The Tris McCall Report

Your Friends And Neighbors, February 22, 2003

Benjamin Cartel -- Salt Water

I'm doing a separate article on the phenomenon, but I may as well mention it here, too -- there's a group of rockers from Larchmont, New York whose writing and performing sensibilities feel altogether characteristic and interwoven. In this case, it's not surprising that the Benjamin Cartel should share elements in common with, say, Milton, since Benjamin Rosenthal and Milton are, er, actually related. They're brothers. Still, Benjamin Rosenthal isn't a blood relative of anybody in the Vitamen or Motherboard, but like his Larchmont peers, he's committed to splicing traditional narrative, literary-ironic humor, and journalistic observations about New York City into unfashionably conventional song forms. If the Vitamen's Jesse Blockton is the neurotic, painfully honest Philip Roth of the contingent and Milton is its richly poetic and celebratory Saul Bellow, that makes brother Benjamin Larchmont rock's answer to Bernard Malamud -- tougher-minded, less stylistically flashy than his peers, committed to conceptual unity and self-interrogation. Salt Water, a personal statement, is the most linear album any member of the Larchmont crew has recorded -- it flips Val Emmich's Fifteen-Minute Relationship by beginning with the narrator's moment of realization that his girl is "no good," follows through the break-up, despondency and loneliness afterward, and concludes with the early, tentative phase of a new love affair. Rosenthal hangs the song cycle (sorry, but there's really no other term for it) on solid, simmering roots-Americana music that frequently bubbles over into extremely effective rock throwdowns: "Dead Light Bulb" and "Tangled," with their controlled ferocity and deft use of disturbing urban imagery, could easily be mistaken for Lepid Opera-era Moths. Benjamin Rosenthal's voice lacks the sweet steam and grit of Milton's, but then his kiss-offs are harsher, and even his pronouncements of contentment are flintier, so his harder-edged tone feels entirely appropriate. I'm not even going to call Rosenthal out on the comparable narrowness of his focus here -- if he and Benjamin Cartel were to record a follow-up so fixated on a narrator's romantic trajectory, well, then I might quibble. But as the thoughtful and sustained hazy-sunlight love narrative of the Larchmont contingent, Salt Water feels like an essential recording. And somebody up in Westchester needs to get these groups together and put out a compilation.

Big Booté --"Top Secret" Special Multi-Media Promo, featuring "Sweet Caffeine," "Deep Or Dumb," and "When I Get Old"

Yesterday I stepped back to take the long view of the thirty records or so that I'm reviewing here, and determined that I could apply the same criticism to about three-quarters of them, and, by extension (since many of the albums I care about enough to comment on are so anomalous that they don't fit in well with mainstream trends) to just about every band involved in the modern rock enterprise. I considered setting up a macro, but that felt cynical even by my wise-guy standards, so I've settled on an acronym instead. So when you see me referring to the B-DARG, know that I'm using shorthand to decry the Big Distorted Ass Rhythm Guitar that American rockers feel necessary to push to the forefront of their mixes. Now, I loathe the B-DARG because it obscures lyrics while hampering the inflective range of singers and bass players, but you might just as well hate it because it weighs down the backbeat, or because it sounds like a food processor attempting to grate aluminum siding, or because Zen Arcade is now close to twenty years old, and perhaps we could move on to something new. In any case, it's my fervent wish that, someday soon, we can all agree to dispose of the B-DARG, which, whatever its purpose once was, has become a wretched sonic cliché. It's also an ugly-American cliché -- you don't find the obsessive need to dump the equivalent of plaster caulking into the midrange in Latin forms, or J-Pop, or Australian didgeridoo music. Questioning why American audiences seem to be unable to accept production choices where notes are left implied -- why all the blank spaces need to be filled in -- might go to the heart of something deep and sadly intractable about our mainstream culture, and perhaps we should just as well ask why our government seems so hell-bent on leveling Baghdad. But it may be just as instructive to compare the widespread use of the B-DARG to another quintessentially American problem: rampant and unapologetic obesity, particularly in those Midwestern segments of the country where guitar rockers seem as incapable of leaving the B-DARG out as their overweight parents are at sticking to their diets when confronted with a bag of pork rinds. Here on the coast, we're supposed to eat small portions of sushi and be more open to international influences, so rockers will experiment with sounds that are less overstuffed, yet when the articles get written about the best and most popular bands in the city, we're right back to the B-DARG and that familiar wall of artery-clogging, high cholesterol, meaty guitar tone. Big Booté's very name suggests obesity as much as Sir Mix-A-Lot's famous erotic aesthetic, and as this is a group of four raging white guys who don't play anything remotely resembling booty music, I'm forced to think that the ass referenced is not a comely Soul Train item, but instead a lumbering white set of mudflaps. What saves the quartet from many of the detrimental effects of their own overindulgence in the B-DARG is their old-school sense of humor, the slapdash recording of the guitar, and their singer's commendable and eye-popping ability to outscreech his bandmates' feedback. This isn't an approach I'd particularly recommend, but I must admit it works well for Big Booté, and imparts a lunatic hysteria and enthusiasm to "Deep Or Dumb" and "When I Get Old" that's undeniably infectious. If these recordings were rendered even slightly better, the balance between the vocals and the rhythm guitar would be upended, and Big Booté wouldn't have been able to construct an inhabitable musical edifice. It's a good thing, then, that they're a bunch of jokers who care more for their gags than they do about their wattage, and who maintain their smart-alecky detachment from rock and roll bombast -- it prevents them from joining the zombie army of slaves to the B-DARG. Think about that the next time you encourage your neighborhood rock band to lose the smirk and get serious.

Black Cat Revolver -- Now More Than Ever

From my perspective, the triumph of the B-DARG followed the radical resegregation of popular culture in the wake of the awful "alternative" revolution that sent popular music straight to hell, and kept it there for years. If Eighties black music (hip-hop in particular, but other forms as well) was willing to evacuate the midrange to give its vocalists the maximum latitude of communicative expression, white "alternative" forms of the Nineties would respond by forcing their singers to howl over the top of a gigantic guitorchestra. Thus, the difference between black musical forms and white musical forms became as marked as it had ever been in the twentieth century, and we moved into the new millenium with major radio stations (read: K-ROCK) comfortable with absurdly segregated playlists without even the dignity of a Rosa Parks at the back of the bus. If it sounds like I'm calling rock rhythm guitarists the instruments of the Klan, well, look, I don't write that kind of crap. I don't expect rock producers to think about the sociocultural relevance of their arrangement choices -- usually, they're just busy copying whatever radio forms have moved the most units, and notwithstanding whatever Ben, Jerry, Paul Newman and Bono want to tell you, progressivism on its own does not a business plan make. We all participate in (and thus ratify by complicity) pernicious social structures every day, and that doesn't make us demons, just Americans. Right now Williamsburg is stuffed to overflow with slumming children of the upper middle class, members of the privileged poor who are altogether comfortable keeping the emphasis on "privileged." Participating in Brooklyn music means, on some level, endorsing that attitude, one that could generally be called classist. But as any student of rock history can tell you, it's always been downwardly-mobile kids who've been most responsible for keeping traditional forms fresh. Exhibit A: Black Cat Revolver, a quintessential Brooklyn underground group, operating with about as much consideration for the pop charts as they do for the proceedings of the Senate Budget Committee. Because of the B-DARG, it's often difficult to tell at their live shows, but this is a genuine blues act, fronted by a guy who sounds like a grouchy octogenarian forced out of his thatched Mississippi Delta hut by an interstate project. Black Cat Revolver is truer, simultaneously, to the blues aesthetic than arch pomo acts like Jon Spencer and all the strict revivalists at Manny's Car Wash, because they treat the form with neither undue reverence nor gratuitous iconoclasm. Genres are carriers of immense cultural meaning, of course, but at base, they're just a vocabulary of tropes, and on tracks like the furious "Hot Box" and the amazing slow grind of "Good Life," they remind us why those tropes continue to resonate for us. Brooklyn may be the epicenter of an East Coast high-aesthetic revival, but it's also dirty and seedy, rife with strip joints and crappy bars and ugly houses with aluminum siding, and without some slumming blues-rock acts willing to tell that side of the story, we're liable to slip into a skewed and sanitized understanding of our own movement. Because I value their perspective and I want their words to be clearer, I wish Black Cat Revolver would lose the B-DARG, but I'm enough of a realist to recognize that big guitar isn't going anywhere.

