts. They will continue working well within the mainstream rock idiom.
What's not so good?: When the Milwaukees sent me This Is A Stickup, I think they were worried I'd give them a bad review. Silly guys -- I've been a fan since I first heard "Drink Soviet Champagne" back in 1999. To be fair, the Milwaukees do many, many things that I normally caution bands against, and I know they know that hard guitar rock is not the music of my choice. But through musical and conceptual excellence, they get away with things that trip up lesser groups. They justify the twin guitar attacks by assigning strict roles to both instruments, and by really working hard to insure that the parts interlock. Clark singlehandedly justify the wattage and distortion by proving that, in his case, it doesn't matter: his voice could probably be heard clearly over a damn temblor. They justify their humorlessness with a poetic address that, upon close inspection, hold up as artful, interesting, and, above all, affecting. But that's because they're an unusual group. Most guitarists don't have the discipline or commitment to play like this, most writers don't have the literary skill to be simultaneously bone-serious and allusive, and almost no singers have the wind power to batter back this kind of treble attack. In other words: kids, don't try this at home.
Recommended?: They carry the flag for Jersey hard rock like champs. I'm proud to have them here. If you like K-ROCK, and you don't know this band yet, give them a shot. They're akin to what you'd hear on the radio, only they're not crappy.
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: I'm always confused about who puts out the Milwaukees' records. I think the label here is Does Everyone Stare (P.O. Box 1006, Edison, NJ 08818), but I'm not sure. You can always go to the source.
Title: The MPS
From: Essex and Passaic Counties. That's what it says on the album, anyway -- the address listed in in Clifton. I know the guitar player was living in Newark at the time of release, but he's not there anymore.
Format: Full-length LP.
Fidelity: Jersey indie. Jersey independent studios and engineers have a tendency to want to isolate instruments when recording even the most ferocious rock bands, or, when isolation isn't available, to still chase after the clean sound of isolated instruments. More on this in the "what's not so good" section, but now let's get to what's good.
Genre: Post-punk/indie-rock. Multi-Purpose Solution shares many formal features with the turn-of-the-decade New Brunswick coterie of groups that spent Saturday nights at the Court Tavern and Melody Bar, and late May at the Wilmington Exchange. Think Aviso'Hara.
Arrangements: Two guitars -- one distorted electric razor of an instrument playing big chords, and another scrawling single or double-note lines over the top. Rock and roll bass and drums, some guitar processing (including a particularly effective phaser on "Combiner", and a great sci-fi sound effect at the tail end of "Superman's Flying, The Guns Are Shooting"), and backing vocals on a song or two.
What's this record about?: Lots. Destructive relationships, bodily functions, weapons, automobiles, capitalism and culture, the liminality of the artist. The Multi-Purpose Solution can't decide if their artistry and passion makes them criminals, or if it's the other way around. The lyrics spring out of the speakers with the chaotic urgency of internet rants: words are coined ("insanefulness", "sansparachuting", "freeopoly"), syntax garbled to liberating effect, screeds suddenly break into articulate Italian. Singer Jim Teacher swears, gets sarcastic, intentionally misquotes classic rock songs, talks about his major and ponders slitting his own throat. If he's wallowing, he's having a great time doing so: trying to figure out whether to participate in the modern culture or to tear it down, and letting us all in on those ruminations. "It would be so much fucking simpler/just to be criminal", he ponders, before declaring himself and his peers "jackals or businessmen", anyway. The individual tracks have the feel of open-ended intervierws with a loose-lipped poet -- clearing his throat, speaking his piece, enjoying the cadence and feel of his prose even when he's saying the most desperate things, periodically pressing "pause". Inspirational verse for all you Jersey cats: "Life's not like the Hackensack/where all the human shit gets dumped and don't come back/Life's not the Passaic/just rooting around for its own sake/there's a little American Revolution in everything we do."
The singer: Aggressive music requires an assaultive tone by the frontman. Yet I don't think I've ever heard a singer take the path Jim Teacher does. He attacks, for sure, but not in the time-honored K-ROCK fashion. Instead, he presents his narratives in a voice somewhere between a punk-rock Louis Armstrong and Tom Waits committing hari-kari. I don't know whether or not he gargles with ground glass, but Teacher's guttural ranting sounds positively painful. Did I imply I didn't like it? I love it. It makes the listener sit up and pay attention to the stories; it's ugly, fascinating, and it suits the songs and subject matter perfectly. Jesse Fuchs used to say that the trick to singing is to create a vocal sound that matches what you have to say. Jim Teacher has done that. If his performances make you think the Multi-Purpose Solution routed an articulate street crazy out of Washington Square Park, stuck him in front of the microphone, and let him do his thing, well, they've probably made their point.
The band: The guitars scrawl and stutter while the rhythm section sticks to the basics. The bass guitar plays eighth notes on the roots, the drummer keeps four-on-the-floor, and the lead guitar shoots oscillating sixteenth-note patters through the fog like signal flashes. Cymbals: big, splashy, and frequent.
The songs: Unusual; songs without a clear center but never without musical focus. Many of these compositions feint toward verse-chorus structure, but substitute tag lines for releases. Teacher's narratives don't move forward in even paces, and the music follows suit: guitarrist Brother Stephen likes to introduce musical themes and then develop them and frequently works with reoccurring patterns, but they don't always develop according to expectation. Multi-Purpose Solution songs build toward foci rather than resolutions -- toward moments of heightened intensity. Sometimes these happen at the intersection of a repeated line and a harmonic resolution, and sometimes they don't. My favorite: Teacher breaking from a black meditation on a woman's breasts to count, gruffly, from one to forty-eight.
What distinguishes this record from other records of its genre?: "Phagocyte", "scholastomy", "ontology", "trilobite": The MPs has got more ten-cent words than the last Decemberists record. The drunken, shambling intellectual is not an unusual figure in certain forms -- the blues, for instance, is loaded with them -- but there aren't many in indie rock. And there are even fewer musicians willing to follow down the thicket-filled paths Jim Teacher is determined to travel.
What's not so good?: I strenuously doubt that these drums were close-miked, but they still feel awfully separate from the rest of the group. They're either too quiet, or they hit with that "ping" so characteristic of Jersey rock production. The electric rhythm guitar and bass are often way too sludgy: they don't exactly melt into each other, they're just occasionally diffuse. The MPs is a long album -- fourteen tracks, many of which break the four-minute mark -- so a little arrangement variation would also have been useful. Hey, I'm not asking for calliopes and optigons, guys; a simple acoustic track would probably have sufficed.
Recommended?: Is there any doubt? Could I hear a stanza like "last night, everything sixty-nined/last night, all the vegans stepped in line/and I was not unkind" and not want to share that with the rest of the world?
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: Alas, the Multi-Purpose Solution no longer exists. The group called it quits in autumn 2003, and North Jersey lost one of their most interesting and unique projects. The website is still up, though, and you can download several of these songs (plus a surprising number of remixes) right here. The address on the CD is 76 Merrill Road in Clifton -- drop them a line at your own risk.
Title: A Sad Cloud
From: Brooklyn. Some of A Sad Cloud was recorded in Northampton, Massachusetts, and it does carry some of that austere New England fatalism.
Format: Full-length LP.
Fidelity: Four-trackish. Jedediah Smith does wonderful things with the four-track, though -- the drums, in particular, sound amazing. He also gets ridiculous emotional mileage out of cheap synthesizers. Making something gorgeous and memorable out of trashy components; that's what Smith does.
Genre: Indie-pop. Since the recording of A Sad Cloud, Smith has moved even closer to the heart of the sub-genre, spinning out new songs that feel like the most engrossing pages from the Tigermilk and Magnetic Fields playbook. For this album, My Teenage Stride is much more Velvetsy than they've become -- but it's the Velvet of "Who Loves The Sun", not "Sister Ray". "Jesus Will Never Let Me Down" sounds like a Righteous Brothers basement tape.
Arrangements: Rolling, sixties-sounding drums -- room-miked for maximum feel -- steady, expressive bass, occasional fuzzed out rhythm guitar, clean high-end leads, and all of the twinkly sounds Smith can coax out of Radio Shack synthesizers. Backing vocals are always Smith himself, deadpanning voices. Canned french horns, Springsteen bells; he plays or programs everything.
What's this record about?: Loss, the price of ennui, nostalgia, meditation, ghosts, the plight of the songwriter, and the weird aging of the rock and roll story. Smith's vision is dark, his knowledge of rock history is broad, his wit is sharp, and he's a clever S.O.B. He seems to believe that the body of rock and roll has been fossilized, and the best we can achieve under current conditions is something like an undead existence. A Sad Cloud starts with a pretty typical last-chance love song ("Penelope"), but gets weirder and deeper from there. "Blackbeard's Ghost" is the first incidence of spectral forces, but there are others; here, Smith rues the the loss of cultural memory, and sings a good-natured requiem for the dissipated legend. Elsewhere, the monsters return: "Dance To The Skeleton Hand" is some sort of fatal sock hop where "the girls are willing and the boys are poor". "It'll kill ya!", sings Smith in the chorus, over and over, with a perkiness that's chilling. Decay and dysfunction stalk the songs -- the "American Car" blows a gasket and ends up in a ditch short of Boston, the Christmas tree in "Jesus Will Never Let Me Down" died in 1943, even the "Man Called Heroin" has no future. Cheap substitutions like plastic phosphorescent stars keep reoccuring. We fall in love by dim electric light, and project our desires onto a cold, white ceiling.
The singer: He doesn't hit all of his notes all the time, but it hardly matters -- Smith has a resonant indiepop voice, elastic enough to sound convincing on the Beatle screams of "Hamburg" and the Lou Reed drawl of "Worst Gig In The Sun". It's a very personable, winning character. When it's untreated and Smith isn't trying that hard to channel anybody, it's remarkably reminiscent of Phil Ochs, circa Pleasures Of The Harbor -- it has some of that same little-boy-lost-amid-the-dangerous-culture quality. I particularly like the insane, overdriven voices on the outro of "Jesus Will Never Let Me Down": "oh yeah" has never sounded so manic, and yet so heartfelt.
The band: Smith is an amazing drummer. Sloppy in all the right places, swinging, energetic, spazzy; homie plays like he never heard a record cut after 1970. Highlights: the wild rolls and fills on the choruses of "Penelope", the stuttering snare tattoo on the bridge of "Hamburg", the hyperactive fifties-strut of "American Car". Hell, it's all highlights. He's a champ on the bass guitar, too, but tape compression insures that the results aren't as ostentatious. But when he falls into a classic groove, as he does on "Skeleton Hand", look out. As a rhythm guitarrist, he's fun -- he plays up on the neck a lot, avoids anything too distracting, squalls when necessary, and simulates British Invasion-style mania wherever he can.
The songs: Traditional but crafty. He doesn't play with dissonance that often, and he's not prone toward wigged-out progressions or odd formal features. He does have a knack for indelible melodies, though, and they rise naturally from the accompaniment -- the tune always leads the chords, rather than the other way around. Smith likes abrupt, unfinished endings, and cutting off his narratives in the middle of phrases: "Let's Go To The Firewalk" ends without resolution, "Jesus Will Never Let Me Down" stops at the beginning of the tag line. Momentum gathers from song to song, one slides into the next, ideas bleed through the spaces between tracks.
What differentiates this record from others in its genre? Indiepop has no shortage of excellent songwriters. Smith is one of them. That alone doesn't distinguish him, though. But when you get a guy whose knowledge of pop history is this broad, and who possesses the musicianship to animate those historical ghosts with letter-perfect performances, you're dealing with a rare talent. Then, there's the lyrical focus on the decay of that history, the detritus of culture, the breakdown of machinery. It takes a few listens to sink in, but A Sad Cloud is a conceptually seamless record, and not just another collection of good songs.
What's not so good?: Like Allen Clapp of the Orange Peels, Jedediah Smith is a very good lyricist who can sometimes be tough to access as such -- because of his penchant for indulging in facile rhymes. He can't make things right, tonight; he's friends, until the end. Jeez, Smith pairs "love" with "stars above" twice in the first three songs. This just shouldn't happen with a writer this smart.
Recommended?: I've had two everyday records so far in 2004. The first was Juarez by Terry Allen, because I can't get enough of those album-length travelogues and examinations of our national character. A Sad Cloud is the second. Now, there are two reasons for this. First, it's because despite its flaws, I still love indiepop best -- I'd rather listen to the Ladybug Transistor tune up than all the Stills, Thrills, and Kills put together. Second, it's because I've played piano and organ for the live version of My Teenage Stride at three shows now, and I need to hear the songs to keep up my chord memory. But I had A Sad Cloud before I'd exchanged more than a sentence with Jed Smith, and if I'd never played a note with him, I guarantee you not a word of this review would be different. I formed my impression of Smith's quality as a musician and writer after hearing a few tracks, and if you like four-tracky indiepop, I bet you'll feel the same way.
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: A Sad Cloud is available in the United States through Banazan Records. Or check the front page of The Tris McCall Report for upcoming MTS dates.
Title: Snacktronica
From: Brooklyn. The Negatones make their music in an expanding homemade indie studio across the street from Peter Luger's, in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge. You can see the colored lights of the suspension cables from the windows of the Melody Lanes control room.
Format: A quick one. Five songs, a little over ten minutes. The Negatones are masters of the less-is-more approach. Rumors abound of an upcoming full-length, but until then we have to be contented with EP releases that are over in a New York minute.
Fidelity: Top-of-the-line indie quality. As self-taught producers and engineers, the Braun brothers have developed their own peculiar sonic aesthetic. K-ROCK it ain't, but it's theirs, it's characteristic, and it's powerful. Snacktronica is the best-sounding example of their work so far released.
Genre: Indie-rock, art-rock, prog-revival. The Negatones have a great sense of humor. While some of this may remind you of King Crimson, they're nowhere near as poker-faced as other experimental/progessive rock bands.
Arrangements: The Negatones are known in some quarters as the "hard" band with the punk-rock xylophone. That's not inaccurate, but it is somewhat misleading. There's nothing even slightly gimmicky about the group's use of unconventional rock instruments. Jun Takeshta -- a multi-insrumentalist in the truest sense -- is an excellent vibraphonist as well as a kickass lead guitar player, so it makes all the sense in the world to have him switch between axes. It never feels forced or overdetermined; it's always organic. The Porn Horns swing by to contribute Bond-movie brass to "And So My Troubles Began", Jay Braun's sinister-sounding banjo underpins "I Suspect There's More". Elsewhere, the Negs incorporate moog and Taurus pedals, syndrums, Electro-Harmonix mini-synth, and as much cheap electronics as they can round up. Mishka Shubaly once called the Negatones a "yard sale". They wear it proudly.
What's this record about?: Revival amid entropy. The last Negatones release -- the harrowing Heavy EP -- was occasionally hilarious but usually downcast, threatened, paranoid. Snacktronica catches the quartet in a better mood. They're still determined to mete out retributive justice to posers and phonies (using karma as a weapon on "Everything Oscillates", hissing at a game-player on "I Suspect There's More), but their attitude is brighter, and maybe a little cheerful. Chaos has never exactly been a force the Braun brothers have tried to resit. "And So My Troubles Began" and "Flattened By The Sun" examine the group's ambivalent relationship to the disorder they see as the organizing principle of the universe. "A million-sided die tumbles from the hand of a god laughing at your plans/and my plans!", shouts J Braun, not entirely in bewilderment. For once, they're laughing along.
The singers: J and Justin Braun didn't start this project to become Mariah Carey. But vocals are no longer an afterthought for the Negatones: they sound well-calibrated here, particularly when they raise their voices together. And J Braun's performance on "I Suspect There's More" is the highlight of his singing career so far -- rarely rising above a grumble, he nonetheless manages to communicate feelings of betrayal, disappointment, and even traces of pity. For non-singers, these guys are becoming excellent vocalists.
The band: The spazziest four-piece in town, for sure. That would mean nothing to a non-spazz if they couldn't also play. Takeshta's leads are ripped from the arena-rock playbook but discharged with the hypercaffeinated energy of the new wave. For drummer Jesse Wallace, every bar is a futher opportunity to freak out, throw in rolls, rushes, and builds, fidget, stop short, and then attack the skins with an animal (or should that be Animal?) abandon. Justin Braun's bass rumbles like a thunderhead, imposing order and logic on these otherwise flyaway arrangements.
The songs: Poppier than The Heavy EP, that's for sure. The Negatones may borrow formal features from Talking Heads and King Crimson, but at base the structure of almost all of their work is Lennonesque. "And So My Troubles Began" is a perfect example: the monstrous riff might remind you of Starless And Bible Black, and its manic repetition of Remain In Light, but if you wanted to render the song on the acoustic guitar, you couldn't do it without those characteristic Beatles chords. "Flattened By The Sun" is a more standard verse-chorus piece, and makes room for several wigged-out instrumental breaks, but has a White Album framework; closer "Everything Oscillates" reintroduces the horns, but can't disguise its British Invasion roots. The great exception here is the instrumental track "Conflict Error"; a bass and xylophone rock-fest so impish in its williness to play with tropes that it doesn't fit any compositional or representational logic I've ever encountered. Robert Fripp on laughing gas, maybe.