Cementhead -- February Girls

Black Cat Revolver makes music that feels and sounds defiantly local -- a communiqué from Brooklyn rockers to other underground artists and musicians. Cementhead, by contrast, sets their sights on the top of the charts and the national airwaves, recording crisp, powerful radio pop-rock that could slot into a top-40 or modern rock format with ease. The commercial drawback of the Black Cat Revolver approach is that it's next to impossible to get the airplay necessary to emerge from a subcultural scene with such unconventional and willfully hookless recordings -- but hey, that may be exactly as they want it, and if it is, I'd be the last guy in the world who'd argue with their stance. The commercial drawback to the Cementhead approach is slightly more subtle, but still pretty manifest: you're in competition with thousands of other nationally-oriented groups aiming for the same ten to twelve playlist slots, and who are doing everything they possibly can to buff and polish their recordings for mass consumption. By that standard, how does Cementhead measure up? Pretty well, I'd wager: the alchemy between the bass playing, the backbeat, and the lead voice (the formula for radio hits, as far as I can tell) creates sparks, and "Paralyzin'" and "Seaside City" sound like huge, compressed, well-mastered chart-climbers, perfect for summertime top-down highway cruises. All that really gets Cementhead is a lottery ticket, though, since pop music isn't a meritocracy, and they'll still need an extremely lucky break to differentiate their excellent rock recordings from those of the other groups working this territory. But those who shoot for national attention and chart success ought to be commended for their bravery, since they're working without a safety net: February Girls isn't the sort of indie release that's going to be seized on by hipsters feeling for the finest tip of the cutting edge, so a release like this one either fulfills its commercial function or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, it generally gets lost. You can look at it this way: groups who are part of an underground circuit and who define their aspirations locally are confronted with an actual, tactile audience that moves in concert with their actions -- it's Dick, Harry, Jenny from the block, Bishka the booking agent, etc., and it's not tough to make waves when you can walk right up to the people you're attempting to engage, hand them a record, kiss them on the cheek, or punch them in the nose. But by contrast the national-radio audience, the mass audience, is always an imaginary construction. It's ephemeral, it's simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, and it has no actual gravity. The mass market for musical production was an enormous historical accident, one caused by the intersection of technology and marketing, and at the rate we're going, it's not going to be around much longer. And when you think about it, won't that be a good riddance? Isn't the very idea of attempting to communicate to the entire world at once a little silly, a little antiquated, even a little fascist?

Cold Memory -- Damage/No Damage

Damn, now I'm making it sound like I think Cementhead has ignored the concrete local subculture to concentrate on chasing rainbows, and it isn't like that at all; like every other band I'm talking about here, you can catch those guys all over town, rocking stages from Arlene Grocery to Luxx on odd nights, taking what gigs they can get, communicating quite heroically to anybody who'll listen. It's more a question of how a group's ultimate aspirations are skewed. The rudest indie hipster harbors secret fantasies of Z-100 play as surely as the hack writing jingles for supermarket commercials dreams of street credibility, and most groups will attempt to have it both ways whenever possible. The tracks from Cold Memory's Damage/No Damage are probably a little too bizarre and stylistically polyglot to fit in on mainstream modern rock radio, but sit a progressive program director down with this album, and I'm sure he'll agree that a few of these ("All The Songs You Know Are Damaged," or maybe the disturbing "Missiles") would provide worthy commentary and variation if he could find the courage to include them in his playlist. Likewise, I doubt that underground purists could feel entirely comfortable with a group whose embrace of mainstream rock convention is so evident, but the arrangement experimentation and restlessness of Cold Memory's intelligence make it impossible to deny them their due respect. Certainly the musicianship here -- especially the lead guitar playing -- is uniformly outstanding, the songwriting is thoughtful and harmonically sophisticated, and in outboard lyricist Joseph Weissman, the Long Island group has unearthed a passionate, impressionistic writing voice that virtually demands coupling with sweeping sonic settings. I don't tell people to "go out and buy this album" -- if I wanted to do that, I would have become a spin doctor -- but anybody doubting the flexibility or expressive power of modern rock really ought to hear Damage/No Damage, just to restore faith in the form.

Dave Spalding -- Invisibles

In their attention to sonic detail and musical generosity (just about every song on Damage/No Damage has great stuff peeking around corners that's only revealed through repeated listens), Cold Memory could be compared to Spacehog, but I've come to hate comparison reviews. First of all, I don't know the guys in Cold Memory, and this city is small enough that Spacehog might have swiped their equipment one night, and the very mention of Spacehog might now make them apoplectic. And if the guys in Cold Memory don't know Spacehog, if they've never heard of Spacehog, what does it really profit anybody to draw the connection? I mean, I believe Interpol when they say they've never heard Joy Division -- the comparison is useful if you're trying to get a Joy Division fan to give Turn On The Bright Lights a shot, but if you aren't a record company flack, drawing such comparisons across time and geography doesn't do much more than flatten out the very real distinctions between London in 1979 and modern Brooklyn. Not saying the case can't be made, mind you, only that the case is never made by your standard "if the Pixies and Murvana got together and cranked out a kid, it would sound just like X!" review. Then there's the problem of my own notorious musical taste, which the generous call contrarian, and the not-so-generous call whacked: I really would much rather hear Howard Jones and ABC than the Clash or Iggy Pop, so yes, it's safe to say your correspondent here won't be doing any pieces for Maximum Rock and Roll soon. But my strident championing of Howard Jones, ABC, Jodeci, Vanilla Ice, etc. draws me toward connections that inevitably make musicians uncomfortable; for instance, I've learned the hard way that city rock groups will chafe at being compared to Huey Lewis, and no amount of protestation on my part about how much I dig Huey Lewis makes the connection any more palatable for them. So, disingenuously, I'm forced to claim that (ahem) a certain local group's sound is reminiscent of the first Joe Jackson album, and swallow what I really mean, which is that their sound is a dead ringer for Sports. Tom Brislin's Spiraling reminds me of the Alan Parsons Project, and there's nothing I can do about that, especially since I love the Alan Parsons Project, and don't understand why they're considered declassé while Radiohead wins plaudits. That said, I can't imagine Tom Brislin likes it very much that I continually compare his recordings to Eye In The Sky, but I mean it as high praise, dammit, and somebody's got to resist the relentless harmonization of rock-critical assessment. All this long-winded throat clearing, as I'm sure you've guessed, is an elaborate attempt to bury the lead, since I have great respect for Dave Spalding and I don't want him to hit me over the head with a two by four. Surely the indie rock fraternity is a peaceable and mutually-supportive one, but I do not know him well enough to assume that I can compare him to Jerry Garcia without physical repercussions. Now, I don't smoke marijuana, and I've never seen the Grateful Dead in concert, but I still think of Garcia as one of the great guitarists and low-key frontmen in rock history, so when I make this comparison I'm not saying that Spalding is a hippie, but rather that he's a warm and often dazzling lead guitarist with a surprisingly expressive but unapologetically proletarian singing voice. Back when he played in the all-instrumental Pell Mell, by design, nobody heard that voice. On Invisibles, a singer-songwriter record, the voice is front and center, and when Spalding brings in a group, well, there's just no way around it, you're at least halfway to the Mars Hotel. "Long Way Down" adds a piano part straight from Pigpen McKernan's playbook to an Aoxomoxoa groove, "The Letter" and "The Scene" recall the loose but oh-so-welcoming combo arrangements on Workingman's Dead. The comparison is in further evidence on the sparer pieces, which echo the solo work of noted Garcia fan Robyn Hitchcock--the gorgeous "Snow" in particular, but also "Theory." With an acoustic guitar in his hands, Spalding favors thumpish, viscerally satisfying weaves that evoke the similarly thuggish playing of Nick Drake, but the real highlight is electric: "Listen," where the maestro cuts loose with a majestic solo scorching enough to melt pack ice.