What distinguishes this record from other records of its genre?: The Negatones have a kinetic exuberance unusual for experimental/prog bands, and a sense of humor and anything-goes arrangement logic almost unheard of in indie rock. If progressives find them unserious and indie purists consider them sacreligiously catholic in their tastes, it wouldn't surprise me. But no great project is meant for the dogmatic or narrow-minded, and I doubt the Braun brothers could tailor their project for mass consumption even if they tried.
What's not so good?: The brevity of this release. Ten minutes is just not long enough to get accustomed to the group's off-the-wall logic and sensibility. If you've been following the Negatones' story for a few years now, all of these choices will make perfect sense to you. If you haven't been, Snacktronica is still the best place to start -- but if the EP blows by in a whir of buzz, hiss, hollers, horns, and electronic bleeps, it's not your CD player you need to adjust, it's your expectations.
Recommended?: I have been seeing shows in New York City for more than ten years now. While it's wrong to say that I have, during that time, gotten a comprehensive read on all of NYC rock, I think i'm suitably immersed in the culture that it ought to carry some weight when I state that The Negatones are easily the best group I've seen out there -- the most adventurous, the most skilled, the most entertaining, the most experimental, the best. As great as the Heavy EP was, it failed to make those virtues manifest: it was too serious, too bruising, and a little too remote. Those problems have been addressed with Snacktronica. Now if we could just get them to expand a little on the ten-minute slices....
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: Right here.
Title: The Jefferson Fracture
From: Although Nova Social is most associated with New York City -- and with the Den of Cin under the Two Boots on Avenue A, where they hosted a show series -- these guys are a North Jersey band. I'm pretty sure they're from Wayne. I cannot even begin to imagine how they rendered some of this over-the-top stuff in a space as intimate as Den of Cin. Audience members must have been stumbling up to street level with their brains scrambled.
Format: Twelve-track album. Some of the songs are lengthy ("Caravan Of Kindness" goes on for six and a half minutes), and even those that are shorter feel epic anyway.
Fidelity: Excellent. The recording quality and sound fidelity of The Jefferson Fracture is really outstanding, especially given that this could not have been a big-budget recording. There are about forty thousand instruments on every song, and the two principals in Nova Social somehow manage to make sure each is audible in the mix. This can lead to listener disorientation, but you never have to strain to follow any of the musical elements on The Jefferson Fracture. Commercial radio would never touch this, but that's not because it sounds weird. It's because it is weird.
Genre: Art-pop, skewed orchestral pop. Imagine the most ornate sections of Skylarking, and then double the number of whistles and bells. David Nagler is clearly an admirer of Andy Partridge and Todd Rundgren, but he's not inclined to reiterate their successess -- he begins at the most experimental fringes of their work, and pushes into the unknown from there. And like many weird pop-obsessors, he's intensely decorative, so every musical departure is accompanied by arrangement choices that feel like tremendous intellectual exertions. The exception -- the "Earn Enough For Us" of this set -- is "Hey Carol", a glossy but uncharacteristically normal piece of power pop. In some ways it's the least successful thing here, but it does provide a bit of a breather from the rigorous musical geometry. The most comparable album to The Jefferson Fracture is Elvis Costello's dense, forbidding, cognitively challenging, but ultimately brilliant Mighty Like A Rose.
Arrangements: Almost all of the songs are underpinned by solid rock drums and bass parts that, while never slick, are unremittingly competent and musical. Atop this foundation Nagler brick after brick of treble: usually hyperprocessed guitar, but also copious piano, organ, chintzy synth, acoustic, pedal steel, and mellotron(!). He and co-producer Thom Soriano like to make industrial jackass (and I mean that fondly) moves, too, so they add tape loops, electronic whirrs, and random unidentified noises wherever they can get away with it. They trot out the horns for "Sailor" and "Horse Song Part I", and simulate a full orchestral string section on a few other numbers. And yes, you Big Country fans, that is an e-Bow making an appearance on "Hardware Store"; here, it sounds less like a bagpipe than a circuit breaker on the fritz. Theremin, glockenspiel, nylon six-string, MiniMoog: they're all here, and they're never buried in the mix. Each instrument announces its presence with authority. And on "There There", they all seem to play at once. Tellingly, it's the best track on The Jefferson Fracture. But more on that later, in the "recommended?" section.
What's this record about?: Nagler has a taste for absurdism and violence: the animal count on this album is extremely high. "Horse Song, Part 1" features an albatross, an ostrich, and a horse (and a fish metaphor) in the first few lines. He also takes a beating -- on "Hardware Store", he gets a scar on his neck in jail, he's slaughtered in "I Got Lucky", he bangs his head and breaks his nose in "There There", and on "The Mechanic", he's literally falling apart. Not all of this is figurative: his writing is loaded with black humor, and my guess is that as his narrators are bumping into things and stumbling through life, he'd like you to visualize it happening. Other songs, like "Caravan Of Kindness", are relationship-deterioration numbers, and he suppresses his natural prankster tendencies on these. But even here, Nagler never goes about it directly -- he can be a little more serious (or just less impish), but he won't tame his highly associative writing methods. Throughout, his characters flail for connection with others, but rarely achieve it: they're speaking dead languages, they get lost in their own jokes, they hone their savagery to a razor-sharp cutting edge, and then turn it on themselves.
The singer: Hilary thinks that Dave Nagler sounds like Charlie Jamison from Landspeedrecord! At first I didn't hear it, but upon my twentieth listen-through or so, I think I see what she meant. Like Jamison, Nagler's got a post-punk sneer in his voice; it's a very clean tone, there's almost no screaming or whispering, and almost every syllable gets one and only one distinct note. It's a radio-friendly voice -- he sounds like a pop-punkster with a sarcastic singer-songwriter background. In fact, it's probably the most conventional thing about The Jefferson Fracture.
The band: Steve Pilgrim hits hard. Even on mid-tempo numbers like "One Table Over", he's slamming the toms with intent to kill. His parts are stuttering and inventive, but a finesse drummer this guy is not. Bassist Thom Soriano is the "pro"; if Nova Social doesn't work out for him, he could probably go session-slickster with very little trouble. If that sounds like a dis, it isn't; as a huge appreciator of Leland Sklar, I mean "session bassist" as a high compliment. Nagler is a very polished guitarrist and a decent pianist as well. But like Soriano, he's almost never interested in showing off. Instead, the spotlight goes to whatever weird treble sound is dominating the track at the moment: either the theremins or the E-bows, or the nerve-rattling electronic loops. Nothing ever feels out of place. This sound tapestry is as richly apportioned, as detailed, and as balanced as any Persian carpet.
The songs: Arch-sophisticated and perpetually ambitious. Nova Social is almost never satisfied with a simple chord progression or an obviously-derived melody. Their theoretical understanding of composition is miles beyond that of your typical rock group. Something like the polychord-rich "You Don't Have To Go To Bed Early Anymore" sounds like the song Sting was trying to write in his cosmo period of the mid-Eighties. Of course, if he ever did, he would have ceased to be Sting, and he'd have stopped selling records. Anyway, without ever being "jazzy" or fusion-happy, Nova Social pushes the envelope of pop song harmonics to the limits of singability. Some of it is by design, surely, but much probably is an accident of the group's own penchant for rich excess. A song like "There There" is built on a repetitive progression, but after the group is done with the guitar loops and the harmonic overlay, the musical accompaniment is so tonally varied that an uninitiated listener can only be bewildered. You know the tonic is there, somewhere; you're like a drowning man bobbing up and down in the waves, catching fleeting glimpses of dry land. After hearing record after record of the same rudimentary blues workouts, a dip in the Nova Social pool can be positively exhilarating. This should probably go in the "arrangement" section, but I already wrote so much up there that I'm sticking it in here as an addendum -- the band just loves the old trick of coming out of a bridge to a stripped-down third verse. I love it, too. I don't understand why other groups don't do it. They probably think it's too dramatic.
What differentiates this record from others like it? There aren't any other records like this. Most albums this ornate fall into the "indiepop" or "chamber pop" subcategories, and those bands try to compensate for the huge arrangements with a disarming twee-ness. Nova Social is too vicious and tough-minded for that. Nobody is going to be comforted by The Jefferson Fracture at the bedsit. Some of these songs lean toward poper-pop, but Nagler and Soriano utterly dispense with the Sweet aesthetic of short, simple, and potent. This is a group without a genre.
What's not so good?: The first time I heard David Nagler perform, it was at a solo show at Makor. I found his songs intelligent and complex, but I had a tough time with his singing: I felt that he was occasionally strident, and that he over-sold his punchlines. With no band to back him up, the harshness of his performances felt incongruous. There's some of that in evidence on The Jefferson Fracture -- he still over-sells his own cleverness. But there's usually so much going on in the track that it's hard to notice. Still, this is not a warm or sympathetic singer. In theory, there's nothing wrong with crooning through gritted teeth. In practice -- or just on this Nova Social record -- some of the angst (and I use that word sparingly) does interfere with the enjoyment of these confections.
Recommended?: Most modern rockers want to tell you that the secret to success -- aesthetic or otherwise -- is to strip a song back to its essential elements. One voice, one treble instrument, rhythm secion keeping four on the floor, and songs about girls and cars. That's the punk philosophy, and it serves certain bands well. Much of what I do as a critic is tell bands to rid themselves of their dependence on midrange treble instruments for the sake of communication. But if you're a good enough producer, and you can find spots for your treble elements, their interaction (and the ear candy they provide) can be both artful and intellectually stimulating. Nova Social is a group that actually sounds better the more complicated they get: the best songs here, "There There", the "Sailor Song", the two "Horse" songs, are the most over-the-top. Sometimes the communicative process works in reverse. If you're theorized about what you're doing -- if you're really committed to building that castle out of gems and stained-glass and marble crossbeams -- weighing each component carefully, and adding filigree wherever you can, will pay tremendous dividends.
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: The Jefferson Fracture is out on Big Sleep Records, a label I know nothing about. The Philip Marlowe refererence works pretty well with Nova Social's occasionally cloak-and-dagger subject matter. You can also get a copy throough Bruce Brodeen's venerable Not Lame power-pop cartel. Just don't expect anything that sounds like the Rooks. Also, as you might expect from a bunch of wordy intellectuals, Nova Social has a very good website. As a matter of fact, if more bands had websites like Nova Social's, I'd spend a hell of a lot less time complaining about band websites. If you're thinking of putting together a band website, do yourself a favor and check out the Nova Social pages. They aren't perfect (what's that weird drum loop over the lyrics page?), but they make you feel like you're in the presence of a thoughtful endeavor, and not just a bunch of mooks looking to shill you their cheaply-manufactured CD. So much effort has gone into this entire project that if you make music, or if you're interested in the art of record-making, you owe it to yourself to pay them some attention.
Title: If Shacking Up Is All You Want To Do....
From: Metuchen, New Jersey; a great Turnpike town. Practically speaking, the Roadside Graves are the most Springsteen-influenced of any Jersey indie band – they borrow from the Boss his lyricism and balladry, his straightforward compositional sensibility, his forthrightness, his fatalism, his loser-mystique, and his profound belief in the potency of folk-art structures.
Format: Ten-song album. If Shacking Up repeats a few tracks from the mostly-acoustic Where The Walker Runs Down (released as a split CD with Hope, Star & Browning), but the versions are all new, and the narrator characters are more fully realized. This is a forty minute complete statement.
Fidelity: Average indie. The Graves have done a good job picking instrument sounds and getting them to tape, but the modest budget doesn’t allow them to capture the full grandeur of the live experience. Consequently, If Shacking Up Is All You Want To Do… sometimes sounds more like a singer/songwriter record than a document of the six-man barnyard rock explosion that the Graves can be on any given night.
Genre: Folk-rock, Americana, some dabblings in alt-country. There’s a long tradition of this stuff in New Jersey, and it predates Springsteen. The Young Rascals were, arguably, the most folk-influenced of all East Coast sixties hitmakers – just listen to that sideshow organ. We’re called the Garden State because the soil is so rich here; no matter how much we pave it, waste it, or toss condominiums on it, the land still calls for us. The Graves are just the latest band to get in tune with those echoes.
Arrangements: Acoustic guitar, some swaggering beer-hall electric (check out the cowboy riffing on “Tulsa Too”, for instance), slide guitar in appropriate places, Appalachian fiddle, bass and drums, Jeremy Benson’s deep-woods backing vocals, and piano – lots of piano. Even though he’s only present on half of these tracks, pianist Mike DeBiasio still somehow feels like the dominant instrumentalist in the Graves. In concert, the Graves often defy conventional arrangement logic – not to mention gravity –by having three acoustic guitars going at once. There’s not so much of that here: for every “Jenny Jump” and its amalgam of six-strings, there’s a “Winter In Tennessee”, reimagined for a smaller combo. John Gleason does much of his singing over single guitar or piano accompaniment.
What's this record about?: Blind drives through the mountains and cornfields, distant truck-stops, liquor, crime, underaged girls, small-town whimsy, consequences damned and dreams frittered away, dissolute energy, wild American romantic poetry. Gleason is an undeniably gifted writer, effortlessly spinning out skewed, brilliant stories of doomed love in the shadows of the train tracks. He trades in indelible moments, radiant juxtapositions, incongruity etched into the roadcuts. Even when indulging his well-known misogynist streak, Gleason maintains a quiet respect for his female characters; his protagonists and their women work toward a tenuous understanding. That doesn’t stop him from putting the troubling (to say the least) “White Girls” on this record, but it does ameliorate a bit against the dispiriting effect of hearing about the dead women, and those who seem at least halfway there. His first-person narrators want love, and sex, but can’t stand to be watched or pinned down; the city wouldn’t be such a bad place if it wasn’t for the cop on every corner. It’s an American archetype, of course, but it’s a Jersey one too – we’re the most libertarian of the original thirteen, and we are defined by our highways. Gleason embodies the spirit of the state as well as anybody currently writing.
The singer: Quavering. His voice shakes with almost every phrase. It trembles, breaks, shakes back and forth around the note ike the needle on a geiger counter. Gleason sings like a hoarse, earnest good ol’ boy – maybe a little too nerdy to have a gun rack, but not to shy to put the Confederate flag on his pick-up. He scrapes expressively through his two and three note melodies, compensating for their simplicity with readings that are humorous, heartbroken, inquisitive, sincere. He’s a heavy ironist, of course, but he’s not at all detached from the emotional content of his subject matter – this is real literary irony he works in, not the cheeky Weezer metadiscursive variety. He can deliver a story about Jesus coming to visit and making breakfast, and when he gets to the punchline – “Jesus Christ, these pancakes are good” – it’s neither irreverent nor winking. It’s a declaration made with great integrity from a writer who has imagined his absurd scenario down to the last emotional detail and slipped into it, inhabited it fully.
The band: Drummer Philip Kunkle and bassist Dave Jones are a classic folk-rock rhythm section in the time-honored style: roots, fifths, four-on-the-floor and no bossy fills. They provide the underpinning, and it’s a solid one. Guitarist Rich Zilg (also of Hope, Star & Browning) and Jeremy Benson share the treble range, strum with conviction, and impart grandiosity to the rock ballads. Benson is the resident multi-instrumentalist, but he handles all of his axes in the same way: roughly, like a frontiersman might. His fiddle tone isn’t the prettiest thing you’ll ever hear, but it’s evocative of the open road, shantytowns and juke joints. DeBiasio is the most expansive musician in the act; he’s got technical skills, and he’s game to show them off. “Tulsa Too” opens with a cascade of high notes on the piano, and keeps up the filigree throughout. On “Song For A Dry State” (the Graves’ most persuasive claim to greatness), he’s all over the place, finding gospel chords, jazz passages, folk melodies, all hidden in the grand two-chord chorus. His role is similar to that of Matt Rollings, the piano player who enlivens Lyle Lovett albums: he’s the frontier prodigy, the gifted small-town musician able to synthesize big city sources, but still wed to the folk idiom.
The songs: I wrote elsewhere that the Roadside Graves know two chords and one tune. That was hyperbolic. Nevertheless, they are not working from a broad harmonic palette here; many songs are two or three-chord grooves that don’t deviate from 1-4-5 expectation. Graves melodies stick to the tonic of the chord: Gleason has no taste for exploring variations or reaching surprising notes. If you think the verse melody to “White Girls” is indistinguishable from the verse melody to “Song For A Dry State”, or the verse melody to “Jesus Is A Friend Of The Family”, well, I will not argue. But folk-rock is all about reiteration, and making similar-sounding musical elements feel fresh; how many times, just to give you a for instance, did R.E.M. rewrite “Green Grow The Rushes”? It’s important to note that If Shacking Up is not a folk suite – it never feels samey, even if it is samey. This is an album of discrete tracks; interrelated, to be sure, but each possessing its own pace, arrangement, and distinctive character.