Drew Isleib -- Sounds Through The Wall

The big gag about emo, as Hilary likes to point out, is that everybody knows they hate it, but nobody knows what it is. All working definitions dissipate under scrutiny: we're told it has something to do with Fugazi and Sunny Day Real Estate, and then directed toward obscure groups that share nothing in common with either; when pushing for examples, bands that used to be emo (on conveniently out-of-print albums) like Rainier Maria and the Promise Ring are referenced, but always with the caveat that what they do these days isn't even remotely emo anymore. Even the name of the genre is misleading -- what pop music made in the past fifty years hasn't foregrounded its emotional content? Ultimately I'm forced to conclude that emo is the biggest "no soap, radio" joke in cultural circulation, and a handful of pop-punk kids in Wisconsin are having a really good laugh at our expense as writers clumsily attempt to deploy their meaningless term. But if "emo" the genre is a humbug, it has gained traction because there has been substantial movement in the just-bubbling-under-mainstream over the past four years away from the testosterone-soaked outward engagement of groups like Creed and toward a more personal and more confessional strains of masculine expression. From a certain perspective, we've been living through a reprise of the early seventies, when, confronted by military action abroad and persistent chaos and injustice at home, white singer-songwriters increasingly retreated toward intimate production and a kind of hard-won, world-weary sensitivity. In 2003, I expect mainstream rock to give more ground to weenie pop-punk and singer-songwriter music as disenchanted white guys, alienated by American belligerence in Iraq and elsewhere, continue to reject traditional masculine roles and instead take solace in introspection and confession. We can be pretty certain that the cloak of disenchantment falls heavily across Drew Isleib's shoulders: at his recent Maxwell's show, without fanfare, he covered "I Ain't A-Marchin' Anymore," and made it feel seamless with his set of introspective (but, refreshingly, never self-pitying) acoustic guitar ballads and mid-tempo rockers. Like many of the recent crop of singer-songwriters, he's got a morbid streak -- on "Trunk," one of the more striking songs on his well-conceived debut Sounds Through The Wall, he half-jokes about checking the boot of his car for his missing girlfriend, and then wouldn't you know it, on the very next song, he's at a funeral. Like James Taylor before his brain transplant, Isleib mistrusts his impulses, worries about the effects he's having on the women who populate his songs, and sardonically doubts his own motives. It's those flashes of black humor and occasional turns of literary irony that make Isleib such an interesting character, and his unwillingness to dispel the shadows that haunt the corners of these recordings compels close and careful engagement. Not a bad guy, just honest -- he's troubled by the spectres we're all currently facing, and addresses them in his introspective manner about as well as anyone can expect. Nice hand with a drum machine and bike bells, too.

Electric Engine -- Music Building

An address on 37th Street, sure, but also a description of a means of production: music building isn't just where they're at, it's what these three guys do. Minus the incendiary and reckless Kerry Shaw and with the comparably sedate Joe Dessereau occupying the stool that once belonged to dervish George Rigney, the yang half of the Moths were free to reinvent themselves as hard-hat fabricators, engaged in brick-and-mortar assembly of roots rock constructed to code. Building with music wasn't always the Moths priority: surreal urban chaos, traffic noises, long dizzy jams and occasional mayhem-for-mayhem's-sake freakouts faded into more ruminative pieces that evoked the countryside, or at least a more open space than lower Broadway. Perhaps because of the sober and level-headed stoicism of the philosophical approach, Music Building doesn't contain the smoking jangle-rock recordings of "Step By Step" and "With Friends Like These" done at Melody Lanes. Instead, the seven-song EP presents Electric Engine as assured masters of pastoral desolation, telling stories of ambivalence and indeterminacy with blunt rural imagery and bleak humor. "I'm lights on a string/In the middle of spring/And I'm hanging off the top of a tower" sings bassist Tom Rigney on "Best Laid Plans," wondering when the wind will topple him. A few of these tracks are semi-acoustic renderings of songs that I remember from the formidable final days of the Moths; "Went And Got Drunk" is here, stripped down to rhythm tracks, Tim Reedy's weary and watchful delivery, and a few of those R.E.M. rain-bucket holler backing vocals. The stark sonic palette evokes Upstate New York -- the undulations of the hills, the high skies, the barns, hillocks and grey railroad towns. It's dreary up there, sure, but the vibe is indelible, and there's always room to build.

Gene Dreamy & Gary Sincere -- Gene Dreamy & Gary Sincere

I really cannot overemphasize the degree to which the B-DARG is a terrible and all-pervasive hazard. Here is a five-song EP that's pretty terrific, but by God, it would have been entirely successful without the B-DARG. Gene Dreamy and Gary Sincere aim for that kind of Carnaby Street throwback sixties British Invasion rock that I'm an enormous sucker for -- Jersey scenesters will know exactly what I mean when I say they're Williamsburg's answer to the Anderson Council, with a very Brooklynese ironic detachment taking the place of Peter Horvath's earnestness -- and they know how to pitch their voices to get that psychedelic chirp that serves as the foundation for all great bubblegum fluff. But then the B-DARG yanks the listener down from the stratosphere and into meat-and-potatoes terrestriality, and rather than suggesting the Strawberry Alarm Clock, the duo, saddled with an anachronism, drifts into Teenage Fanclub territory. This is not, I repeat, not a campaign for delicacy, only justice: Gene Dreamy and Gary Sincere are much too good at writing hooks to ever settle for standard power-pop production. I recognize that it was The Beatles themselves who started this trend by sticking a much louder rhythm guitar into the middle of their mix than had ever been previously attempted on a pop song (and poor George Harrison got his reputation as the Quiet One in part because John Lennon, thug that he was, was always partially drowning out his leads), but I have to believe that George Martin, were he supervising this EP, would have called off the dogs, cleared some space in the midrange, and implored the duo to focus on their core competency. In this case, it wouldn't have been difficult -- scrape away the B-DARG and what you're left with are two Zombiesque dream-pop songs ("A Cup Of Water," "I Wanna Girl"), a Who-like shouter ("I Don't Know"), a late model Rubber Soul vehicle ("Girl"), and a closer ("Jenny") that could have been written by Buddy Holly if he had been given a megadose of MDMA. I hate to Monday-morning quarterback this extremely enjoyable EP, but the duo has everything to gain and absolutely nothing to lose save a little gruffness by ditching the B-DARG, and I hope they'd indulge me in my Virtual Producer role here. Without the B-DARG, the words would be clearer, the rhythm section would sound crisper, the vocal harmonies would be fuller, and most importantly, the authenticity of the British Invasion sound would be preserved. It wouldn't matter at all if Gene Dreamy and Gary Sincere didn't have the songwriting acumen to effectively mimic the Hollies on record, but they absolutely do, and the only thing standing in their way is a piece of modern production convention that adds absolutely nothing to their sound.

Girl Harbor -- Shine On

The B-DARG obscures some of Jimmy Spoiler's lyrics, which is a shame, but then Mick Ralphs never got out of the way of Ian Hunter, either, and I've come to see Girl Harbor as a unmodified reincarnation of Mott the Hoople, complete with period wardrobe. Any one of these four highly literate wiseguys has the capacity and inclination to write rock diaries as scathing as Hunter's, sure, but that's not really what I mean by the comparison. Girl Harbor stands in exact relation to the rough living, coke snorting, party crashing element within the Williamsburg rock subculture that Mott did to the most excessive players within seventies glam and proto-metal: fascinated, celebratory, but too arch intellectual and detached to participate fully. Like Hunter, the Spoiler is a natural satirist whose edge is constantly on the verge of being swallowed or blunted by the wattage of his band. But in both cases, the wattage exists as a precondition of the satirical project -- neither writer (commendably) has any interest in taking singer-songwriter potshots from outside their dangerous and disreputable subcultural circles. Still, the reward of the dilettante satirist is clear reception, and throughout the seventies Mott the Hoople was notoriously misreceived -- they were always far too clever for their audience, who largely missed the referential and parodic elements at the heart of their project. Does a similar fate await Girl Harbor? Much will depend on the rigor of their upcoming and anticipated full-length, and their willingness to foreground their brains and resist all the LCD decisions that are de riguer to their peers. In the meantime, we've got the live shows -- always a treat, even if the Spoiler does occasionally get dissolved in the white noise -- and the Shine On EP, an enjoyable stopgap. Because they play to audience response, Girl Harbor has never abandoned a crowd-pleaser (well, they don't do "Never Been Dead" anymore, but everybody has to draw that line somewhere), so it's no surprise to find a couple of songs here that have existed more or less intact since they were called Come On and Mishka "Shotgun" Shubaly was playing bass. But Come On was a very different group from Girl Harbor -- less wry, less writerly, a little crazier, more adolescent, more attracted to chaos and curt, rude solutions -- so both "Sleeping To Drink" and especially "Boys In Heat" feel anomalous here, like missives from a currently inactive version of the Spoiler. Likewise, "Spring Is In The Air," while a wonderful and hilarious song, dates from the transition period, and doesn't catch fire with the polychromatic pyrotechnics of the title track and "Riff City." It's on the latter of those two that the full glory of Girl Harbor truly unfolds; a big blues-rock stomper with some of the weirdest and most inspired pick-up lines that the Brooklyn scene has committed to tape. "Let's get it on/ let's take it off/ oh yeah, we're going to have a bad time," wails Spoiler, before offering to smoke crack with his intended, insisting that "RU-486 is raining down on me." The singer's willingness to throw away phrases like "baby, do me like they did Diallo" testifies simultaneously to his cheeky bad taste, his logorrheic delirium, and his admirable faith that his listeners will try hard to decipher his shriek. "Falling face first in the snow," an inebriated Spoiler sings on "Shine On," "I'll take my G & T to go." A fine line they tread, this rock group, between commentary and corroboration, and because of that, theirs is a deceptively complicated project, and one that needs to be packaged and handled with care.

Interpol -- Turn On The Bright Lights

I do demand humor -- or at the very least, awareness of language -- from music, and a group like Girl Harbor, with their wordplay, trenchant pop-cultural references, and shameless willingness to wise off, will always receive the benefit of every doubt from me. Matt Hyams of the Vitamen recently suggested to me, as many have, that my tastes are counterintuitive (to his credit, he didn't actually say "counterintuitive"), and I acknowledge that to the uninitiated, they must seem that way pretty often. Nevertheless, I argue that if you've had any protracted exposure, you're bound to notice that my aesthetic preferences follow some predictable patterns: if somebody writes a song about falling off a barstool in Tuscaloosa on Easter Sunday in 1936 and describes in concrete particularity and detail the puddle he hit on the floor, I'm probably going to approve. If he writes a sweeping, uplifting anthem about the human condition, I'm usually going to hate it. I like specificity -- and dislike generality -- because specificity reinforces distinction, subtlety, and the uniqueness of individual voices, while generalities are reductive, erase human difference, and finally end up conflating all experience into a seamless mush. Others, especially Radiohead fans, will quickly notice that I hate Radiohead, and about that I've been awfully consistent over the years. Now, Radiohead is, in fact, responsible for much of the poker-faced, angst-ridden generalism that pervades our mainstream culture, so, yes, there's a connection, but in fact, I don't consider Radiohead the main offenders. No, there are four crown princes of bland universalism and "We Are The World" anthem-rocking, and they've been pushing rock music toward sweeping tapestries of boring and pointless vainglorious sound now for close to twenty years: I write of course of U2, whose garbage can Irish mysticism provides the template for amateur rock philosophers and guitorchestra leaders worldwide. Interpol has come under fire for pirating their sound from the Chameleons UK and Joy Division, and for clumsily rewriting "This Charming Man" into "Say Hello To The Angels," but like most vaguely experimental rock groups that have been embraced by audiences of people who aren't also in bands, they're mostly reminiscent of U2. If OK Computer was The Joshua Tree warmed over (and married to Neil Peart's lyrical agenda), Interpol gets some credit for bypassing the usual nexus of associations and borrowing from October and the better moments of Boy. Turn On The Bright Lights did very well on our Critics Poll this year, so to some degree their strategy is working on jaded listeners, but it's also testament to Interpol's successful adventures in formal experimentation. For corroborating evidence, I point you to the tracks on the album, most of which operate according to a compositional logic that only reveals itself after protracted exposure and careful listening. That's hard to do in 2002, since most of the templates for rock song presentation are pretty much set in stone by now, and even inveterate pioneers tend to follow generally-accepted patterns for deviation from expectation. Most of the credit has to go to the musicianship, which is pretty impressive: Turn On The Bright Lights boasts some of the most creative and flexible drum parts I've heard in years, and while Interpol is saddled with a bassist who chooses to boogie at some very peculiar times, it's undeniable that he's got the ability to lock in with the backbeat and propel these unusual tracks when he wants to. Add Paul Banks's impassive and somewhat fetching singing, and you've got a state-of-the-art piece of prog-rock -- loath to call attention to its technical and virtuosic proficiency, heavy on mood and atmosphere, dense and foreboding sonic choices, and hairpin turns handled with the assurance of a sleek, well-calibrated foreign automobile. But in the end, if, despite the innovation and flexibility, it still sounds and feels like U2, don't you think a certain amount of despair and distrust is inevitable from these quarters?