What differentiates this record from others like it? Because of the towering example of Springsteen, you wouldn’t think this would be true, but it is: there aren’t many poets working in Jersey rock. Marc Maurizi of Cropduster and the Brokedowns was a frequently brilliant lyricist whose Dylanesque imagery came on like a fever dream, and Jason Cieradkowski of American Watercolor Movement writes his cadenced travelogues. Beyond that, I’m at a loss. There are other good lyricists, sure; some are very good. But they don’t have the attention to language-sound, image, and narrative that I expect from a poetic writer. Poetic Jerseyans gravitate toward the singer-songwriter circuit. You can feel the tug here on John Gleason toward the coffee-bar crowd. But his subject matter will always get in the way. You can’t render something like “White Girls”, “I Shit On The Roof Every Time It Rains” or even “The History Of Lilies” to a middlebrow crowd; they’ll ask you to take sensitivity lessons. He’s a rocker to the core, anyway; he belongs in front of a fusillage of six-strings, stomping his foot on the stage and exhorting the crowd to scream.
What's not so good?: No discussion of the Roadside Graves would be complete without examining some of Gleason’s applause lines. Joseph drills a hole in the wall to watch Mary undress, the love object in “Song For A Dry State” has one dead husband and “another on the way”, the young woman in “Junk On The Highway” needs “a key in the door”, but it’ll take more to get through, and white girls can kiss his ass because black girls dig him. That’s just a sampling. Many of Gleason’s misogynist scenarios are undeniably poetic, and like Lovett, he seems well aware of the full political implications of his scenarios. That doesn’t get him off the hook. The endless procession of drunken women and whores “with the wild look on their face” marches through songs where they probably aren’t welcome. Gleason’s misogyny, like Lovett’s, stains his entire work: a purely literary romantic scenario like the gorgeous “Winter In Tennessee” can’t be heard out of context. The Graves, no doubt, do not want you to. But I still wish it could be. The answer isn’t to leave “White Girls” off of the record (though I probably wouldn’t have minded had they done just that), but to temper some of the more excessive language. Gleason already knows the trick of singing a culturally troubling line with great sensitivity and nuance, thereby cushioning some of the shock. So, yes, that could break either way – he could use that knowledge to continue being insulting, or he could listen to the better angels of his nature, which are telling him to ease up on the country-punk gynophobia.
Recommended?: With the Brokedowns semi-sidelined, and Prosolar Mechanics missing in action, the Roadside Graves are probably the best independent rock band in New Jersey right now. The lyrical force of “Song For A Dry State”, “Jenny Jump”, “Honky Tonk”, “Winter In Tennessee” and several of their other standard performance pieces set a highly articulate standard for current folk-rock. I expected If Shacking Up to be one of the year’s finest albums, and I’m not disappointed. As a matter of fact, I’ve never heard “Song For A Dry State” without getting goosebumps. Coming from a jaded rock writer like me, that is high and uncommon praise.
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: The Graves finally have their own website. Enter at your own risk!
Title: Skyline Rodeo
From: New Brunswick. Singer Morgan Chen lives in Plainfield, but all of these guys are Rutgers/Hub City rock veterans. Steve Bumgarner and Joe Dingerdissen used to play in the fiery Dewey Defeated, and Chen sang with Joshua Marcus in the pop-smart Makeout Party.
Format: Fifteen minute EP. There are only three songs here, but the last track is seven minutes long. Skyline Rodeo does not feel insubstantial. Yet since "Live Free Or Die" is the group's play for radio attention, you could also look at this as a maxi-single.
Fidelity: Decent, maybe a little thin-sounding.
Genre: Jersey indie rock. No curveballs.
Arrangements: Two guitars, one scratching out rhythm parts and the other squalling single notes and weaving patters in the treble range, bass guitar, standard small indie rock kit. No backing vocals. The last and longest track here is instrumental.
What's this record about?: "Live Free Or Die" has about six words in it, most of which are "fine time". It could be a celebration of hedonism, or a resignation to it; admiration of a dancing girl, or jealousy of her freedom. As a straightforward lust song, it doesn't require much more explication than what we're given. "Fire In The Hole", a more kinetic track, is a broadside about class politics. "Lower income out on their ghetto ass/favoring all the fat cats" sneers Chen, before deadpanning the tag line. On the second verse, Chen gets poetic, but hardly elliptical: "Hippies hide from the repo man/yuppies scream for the ice cream man/bullies preach 'these colors don't run'". Them's fighting words.
The singer: Morgan Chen is one of my favorite vocalists in New Jersey music. He can sound expressive, optimistic and assured, and then turn around and deliver a hectoring lyric with icy dispassion. If his performance on "Live Free Or Die" feels a little too cocksure, his pissed-off robot act on "Fire In The Hole" ought to be enough to humanize him. And if you like cocksure frontmen, Chen is your Jersey version: he doesn't swagger, he just stands there, hand out, holding the song in his palm. He reminds me of Tim Wheeler from Ash -- tuneful, a little bluesy, bending notes from time to time without being overly melismatic, rarely shouting, self-contained, confident, occasionally breathy, always human. In a state full of shouters, here's a rock and roll singer.
The band: Wow, drummer Joe Dingerdissen has sure developed from his days beating the skins for Dewey Defeated. He slams these songs all over highway 287, keeping mostly to rough stuff on the snare, but giving us a little of that rolling thunder from time to time. Chen underpins the songs with down a low, distorted rumble, and Bumgarner adds the pretty stuff over the top. Or is that the other way around? Hard they are, but this is not a heavy band; the "rodeo" is there in the name to let you know that they're here to rounding you up, not bludgeon you into submission.
The songs: Skyline Rodeo like long intros and outros -- "Live Free Or Die" opens with a signature riff (in 5/4 time, no less), and closes with thirty seconds of lead guitar. "Live Free" keeps to verse-chorus structure, and tacks on an end-of-song breakdown that essentially reiterates the opening guitar melody. "Fire In The Hole" -- built around one droning guitar chord and a shifting root note -- repeats verses and lets the band handle the release. When in doubt, Skyline Rodeo adds an instrumental section.
What distinguishes this record from other records of its genre?: I am not sure they're trying to be particularly distinctive. This recording is firmly within its tradition. See "recommended?".
What's not so good?: Jersey bands have an unfortunate tendency to underutilize -- sometimes even hide -- their singers. Considering what a winning presence Chen is, there's simply not enough of him here. I enjoy the seven-minute instrumental that closes this EP, but it's simply never going to be as meaningful as the other two songs. Even there, Skyline Rodeo takes too long to get to the singing, and dilly-dallies with instrumental bridges.
Recommended?: Among the many useful concepts entered into the rock critical lexicon by Jesse Fuchs is "The Steve Forbert". "I think the simplest way to put it", explains Jesse, "is that the Steve Forbert of a genre is that genre's acid test -- i.e., the signal that you value and enjoy the tropes and conventions of that particular genre. The trickier part is explaining why the Steve Forbert can't just be completely generic him or herself, and actually has to have some sort of distinctive personality, albeit a distinctive personality entirely circumscribed by the genre that they work in. To me, it's much easier to explain by simply stating that Boz Scaggs is the Steve Forbert of white soul." Jesse is a big Boz Scaggs fan. I'm a Skyline Rodeo fan, and a Jersey indie rock fan, too, and I strongly suggest that Skyline Rodeo is the Steve Forbert of Jersey indie rock recordings. It epitomizes the Hub City approach, while spinning out intelligent and thoughtful variations on it that always feel completely consistent with its core aesthetic.
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: Try the band's website. You could also go to this Saturday's Jersey Beat show at the Charleston -- Skyline Rodeo will be sharing the bill with, among others, the arch-literate Sabado Domingo.
Title: Evacuation
From: Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Format: Full-length LP. Nine songs and a remix of the title track. It feels like more of a reprise, actually.
Fidelity: Good indie club music quality. You could throw these tracks on at a mainstream disco and nobody would fret about the sound. Listening to Evacuation on car speakers, the bass frequencies do feel enormous, and you might wish that the masterer did a little more to rein those in. But this album was probably mixed for potential club play, and we know that rump-shakers -- even dispassionate Euro ones -- need that bass.
Genre: Synth-pop. Think New Order or Ultravox. Somnambulants major domo Joseph White even looks a little bit like Bernard Sumner. The three songs sung by Lorraine Lelis lean in the direction of trip-hop, as the beats are a little bit too funky for Germanic new wave. But for the most part, the Somnambulants keep close to their Eighties proto-electronica sources.
Arrangements: Vintage drum machines, throbbing bass, sweeping Arp-soundalike synthesizer, occasional guitar lines lifted from those romantic Molly Ringwald scenes, robotic backing vocals, synth arpeggios, electronic processing. The Somnambulants love the Eighties trick of counterposing a sticky, oscillating synthesized bass with a high descant line played on a similar instrument. That's something I always try to do when I play my own synthesizers, but White's execution of the move is much purer and more authentic than mine. I tip my cap, Joe. Well, to be fair, that might not be White's doing: some of the instruments here are played by Stephen Vesecky, Eva Hahn, and Lorraine Lelis. If you're familiar with the Somnambulants' stage set, you might be wondering about Channing Sargent's absence from that list. Me too. In concert, Sargent and White are the Somnambulants: they play all the instruments, and Sargent sings everything that White does not. On Evacuation, the only time I hear Sargent's voice is on the choruses of "Monument", and she's not creditied with any of the synthesizer on the album. Yet she's pictured on the cover; hand on hip, standing in front of White. More on this dissonance in a bit.
What's this record about?: Each singer contributes his or her own vision to the project. Maki Hojo handles the disturbing verse ("you trip off the stage", she deadpans) to "Countdown", the poppiest song on the set. Lorraine Lelis writes songs of romantic longing and loneliness; she's a poetic force, and if she sometimes sounds resigned to her fate, there's always a kick waiting for the listener. But White's perspective is by far the most interesting -- it dominates the set, and throws its shadow across the songs sung by other writers. He's a romanticist first, but we watch his characters struggle to recuperate value from their own alienation. In the title track, there's been some kind of apocalyptic disaster, or maybe folks are just leaving town. The toxins fill the lungs of the survivors, but White's narrator recognizes his love object because she has chosen to hang back. White structures the robotic "Monument" as an ideological struggle, or perhaps a coming to consciousness. The song begins with regrets about percieved historical irresponsibility, and morphs into a celebration of iconoclasm. "Uh-oh, things will happen", he intones on the album's centerpiece, and he doesn't sound thrilled about it. But then he hits the release, and everything is all right when he's dancing, with his girl, alone on an abandoned coast, dust filling the air, all regrets dissipated or burned away by the evening radiation.
The singers: All very good. White performs in a deep, wide-eyed Midge Ure-ish baritone. He's not an acrobatic singer, but that's part of the point -- robots, at least at first, are going to be kinda stiff. They draw from many of the same sources, so it's no coincidence, but on "Traveling Companion", White even manages to channel a little Baby Dayliner. Lelis is a more flexible, if generally dispassionate singer; I like her performances a lot, but then I'm an apprecatior of Old Europe, too. She reminds me at times of Sarah Blackwood of Dubstar, another plainspoken singer with a pure tone and a little-girl-lost affect. Hojo, with her evident Japanese accent, is a little more fiery; she can be a little pitchy in the choruses, but I don't mind. Channing Sargent's performance on "Monument" is convincing in its Soviet-era iciness -- she sounds like an android sent by the Kommisar to reprogram humanity out of its impatience. Rock!
The music: The drum programming drifts ever so slightly into modern electronic territory, especially on the Lelis songs. But really, the Somnambulants want to give you a clockwork snare and high-hat groove, just like Vince Clarke used to back in the good old days. White doesn't indulge in too many stupid synth tricks, but when he lets the sequencers rip, as on "Streamline" and "Monument", it always serves the song well. The choice of synthesizer sounds is impeccable. Some of them haveto have been sampled off of classic Eighties synth-pop records, and if they weren't, White must have hunted down or lucked into similar instruments. The production team of Power, Corruption, and Lies is always effective: the New Order template almost never fails to communicate brave optimism amidst reserve and foreboding.
The songs: Pretty traditional. The Somnambulants are not the sort of band to waste time with lengthy intros or instrumental sections. Songs begin with a groove, a simple chord progression, and a straightforward verse melody that opens up into a singalong chorus. White baits his shiny hooks with evocative imagery. An exception is "Bleeding Hearts", which is just a distorto synth-nightmare, and doesn't bother advertising its own pleasures. It hardly matters since it's sandwiched between "Things Will Happen" and the immediate "Bleeding Hearts", but it's one of the album's most intriguing compositions. "Streamline" is a little looser, and it's sometimes difficult to tell whether you're supposed to be listening to Lelis or White. Not that I'm complaining -- Evacuation is mannered enough that the Somnambulants can justify their occasional experimantal departures. Three of these songs contain outros that must have been sampled from corny old vinyl records: the most notable is "Traveling Companion", which suddenly becomes a Boy Scout song. Juxtaposed with the cool, flat backbeat, it's touching, humane.
What differentiates this record from others like it? This is a formal project. Much of what the Somnambulants do is historical reconstruction. But just like the narrators on "Monument", they've got a secret desire to tear down the edifice, too. White's perspective is unusual, to say the least, and he's an affecting writer with an ear for an aphoristic phrase. When he wants to, he can conjure both the frostiness of Berlin Wall authoritarianism and the flickering optimism of the hearts trapped in the system.
What's not so good?: If you've seen the Somnambulants perform, no doubt you've walked away charmed by (and maybe a little smitten with) the onstage relationship between White and Channing Sargent. They come off as remarkably human amidst their robotic posturing, and, of course, that's the message they're going for. There's great discourse between the two -- candid angled glances along with loosely choreographed moves -- and when they break free from the android shells and dance together on "Things Will Happen", it's pretty exhilarating. An onstage relationship can't be captured on a CD. But still, I wish there was more evidence of Sargent's participation in the project on Evacuation. It's such a vital part of the Somnambulants' public identity that it's a shame it's not well-represented here. That's no knock on Lelis or Hojo, both of whom make terrific contributions to this album. But the "cute couple robot" that delights fans at Somnambulants shows is nowhere in evidence here: not even on "Monument", White's duet with Sargent.
Recommended?: They may not be as arch as Mommy & Daddy, as cryptic as the Blood Group, or as multifaceted as Baby D, but with Evacuation, the Somnambulants have recorded one of the best albums of 2004 so far. There aren't any weak tracks on it, and the level of musicianship, performance, and writing is unfailingly high. If you've got any taste for synth-pop or bleak Euro electro-pop, the Somnambulants are a group you should check out.
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: Evacuation is available through the Clairaudience Collective, an excellent Brooklyn-based record cartel.
Title: 9 O' Clock In The Afternoon
From: Staten Island. But the group has played in New Jersey enough now that they're honorary Garden Staters.
Format: Full-length LP. Fourteen pop songs, plus one extra what-is-it tacked on at the end. Some albums represent the sum of what their authors have to give the world: nine pristine songs and no encores, say. That's not what the Speedsters and Dopers do. Singer and songwriter Greg Di Gesu sent along two full CDs of extra living room recordings to accompany 9 O' Clock In The Afternoon. This is not a project suffering from a shortage of material.
Fidelity: Just okay. These songs don't try to get by on a big sound, so it doesn't really matter. A few of the "big rock" moments can feel puny, but those are so few and far between that their relative rarity makes up for the lack of ferocity. Really, I don't care, and neither should you.
Genre: From the band's website: "Join Millions of other Speedsters and Dopers Heads in proclaiming 'That's not at all what I thought it was going to sound like -- I mean given the name of the band and such'". This is one of the least trippy, drugged-out bands in the city. S&D write dramatic little three-minute indiepop songs; many of which are piano-driven, and almost all of which have delicate melodies.
Arrangements: Jazzy piano, alternately brushed and pounded drums, active (but relaxed) bass parts, a few moments of plaintive analog synthesizer, cheap electric organ here and there, some electro-guitar trickery, tremolo leads, undefinable feedback washes. Di Gesu bathes his vocals in a honey-warm reverb that sometimes makes him sound like he's crooning from the speakers of an eight-track player in 1977.
What's this record about?: The Speedsters and Dopers are my kind of lyricists -- clever, highly associative, unafraid to be silly. Di Gesu tells childish jokes ("Holy Moses King of the Jews/wiped his rear with the Daily News", he sings in the rapt warble of a guy visualizing the scene), ponders about historical figures ("When did Harry Truman really fall in love/with those gloves?", he wonders), but regains poise enough to meditate on violence, relationships, and the meaning of rock and roll. Di Gesu can be downbeat at times, and many of his narrators are self-deprecating, but there's always levity around every corner.
The singer: Conversational, cracked, questioning. Di Gesu hardly ever shouts, and he doesn't go in for showiness or cheap emotional tricks. He performs these songs as a vaudeville actor might: doing characters when necessary, but always within set parameters. Even at his most satirical, he always sounds friendly.
The band: Pianist Billy Donohue has a great sense of humor, his ornamentation and glissandos are effective, and he's a pleasure to listen to. Dan Green's bass parts vary from R&B walks ("Sister Do"), to country swing ("Like A Fool") to straightforward rock ("Broadway"); they're always quietly confident and intelligent. The liner notes list two guitarrists -- Jack Petruzzelli is credited with "weird guitar", while Jeff Kolber has to settle for plain old "guitar". I'm not sure which one is responsible for the leads, but they're always executed with taste and poise. And yes, some are weird.