Lanky -- Inner Onwriter

Kari Orr, sage of rec.music.hip-hop, sliced the Gordian Knot of the East Coast/West Coast feud for me by attributing the production differences between the camps to the tactile conditions of audience reception: Californians are drivers, so hit music there is explicitly mixed for car stereos, while New York pedestrians favor records that sound good through tiny headphone speakers. I think we can arrive at a parallel understanding of differences between New Jersey and Williamsburg indie rock -- we're a freeway state; they hire the car service for gigs every once and a while. Brooklynites consider many of the quintessentially Jerseyan production choices gauche, but highway music requires supercompressed instruments and big arena-rock vocals that you can hear over the engine and the eighteen-wheeler passing you in the left lane. Likewise, the buried vocals and trashy lo-fi guitar sound of so much current New York indie rock crumples like a leaf if you try to pump it in your ride, but it takes on an endearing quality on walkman or at the bedsit that Garden State howlers can't pretend to. There's plenty of evidence that Lanky (former Darby Jones guitarist Frank Stabile) intended Inner Onwriter for the bedsit -- he plays most of the instruments here, the arrangements are modest, its tone is introspective by Jersey standards, and he's been very public about how most of the album was recorded in his basement. But if it succeeds in that ambition, it's because Stabile's own Big Voice is smooth, familiar, and immediately appealing. Like most of the shockingly professional indie rock records that have come out of Hoboken's Pigeon Club recently, this is music for the parkway (not to mention the Parkway) -- big impact, rhythm guitar compressed to the point of explosive punch, highly melodic, driving, catchy, optimistic, anthemic by natural effect and passionate by intent. And even those who dismiss the Jersey highway-rock tradition might find it difficult resisting Inner Onwriter's highlights. Stabile is an effective songwriter with an unerring ear for hooks and catchy choruses, so even though most of these tracks are polished to the point where comparison to the Goo Goo Dolls seems not only warranted but inevitable, the composition and craft are evident, and the enthusiasm is infectious and undeniable. Me, I love the Goo Goo Dolls, so I wouldn't even begin to try to resist a confection as sweet as "Firecracker" or the heartrending tug of "Anybody," a mid-tempo ballad as wide and pretty as a Turnpike sunrise. Like Cementhead, Lanky shoots for mainstream radio acceptance and fulfills all the base-level qualifications for getting that lottery ticket I discussed in the entry for February Girls, but because Stabile has staked his claim from the Jersey side, Inner Onwriter seems simultaneously closer to formal approximation and further from industry attention than Cementhead does. As a matter of fact, you can look at Stabile as a parallel figure to Cementhead's Gordon Smethurst -- their intentions and sources overlap considerably, and their dissimilarites can largely be accounted for by the differences between North Jersey and Williamsburg. If Stabile had been a New Yorker, he'd probably have lost some of the polish from his guitar, dulled his voice a bit and pushed it back in the mix, and made a record that sounded more like February Girls. Likewise, if Smethurst was from Bedminster and not Bedford Avenue, you can bet he'd be making highway music.

Milton -- Milton

I flatter myself to think that if my own musical project has a New York parallel, Marc "Milton" Rosenthal is probably it. Milton writes about Westchester, Manhattan, and Brooklyn with the same perceptive rigor, warmth, and hangdog loyalty with which I've always tried to represent my own North Jersey surroundings. To be fair, while my own singing voice is a pen that frequently feels like it's running out of ink, Milton possesses a remarkably expressive and immediately identifiable instrument, and while I have a soft spot for shaggy-dog stories and obscure references, Milton keeps the language pretty tight. But all of that is just to say that if you dig what I do, you really owe it to yourself to hear this guy. I doubt you could unearth a more articulate and genuinely winning singer-songwriter and first-person guitar chronicler if you spent the rest of the year sifting through every demo in the booking agent's pile at the Bottom Line. An extremely self-aware curator of his own musical choices, Milton draws from sixties Vanguard folk and protest records as trenchantly and respectfully as he pulls tropes from Springsteen, Neil Young, and John Cougar, and the Milton collection successfully presents him as the natural successor to (and inevitable culmination of) these archetypical American voices. He's got a classic American combination of concerns: passion-for-the-land Guthrieisms coupled with first-person vulnerable balladeer narratives. On "Scenes From The Interior," Milton's ardor takes the long view -- his narrator "loves America, right down to its styrofoam cup"; later, the telescope tightens, and we learn the countless reasons he's "so glad to be walking around in the City," and why his suburban home is "the town he'll never leave." The main character from "Interior" is probably a travelling singer, experiencing American towns and cities as a transient (but deeply moved) observer, and here, as elsewhere, Milton takes as his subject that strange combination of pathetic neediness and expressive generosity that drives the wandering reporter/performer. We can keep our fancy cars and our summer homes, we're told, because all the narrator wants to do is sing -- but that's not precisely true, as on "Come To The Show," he reveals quite desperately that he also requires attentive listeners. "Winter Of '39" knits together both thematic threads: it's a first-person narration by a homesick bluesman struggling through a Chicago snowstorm. Isolated from his ability to perform, he "misses New Orleans so bad"; as the jazzy accompaniment follows the subject matter, Milton painstakingly sets the scene with colorful lyrical detail, and then fully inhabits it with a frighteningly convincing portrayal. But the collection's highlight is the magnificent set-piece "This Is The Town" -- an exploration of the suburban condition both sympathetic and caustic. Not a single word or illustration is wasted, and because of Milton's skill as a performer, his images combine to form an indelible travelogue of commuter-town events and impressions. And as night falls over the rooftops of Milton's Larchmont, these songs, populated by characters who are simultaneously restless and oddly still, crammed with associations that juxtapose beauty with absurdity, close together like the wings of a great bird, or like a child's hands in prayer.