The songs: Jim Testa compared S&D to Harry Nilsson, and I know what he means by that, but Di Gesu's writing also reminds me of Van Dyke Parks, and Tom Petty's whimsical-historical side. Nilsson and Parks both often drew on pre-rock traditions, and imported an older harmonic logic into the modern pop song form. Di Gesu throws chromatic intervals (half-steps) into his melodies, uses seventh-chords, and recycles some shuffles that feel as though they might have been pulled from Tin Pan Alley, or British music hall. In a city filled with garage rockers spinning out blues progressions and melodies harnessed to the pentatonic scale, here's a writer looking backward to go forward.
What differentiates this record from others in its genre? Catchiness has always been a vexed issue for me. I go through periods where I really distrust it, yet I do value songs that are persistent -- ones that don't evaporate the minute the record stops playing. For a few years, I tried to approach this question scientifically: I kept a notebook, in which I'd write down whatever songs were stuck in my head that day. Then, at the end of a week, or a month, or a year, I'd look at the list and try to tease out patterns. What I learned was something I already knew -- the songs that I found catchy weren't those that the rest of the world did. While the rest of the country was singing Collective Soul and Green Day songs, I was hung up on Tori Amos, the Pharcyde, and the High Llamas -- none of whom bother with tight song construction. Speedsters & Dopers do bother, on occasion. But I'd guess that's not why I find their music so naggingly catchy. No, I think it has something to do with Di Gesu's unusual sense of melody, and fondness for the chromatic scale. I first heard S&D do "Sister Do" and "Iggy Pop" one night at the Luna Lounge, and I walked out of the club with those melodies and chord progressions indelibly etched in my brain. I didn't hear this group for over a year, yet every time I saw their name in a listing (pretty often), I would start whistling "Sister Do". Now that I've got their album, I can't get the songs out of my head. I have no idea whether you'd have the same reaction to their music. Keep your own notebook, and let me know.
What's not so good?: 9 O'Clock In The Afternoon starts with a bang -- six or seven winners in a row -- but bogs down with a stretch of slower and less characteristic songs during its second half. I think a writer capable of replicating a Tin Pan alley experience ought to exploit that ability. I want more "Sister Do" out of Di Gesu, and less "Mother Adorned". He probably thinks "Mother Adorned" is really beautiful. And it is -- but it's also much more common. There's nobody else doing stuff like "Sister Do": hot-cha-cha hokey 1910 schtick.
Recommended?: This isn't a group that people are going to notice unless they're out there looking: they don't really wave the flag furiously for themselves, they aren't pinups, their music isn't overly flashy, they don't get by on noise or effrontery. I don't look at this NJO column as a buyer's guide, but I do hope this review does a little bit to raise the profile of S&D. They've really got their own bag -- they've got character. They deserve some attention.
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: If the website doesn't work out for you, try Get Hooked Records (possibly a reference to Fisherman's Stew, Di Gesu's former group?) at P.O. Box 640, NY, NY 10009.
Title: Fatetown
From: Brooklyn, I think.
Format: CD single. Mine is marked TF0195, which probably means it's a limited release. "Fatetown" clocks in at a little under two minutes. Brevity is the soul of Williamsburg.
Fidelity: Raw indie quality. This was cut in Brooklyn, which means that there's been no attempt to tart up the track by separating the drums and making it into something it isn't. But the vocals sound great, and that's all that matters. If you've got one good microphone, don't waste it on the kick drum, right?
Genre: Indiepop/minimalist blues-rock. Cross the White Stripes with Palomar. Has that been said about these guys before? If it hasn't been, it will.
Arrangements: Alessandra Maria sings and plays scratchy guitar, Jen Watts handles the drums and contributes backing vocals. There's a little electric piano on the bridge -- or perhaps that's just a trick of EQ. The fusion of tweepop with the two-man electric blues band aesthetic could have been designed by a shrewd zeitgeist reader under tight Brooklyn lab conditions, but Tomorrow's Friend feels very organic.
What's this record about?: The vagaries of chance. "Fatetown" is a free-spirit's anthem sung by a bemused observer of entropy. She's not giving herself over, entirely, to the ebb and flow, but she's not fighting it, either. "Sometimes the night takes you where the waves they break/You know sometimes it don't", sings Maria, as a statement of fact from a sharp-eyed watcher. Two verses, a chorus that recaps the ambivalence of the lyric, a bridge, and then a restatement of the first verse. She's laconic.
The singer: There are vocalists who I know are fantastic, and you damn well the rest of indie nation is going to agree with you; I'm thinking of Karen O now, but there are plenty of other examples. Then there are the singers from whom I get an immediate emotional responce, and whose voices I love, but it's easy to imagine others within this subculture disliking. I think the world of Elizabeth Harper and Dawn Landes, but I understand it when rock guys say their voices are too fragile. Alessandra Maria falls somewhere in between these two categories. She's definitely weirder than Karen O: rather than attempting to get by on sexuality and manic energy, she's poised, intelligent, rational and reflective. Her tics and mannerisms lean towards the blues, but stop somewhere short, and rest on a ledge of her own manufacture. Yet she's tough, too; she's not a fragile singer. Her voice isn't huge, but it's powerful, communicative, direct. She's got a little snarl tucked away in there, too, and she's not afraid to use it, but when she's strenuous, it's wisdom she radiates, not discontent.
The band: In a city of a hundred thousand drummers, Jen Watts is an original -- a characteristic voice on her instrument. She doesn't drive her kit as much as she explores it arithmetically, indicating the relationship between the drums as she stitches together her unusual beats. Watts likes to keep both sticks on the same piece, so she'll move from a two-handed hi-hat fill to a floor tom tattoo to a snare rattle and back, rather than keeping both instruments going at once. On "Fatetown", Watts stutters along through the verse on the closed hat, sending out a telegraph line before punctuating Maria's lyric with a ten-stroke tom fill. There are very few drummers imaginative enough to consistently give their songs an instant sonic signature. Watts is one.
The songs: Because Alessandra Maria's guitar parts are written to correspond to the unusual beats, it's tempting to hear Tomorrow's Friend as compositionally off-the-wall. But the verses in "Fatetown" are a standard sixteen bars long: it's just the emphasis that's strange. Certainly they're not hardcore traditionalists, but they're not upending the apple cart, either. This is blues-rock, and blues-rock follows rules. Deviation from expectation here isn't as dramatic as it initially appears.
What differentiates this record from others like it? You could argue that Tomorrow's Friend takes the best elements from two genres and dispenses with their drawbacks. "Fatetown" has the D.I.Y. energy of two-man blues-rock, but none of the testosterone-drunk posing I associate with the subgenre. Like the best indiepop, it's charming and direct, and the vocals are foregrounded, but it's neither precious nor self-contained.
What's not so good?: Elephant was my favorite album of 2003, so it's not like I don't acknowledge that it can be done. But we've really all got to stop thinking that it's okay for bands to go without a bass player. What was once an irritating novelty has now become a trend, and as trends go, it's immensely unwelcome. A singer as good as Alessandra Maria needs a harmonic bottom to support her voice. Of course Tomorrow's Friend would be better with a bass instrument -- as would the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the White Stripes, and everybody else trying to get along without one for inexplicable aesthetic reasons. Lose the guitar instead, why don't you?
Recommended?: Tomorrow's Friend is at the top of any "bands to watch" list I could make. I rabidly anticipate a full-length from these guys. But hell, I will settle for more singles as good as this one.
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: Since it's marked as such, it wouldn't surprise me if there weren't any copies of "Fatetown" left. But it can't hurt to ask. The single is available for download at the site.
Title: Young Liars
From: Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Format: This is an EP release. Four lengthy songs, plus a hidden a capella version of "Mr. Grieves", which has now been covered more than "Blowin' In The Wind". All of the reviewers who've said that TV on the Radio is up to something really original by covering "Mr. Grieves" must be inhabiting a different rock universe than I do. Pixies covers -- particularly versions of songs from Doolittle -- are as common as toadstools.
Fidelity: Just a hair below radio quality. These songs won't be turning up on K-ROCK, but you can easily imagine them on 120 minutes, or whatever MTV is calling their latest "cutting edge" program. TV on the Radio sounds indie enough to satisfy purists, but never so odd or alarming that you couldn't throw it into the mix at your mom's next cocktail party.
Genre: Art-rock. Not as dreamy as Sigur Ros or as symphonic as Radiohead, but definitely leaning in the direction of "sound tapestry".