Miracle of '86 -- Every Famous Last Words, and Miika Grady -- Curtains

Two very different records here: a collection of aggressive guitar-pop tunes sung by a man possessed, and a sleepwalker's gauzy cycle of broken-hearted song-poems intoned over programmed beats and artful arrangements. But Mike Skinner (the Brooklyn drummer, not the British rapper) waxed both of these LPs at 80-20 studio in Queens, improving his already stellar reputation as a handler of disparate projects and adding another exhibit to the case for self-contained, studio-based song production companies. Along with brother Dan Skinner -- whose solo album as Sabado Domingo was also recorded at 80-20 and which will be discussed in some depth when I get around to the letter "S" -- Mike Skinner and Grady were bandmates in the Sidedoor Johnnies for several years in the late nineties; after that group disintegrated following notorious major-label mismanagement, Mike Skinner joined Miracle of '86, and Grady put together Curtains. The album washes in with guitar feedback and synth and softly strummed acoustic guitar, and remains subdued throughout; at times gliding like a monorail along effectively programmed beats. Grady's voice is low, hushed, and raspy; surrendering to heartbreak and loss, he sighs and slurs over the cool acoustic/electronic hybrids like a BQE model Robert Wratten. Grady credits Skinner with, among other things, "textures," and on a recording so atmospheric, that's a crucial role, especially since much of the emotional weight of the album is contained in the evocative sounds that bubble out of the edges of the mixes. None of this is to suggest that Curtains doesn't use rock elements -- on the contrary, the title track and the Cure-like closer "Dance With Me" end with guitar rising out of the soundscape like an obelisk in the desert, and "Taking Time Is Hell" (which really sounds like Trembling Blue Stars) rides to its conclusion on a great eighties-style scrape rhythm guitar solo. Likewise, while Every Famous Last Words is nominally a guitar-rock record, Skinner never overwhelms the listener with the B-DARG, which is pretty remarkable, since as anybody who's seen the Miracle of '86 perform can attest, in concert these kids bathe themselves in treble squall. There are plenty of effective big guitar moments on Every Famous Last Words, particularly the thunderhead of distortion on the chorus of "Dance Dance Revolution," through which lead singer Kevin Devine howls "go home!" over and over, as if recalling a bad memory he can't shake. That's affecting. But it's the slower and softer songs ("I Think You Meant To Say No," the moving "Quicksilver Moment" and the ridiculously catchy "Southern State"), many of which echo the lighter side of My Aim Is True, that distinguish this collection and elevate it above those of their pop-punk peers, most of whom are far too antsy to allow themselves to lock into a proletarian groove. Devine's inflective range is pretty much limited to a Kwellerish hurt-puppy whine and a sheet-metal shredding roar, but damned if he doesn't employ both for maximum communicative effect. Inspirational and revealing verse, from the title track: "You got it stuck in my head/ I want it to sound smart/ To ring and ring and ring and ring and ring/ And ring and ring/ And ring!"

Mishka "Shotgun" Shubaly -- To Hell With You

This has been a long time coming. Since his debut, Shubaly has been plenty busy -- booking Club Luxx, novel-writing, and, most exhaustingly, living as a New Yorker and a Brooklynite, and embodying the rough virtues of his adopted home. I can remember when the tentative title for this follow-up to the well-received Thanks For Letting Me Crash was Dollar Beer. Shubaly's not the kind of arch obscurantist who leaves the title track off of his album, so, presumably, there existed a draft version of this LP that included the relatively lighthearted "Dollar Beer." Hmm, it's probably incorrect to describe any of Shubaly's writing as lighthearted, but he's got a propensity for writing extended jokes and songs that function as platforms for his cleverness, and anybody who's seen him perform will instantly know what I mean when I say that some of his compositions ("Dollar Beer," the duet "We Came Together," etc.) allow the singer to mask his disappointment behind humor and wordplay. Well, none of those songs are on this album. To Hell With You presents Shubaly as a tough-guy too heartbroken to crack wise, a drunken lover looking to escape himself, excoriating friends and enemies, always intelligent, dangerous as a poorly-chained Doberman. This record isn't as immediate or as cheekily ingratiating as Thanks For Letting Me Crash, but it is a whole hell of a lot better, more moving, communicating of a more palpable desperation, more frightening, more willing to jettison sarcasm and glibness in favor of naked expressions of pain and loss. Shubaly's notorious singing voice makes Nick Cave sound like Mariah Carey by comparison, but this is a taste well worth acquiring, and, commendably, he knows this: the vocals are front and center here, sometimes echoed, sometimes doubled, never subsumed by the shambolic backing tracks. The hung-over, rueful "For You" and "My Love Is A Gulag" find power in pathos; the latter a dark sleepwalk through barely-sublimated rage and frustration. "I've got a secret life that begins when I black out," Shubaly sings, and spares us the details -- though later, on "Drooping The Boom," the veil of privacy is further pushed back, as the narrator is found "waking up dead" in a room that the listener can almost smell. "Hellbound" ("if we were hellbound, we'd be home by now" -- did I suggest heartbreak had squeezed all of the smartass out of this guy?), by contrast, is a portrait of the artist out of control, murderous, ranting, attempting to suffocate his intended with a gigantic blanket of scathing verbiage. Jimmy Spoiler's "Tagged And Towed" is rewritten from a cocksure (if slightly unhinged) come on into a pleading duet with Alison Langerak, whose voice provides welcome relief from the claustrophobic intensity of Shubaly's interior monologue. Best of all is "Kansas City Misery" a break-up song where nobody gets away cleanly; a Great Plains desecration complete with guitar squall from Beauty Supply frontman Josh Taggart and even a harmony vocal break(!). Shubaly could easily have made Thanks For Letting Me Crash II and kept everyone happy but himself; instead, he followed his voices and pushed further into the darkness. He might find fewer followers this time out, but those who take this trip with him will be rewarded for their dedication.

Paula Carino -- Aquacade

People laugh when I compare Shubaly to Liz Phair, but all I mean by it (usually) is that they both like to pitch their voices deep enough to trawl through the murkier elements of their experiences, and when they pull the nets up, the representations of what they've discovered are artful but uncommonly blunt. Paula Carino gets Phair comparisons, too, but that's mostly because of her voice, her evident intelligence, and a guitar tone that recalls Exile In Guyville; where Phair is generally cold-eyed and direct, Carino proceeds slyly, with reserves of cautious warmth. While she undoubtably rocks, there's no riot in this girl: she's closest in spirit to the oddball neo-traditionalist songstresses who were so prevalent in Hoboken (Janet Wygal, Ellen Skye, Deena Shoshkes, etc.) before gentrification pushed all the alternachicks out to Brooklyn. Though she'll perform in a pinch with her acoustic, Carino is a pop-rock bandleader by both intention and inclination -- she gravitates toward sonic experimentation, mildly psychedelic passages, layered production and processed vocals, none of which would sound appropriate without a full rhythm section. Aquacade, a "solo" record in name only, reveals Carino as a careful song-architect and pop craftswoman, confident in her ability to write winning chorus hooks and fashion a clever chord progression, but concerned mostly with the elaboration of her stories, characters, and scenarios. So there's plenty here to satisfy songwriting fetishists, but as for me, I get excited about Carino's records because unlike most singers who specialize in short fiction, she manages to be extremely writerly without descending into whimsy or cuteness. Sure, she doesn't like to abandon a metaphor until she's wrung as much juice out of it as possible, but that's a forgivable tic, especially when as it's clear as it is on "Venus Records" -- a song that compares a boyfriend to a "lucky find" in a cut-out bin -- that the singer is laughing along at her own absurdity. "Tip Of The Iceberg" (my version of Aquacade doesn't have a tracklisting, so I hope Carino will forgive me my educated guesses here) matches the metaphor to an appropriately frosty rock band arrangement that culminates with Beatlesque backing vocals drenched with flange; here, as elsewhere, the writer displays her unerring ability to identify and foreground musical choices that illustrate and deepen her narratives. Her lyrics, spiked with wordplay and literary devices, and her favorite technique is to situate an ambiguous line that rests somewhere between Borscht Belt wisdom and Zen koan within a specific scenario: "when they finally spring you/ it will be mid-fall" is a characteristic one, but there are many others. Look, no matter how much they feign primal release when listening to AC/DC albums with clinical detachment, intellectuals need rock records that don't talk down to them. Carino isn't shaking the rock establishment here or even pushing against its conventions, she's just being very smart, and if there's no room for that in indie rock, we might as well be making movies.