Arrangements: One of the most striking features of Young Liars is that it's often difficult to tell the synthesizers from the guitars, or drums, or even voices. It's perfectly possible that there are no synths on this record at all. Well, hell, I know that's not true. But if the lead instrument at the end of "Satellite" is an actual okarino and not a sample, I wouldn't be shocked. The rhythm track sounds like the drummers of Burundi squashed through a transistor speaker, or maybe just envelope filter feedback from an analog synthesizer. "Staring At The Sun" begins with ethereal boy-girl harmonies, a strange foreign language telecast, and then opens up into a chorus underpinned by a machine hi-hat that sounds remarkably like the stopwatch from 60 Minutes. "Blind" lopes along on a post-Maxinquaye groove; all treble instruments smeared together in a haze of feedback, treated piano, and slide guitar, and doused by reverb plates located somewhere in the Grand Canyon. You already know about the TVOTR a capella propensity. It crops up here and there. It's never as annoying as Todd Rundgren's excursions.
What's this record about?: Heartache and romantic longing. Singer Tunde Adebimpe has had some bad relationships, experienced some unrequited love, been screwed over. Usually he's poetic about it, but occasionally he descends from the cloud to make his intentions plain. This doesn't tend to be a good idea. On "Blind", he offers an "open letter to the perfect girlfriend," which he later rhymes with "be my little godsend". Oh, dear. "My life is a sucker bet!" he offers. Um, thanks for sharing.
The singer: I grew up with Selling England By The Pound stuck in my cassette player. I can sing you every word on Foxtrot, and "Games Without Frontiers" was one of my first favorite records. I tell you this because I want you to believe me when I say that Adebimpe sounds like Peter Gabriel. No, wait a second, I can't emphasize this enough: he really sounds like Peter Gabriel. This is sometimes a problem -- at moments, it makes Young Liars feel like outtakes from Security. Usually, though, the resemblance is a pleasure: Adebimpe sings with old-man-of-the-mountains authority and gravity, and his voice sits well in these mixes.
The band: TVOTR gets substantial mileage out of some of the puniest and tinniest drum machine sounds this side of Momus. It's a testament to their musical creativity -- and to their cinematic vision -- that they're always willing to subordinate their rhythm tracks to the demands of atmosphere. The guitar parts range from Joy Division-by-way-of-Interpol angularity and repetitiveness to background wailing; they're supporting characters, never leads. Synth textures are cool, arresting, enveloping, sometimes stuttering away, sometimes oscillating like the needle on a geiger counter.
The songs: Bluesy, droning. TV on the Radio rarely changes basic chord patterns. Choruses (such as they are) are marked by Adebimpe and a shift in the rhythm track. On "Satellite" and "Young Liars", Adebimpe varies the melody by singing the choruses in cut-time; "Blind" ebbs and flows, but still sounds a bit like a six-minute outro. They're probably intended to evoke the long multi-culti explorations on Remain In Light, but the effect is more trip-hop than new wave.
What distinguishes this record from other records of its genre?: Unlike most art-rock bands, Adebimpe and collaborator David Sitek don't indulge in bombast. The arrangements are varied, and the sonic palette is rich and evocative. Adebimpe doesn't sound anything like Thom Yorke.
What's not so good?: Because they are poetic and rich in imagery, it's probably not fair to call these lyrics a problem. Yet the observations and stances are often so pedestrian that it's difficult to take Adebimpe seriously. Much of the awkwardness is masked by Adebimpe's voice and the expectations it generates -- Peter Gabriel also indulged in some lovelorn phases, too. But Gabriel also wrote about giant hogweeds, blood-sucking lamias, and disembodied brains. Music this atmospheric and ethereal deserves a similarly unearthly perspective. TV on the Radio could also benefit from changing chords every now and then, and freeing their melodies from expectation. Young Liars assimilates too easily to background noise.
Recommended?: With reservations. This is a very interesting project, and one worth following. But even TV on the Radio conjures memories of Seventies art-rock glory, other all-too-prominent elements here lean toward lite-radio digestibility. I fear we may have generated our own stateside version of Coldplay.
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: TV on the Radio records are available through Touch & Go, home to some kindred art-rocking spirits (Calexico, Quasi, Man or Astroman).
Title: Meadowlands
From: Northern New Jersey. This is the second straight Wrens album with a Jersey place name: the last album was called Secaucus.
Format: Full-length album. Where prior Wrens records felt like a series of snapshots or sketches, Meadowlands is epic. Several of the tracks, including most of the key songs, clock in at five plus minutes.
Fidelity: Murky but powerful. Sound fidelity here is about as good as you'd find on an early Pavement album, or Spoon's A Series Of Sneaks, a record Meadowlands sometimes resembles.
Genre: Indie rock leaning toward emo. The Wrens are a little old to be making emo albums, but all of the elements are here: big, soaring choruses, hurt feelings, sincerity, struggle against adversity, a desperate, drowning sense of hopelessness.
Arrangements: Thick, soupy rhythm guitar, huge, rumbling bass, distant bells, some dry-sounding piano, Moog lead synthesizer playing portamento parts over the top. The Wrens saturate the sonic spectrum when their songs get big.
What's this record about?: It's been seven years since the last Wrens album, and Meadowlands is a concept record about what happens when you take seven years to make a follow-up. You get into fights with your bandmates. You shake your fists at label people who are screwing you around. You lose hope and focus. Your girlfriends get fed up and walk out; you screw around in despeartion and break hearts. You add insult to injury, you mope, you make self-important proclamations that you really don't mean. You decide that life has passed you by; you wallow. "I can't temp, I can't write", howles Charles Bissell, wondering where his next paycheck is coming from. No, it's not labor in the coal mines. But if you can remain unmoved by his unflinching honesty, you probably have no sympathy for the rock and roll project to begin with.
The singer: Bissell and Kevin Whelan lay it on thick. But hey, so does Mariah Carey; modern cultural production is built on raw, unashamed communication of emotion. The Wrens often sound like they're about to burst into tears, and that can be tedious, but at times -- like the falsetto voice-break on "She Sends Kisses" -- it's undeniably affecting. The Wrens also clip words, sneer, shave off sentences, and generally sound pissed as well as despondent. The performance on "This Boy Is Exhausted" manages to sound simultaneously defeated and angry as a cornered cur.
The band: The Wrens are considered one of the most ferocious performing acts in New Jersey, and Secaucus didn't always show you why. Meadowlands more than makes up for that: the group plays like their lives depend on getting every note right. I don't generally like big guitar, but the grandeur of the Wrens's sound is undeniable. Even when the treble is overloaded, it always feels pregnant with possibilities and meaning rather than shrill and unlistenable.
The songs: Conventional indie rock, but with ingenious twists. The Wrens won't give you a 1-4-5 chord progression: there's always a quirk thrown in, and it inevitably works. The bookend tracks are short sketches (though "The House That Guilt Built" lays out the album's fundamental complaint), and are the simplest songs; "Happy" and "She Sends Kisses" are both two-part pieces that build to thundering climaxes. "This Boy Is Exhausted" is one of the most spirited songs on a record with some long, somber stretches; "A Faster Gun" is just a blurt of manic power-pop. "Thirteen Grand" is built around a winding piano riff, "Everyone Choose Sides" a wild, scratchy, Pixies-like guitar riff. Best of all is "Ex-Girl Collection" -- four and a half minutes of aching rock melody strung like lantern lights over a muscular chord progression.
What distinguishes this record from other records of its genre?: In a glutted field, it's difficult for a traditional song-crafty indie band to distinguish themselves, but the Wrens' melodies are so memorable and their performances are so intense that after a few listens, you'd never confuse Meadowlands for anything else. And in a world of emo records, this is also one of the most depressing albums you'll ever hear, and it maintains its desperate tone throughout. Bissell and the Whelans are down about girls, down about record contracts, and down about their own possible futures, and the effect of their letdown is cumulative: by the end of Meadowlands, you don't know where the breakups begin and the bad deals end. It's all part of a great continuum of disappointment. If you're willing to dip your toe into those waters, you'll probably find them much hotter than the usual indie rock steambath.
What's not so good?: The Wrens are always honest with us, so let's be honest with them: their problems are not exactly those of world importance. If you can't stand to hear musicians whine about their bad breaks, this is probably not the album for you. At times, Bissell's self-importance and high Romantic ideology can be laughable -- "I walked away from more than you can imagine", he sneers. Oh, please.
Recommended?: Yes. Overwrought it is, but Meadowlands is also a state-of-the-art indie rock record; a craftily-fabricated wrist-slasher good enough to satisfy the intellectual demands of the songwriting formalists and the confessional demands of the emo crowd. Voters in our Critics Poll agreed -- they voted Meadowlands the best album of 2003.
Where can I get a copy/hear more?: You can pick up a copy of Meadowlands at any area rock record store worth anything. To go directly to the source, try Absolutely Kosher's site.