Planet Janet -- Nice Socks

If Carino got into this rock game to become a megastar -- or even a participant in mainstream culture -- a few years through the wash and rinse cycle of the New York City club scene have bled those aspirations out of her, and at any rate, she now clearly recognizes there's far more dignity in authorship than in diva-hood. When Sarah Fire from Planet Janet sings that listening to hit radio "makes her want to kill herself," what she means by that (not to say she'd own up to it; this happens, after all, in the context of a relatively straightforward love song), among other things, is that she's furious about the injustices that have kept her group off the airwaves in favor of those she considers her intellectual inferiors. And likely they are -- her inferiors, I mean, as Fire is pretty bright -- but, as I've pointed out, pop music isn't a meritocracy, and more than anything else, that's what keeps it fresh and democratic. Planet Janet are far too young and exuberant to abandon their chart ambitions, and if they ever did scale back their aims, we'd probably stop getting these huge, glossy, multi-part pop extravaganzas from them. And that'd break my heart. Nice Socks is missing their two best (and not coincidentally, their most epic), "Shut Up" and the amazing "Center Of The Universe", but there's enough here to give you the general picture. "Heart" establishes a template for what's to come -- a muscular glam rock riff, requisite stomp and swagger from the rhythm section, Fire bellowing over the top in a voice that alternately evokes Sonia Madan, Gwen Stefani, and outraged cartoon heroines, hyperactive energy, a singalong chorus, a curveball bridge that dissipates into Fire talking to herself, and a recapitulation of the original theme over which the group plays as if they were pursued by furies. The B-DARG hardly lays a glove on Fire, whose singing could probably be heard over a train collision, but it does interfere with the intelligibility of her lyrics, crumples up some of her synthesizer parts, and strips some of the definition away from the bass and drums. But this is Jersey highway music as sure as is Inner Onwriter, and that means a big guitar as a prerequisite, so perhaps I ought to simply bow to tradition and give them a flier.

Return Me To My Mind -- Return Me To My Mind

The most peculiar record of 2002 arrived courtesy of a musician who is no stranger to weirdness: pianist Dan Madinabeitia, who has participated in some of North Jersey's most warped combos. When last we heard the reclusive Madinabeitia on record, he'd been contributing songs and vocals to the incomparable and aptly-named Fixations -- a group so explicit about their sexual and cultural neuroses that they'd have made the Vitamen blush. After the dissolution of the Fixations, Madinabeitia dropped out of the pop scene for a few years, but continued writing songs and making strikingly successful home recordings -- he's gifted with a plainspoken, little-boy-lost voice that slides effortlessly to tape and conjures immediate sympathy regardless of the difficulty of his subject matter. Return Me To My Mind pairs Madinabeitia with guitarist Greg LaRosa, and the duo largely rejects rock and pop trappings in favor of an amalgam of eighties blue-eyed soul, slinky cocktail music, Sinatra-style saloon ballads, and ECM jazz recordings. It's all underpinned, however, by creepy atmospherics and spiked with improbable and occasionally jarring arrangement choices: here a Wham! saxophone, there some synth strings, sampled beats, inexplicable noises. Madinabeitia, unsurprisingly, is quite effective as a smooth soul singer, but his lyrical concerns have barely relaxed since the heyday of the Fixations. "Too Much," perhaps the frankest song ever written about menage a trois is here, as well as the disturbing sex fantasy "Zombie And The Vampire," replete with ticking drum machine, bells, plucked bass, and truly deranged synthesizer swoops. But while the Fixations were indisputably discourse-driven, Return Me To My Mind dissolves verses and choruses in lengthy instrumental sections that further destabilize the already bizarre tracks. The overall effect is one of dissolution and derangement -- minds strained and warped in the frenzy of their own activity, all to the tune of lite radio gone completely mad.

Romulus And Remus -- Echolalia

Return Me To My Mind is a capsule project -- two guys, alienated from any musical trends or subcultural scenes, hole themselves up in a studio, where their only real influences are internal ones. It's tough to maintain a capsule project in Williamsburg, because you're confronted with rock styles and trends wherever you look, and if you're at all sensitive, you absorb and respond to what you encounter. Here on the left bank of the Hudson, by contrast, much of the art and architecture exists in small settlements along the river which have no relationship to New York nor the Jersey street, so it's pretty fertile soil for introspection. Echolalia is the impressionistic work of Ulysses Serra, who lives right here in Union City, and who paints in rainy colors from his own personal palette. Serra dwells on his own heartache as monomaniacally as Drew Isleib does on Sounds Through The Wall, but unlike the self-critical and pathologically worried Isleib, Serra is so wrapped up in his own thoughts that he can barely see outside his own experience. The girls on this album are part of the tapestry of art and beauty that hypnotizes the narrator, and, as such, they're facets of his own loneliness -- as he sings on "I Hate It When Things Are Magical," "the sun sets on New York I see the light shining through your dress/ I'm instantly possessed/ I'm terribly obsessed." The object of his appreciation promptly supplies the punchline: she's not impressed. And who can blame her, really?, nobody wants to be an object of wonder. The transfixed, are, however, conscientious and patient observers, and Serra lovingly details his personal experience with the unswerving attention of a manic diarist. Because he is obsessed with beauty and texture, Echolalia is a gorgeous record, filled with gossamer threads of piano and guitar reverb, breathy vocals, delicate melodica, and sharp-focus imagery -- a field of orange trees, swaying stars, a strange moon. Interspersing delicate instrumental tracks among the more traditional indiepop songs, Echolalia achieves an elliptical, dreamlike quality, a North Hudson answer to The Clientele's Suburban Light. And when the mist clears and Serra gets down to snappy tunes -- most notably on "Mirror In The Sky" -- the clouds don't part, since his madly romantic and fragmentary sentiments only intensify the trippiness and internal consistency of the project. Unlike Miika Grady, who escapes the solipsism of indulgent heartache by the end of Curtains, Serra never emerges from his capsule of poetry, impression, wonder, and loneliness. Echolalia reads as a message in a bottle in the traditional Police sense, a distant siren from a misplaced child who views the built and natural environment as an extension of his own inner experience, wandering the world utterly lost in himself.

Sabado Domingo -- The First Day Of Our Reinvention

Ordinarily, when writing about somebody so indebted to Neutral Milk Hotel, I'd mention something about Neutral Milk Hotel in the review. Chris Serra does see to it that parts of Echolalia -- the song titled "S," for instance -- evoke In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. I don't know for sure, but I'd bet it's intentional. For a writer committed to representing inner experience with romantic and occasionally hallucinatory imagery, close engagement with NMH must seem a good place to start. Now, Dan "Sabado Domingo" Skinner claims never to have heard Neutral Milk Hotel, and I believe him, because if he had, in assessing his own work, he probably would have, er, intervened. The music he's made since the disbanding of the Sidedoor Johnnies sounds so much like NMH that if you played The First Day Of Our Reinvention to a roomful of Elephant 6 enthusiasts, I bet you'd fool at least half of them. The best giveaway here is Skinner's voice -- while he shares a certain reediness and purity of tone with Jeff Mangum, he's much less annoying, and he almost never screeches a la "Song Against Sex." Beyond that, Skinner hits all the NMH touchstones with impeccable skill: brass and piano over acoustic guitar on "Explosions," prominent woodwind solo on "Morning To Nighttime," artfully fuzzed distorto on "Trouble," fast, impossibly wordy acoustic numbers with a relentless stream of associations, restrained romanticism, surrealist touches. Skinner's got a better stable of backing singers than Mangum -- and I want to hear more of Michal Friedman, whose remarkably wispy, childlike voice positively transports a few of these recordings. The emphasis here, however, is on Skinner's articulate and consistent songwriting. All the songs I've mentioned so far are completely realized indiepop compositions, and they're joined here by at least three others that match their mastery: the dizzy, wide-sky waltz "Jet Planes," the hazy "Keep From Moving," shimmering with summer heat, and the gorgeous, touching "Snow Day." "Everything is logical but wrong" sings Skinner, diagnostic, poised, diplomatic, thinking through emotional problems, threading his way gingerly around intractable objects, gently negotiating the strange landscape of interpersonal connections.

The Negatones -- The Heavy EP

This process is broken. I don't think it's irretrievable or anything, but I'm also not terribly hopeful. Ideally, the record reviewer would exist in dialogue with the musician he's writing about: he'd advance an interpretive claim, and she, in her own column, or her own medium, would respond to that claim. The writer can take a wider scope, and discuss the artist's place within the subculture, or, if he's reviewing a piece of mass entertainment, its role in the great national play of ideas. Or, if the reviewer didn't feel like exerting the effort to make interpretive or argumentative claims, he might sink to the making of comparisons: i.e., Planet Janet sounds like a cross between Sleeper and Alanis Morrissette, or between Patti Smyth's Scandal and a perfect South Jersey spring day. Something silly like that doesn't give the artist much latitude for response, but at least a threadbare one is imaginable. But if the music industry encourages and frequently demands such associative judgements -- the better to target-market their products -- I'm afraid that the groups themselves generally ask reviewers to go one worse. They want qualitative assessments, and they want them both so they can pad their presskits and so that they can have something to show momma. And I am deeply sympathetic, both to momma, who is wondering why in hell junior is spending so much time and money recording himself making an ungodly racket, and to the very real music-business need for qualitative assessments in presskits. I'm not a complete jerkoff; I want Planet Janet to have gotten something useful out of my attempt to engage with their project. The trouble is that qualitative assessments are stupid. Critically speaking, they're a total waste of time -- they don't tell you anything other than that a particular reviewer got a bang out of a particular record on one particular day. Why anybody should care has always been beyond me, and I shake my head in speechless wonder at how and why publications like Magnet bother to churn out qualitative assessment after decontextualized qualitative assessment, stuffing presskits like a donut machine pumping jelly into pastries. Then there's the unfortunate fact that qualitative assessments tend to parrot and reinforce prevailing biases and prejudices. Examine, for instance, the All-Music Guide's massive project to assign a star rating to every album ever released; a mammoth undertaking which, whatever its intention, will only serve to reinforce the hegemony of the commonly-accepted rock story. The army of fat white guys writing the reviews and making the assessments have, unsurprisingly, managed to assign four and a half stars to Professor Griff and Ms. Melodie, while damning De La Soul Is Dead by comparison, and have further determined that Headhunter by Krokus merits a better rating than Carole King's Writer. Multiply this deadly cocktail of ignorance and lazy conventional wisdom by tens of thousands of albums, and you begin to see the trouble with broad qualitative assessments. Ultimately, one man's opinion is dependent on the man, and the man is too often wholly dependent on the bigger man's opinion. Of course there are always gadflies like me, nuts who follow a compass swaying to the demands of what seems to be an entirely unearthly magnetism, but that poses a problem no less knotty than that of the slavish follower of convention. That the Negatones satisfy all of my aesthetic criteria for "great" music is something I've made no bones about broadcasting, but then I've publicly advanced the same for the likes of Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Death By Chocolate, so thinking that my cheerleading alone will convince anybody to share my conviction is perhaps childish. One might also point out that as a rock enthusiast and a rock enthusiast above all else, I have the habit of wandering into places like Club Luxx, Luna Lounge and (god forbid) the Continental, and really getting down to whatever inchoate collection of hooligans have been thrown onstage by the booking agent; so by virtue of its catholic nature, there's something suspect about my taste. As a matter of fact, the Negatones themselves have made that claim on several occasions. I suspect they make it because they recognize they are a favorite, and they want all the advantages that ought to accrue to them because of their status as one. I'm with them, there, too - and as a fan first, a fan who's had the immense pleasure of being present at countless Negatones performances, my inclination is to drop any desire to write a detached, wide-scope article on them and instead rave about their virtues. See what I'm getting at? Like everybody else writing about music, despite my better judgement, I'm tugged in the direction of qualitative assessment by my own enthusiasm for the form and my desire to please the band. So what's a rock writer to do? The industry wants associative assessments, so they can compare Group X to Nirvana, and sell it, hypothetically, to Nirvana fans still pissed off that they didn't get a follow-up to In Utero. Group X wants a five-star rave, so they can chuck another entry in their presskit. I loathe presskits, but my distaste isn't going to chase them away any more than my disdain for associative assessments will dispel the publicist's need to market her releases by association. To ignore these realities is to be an irresponsible reviewer. Yet if the reviewer is slave to the publicist and the presskit, we might as well give up entirely on encouraging discourse between artists and teasing out significance and cultural meaning and go ahead and join the advertising industry. That may be satisfactory for those at Pulse, but it's not going to work for me. A record review might need to conform to the music-industrial requirement for qualitative and associative judgement, but it should aspire to correlative, interpretive, and sociocultural assessments as well. Let's see how that might work for the Negatones and their Heavy EP:

• Qualitative assessment: The Negatones ROCK! Well, now you think I'm being sarcastic, but no, really, they do. This is about as good a rock band as you can possibly ask for. Their experimentation with form and integration of electronic elements are simultaneously courageous and stylish, and they have the instrumental skill to successfully harmonize their prog-rock ambitions with their very infectious sense of humor. Justin Braun is an absolute rock on bass guitar, underpinning these songs with sturdy precision, and providing a launching pad for Jun Takeshta's stratospheric leads. The songs take odd twists, pile huge and demented riffs upon a superstructure of twisted steel rhythm playing, drive through dark lyrical tunnels, arrive at secret bunkers in the heart of the city. Gigantic elastic bands of guitar snap and bend with vicious twangs, the amphetamine roar of treble suffuses J Braun's relentless yelp, the words come in a torrent, like a hard rain on a tin roof. This is rock majesty -- undeniable, royal, crazy, angry as a deposed prince, amusing as his scheming jester.
• Associative assessment: If the Foo Fighters stuck their fingers in wet sockets. If McLusky added xylophone and as much fucked-up old electronic equipment they could get their hands on. If Rush had a sense of humor, if King Crimson had a sense of history, if the Police were created twenty years later and were forced to respond to grunge. If the Soft Machine got hard, if Adrian Belew got blown, if Peter Hammill got hammered, if David Byrne got burned and Talking Heads shut up and played. If Kurt Cobain met Chrissie Hynde in the back of a convenience store, and all the security cameras went dead. If William Gibson and C.J. Cherryh had a rock band. If Michael Moorcock had a rock band (other than Deep Purple, I mean). Late Batman comics, trash television, late night infomercials for indescribable products, anime, hypertext, the Tacoma-Narrows bridge.
• Sociocultural assessment: In a borough filled with rock bands attempting to chase money and tailor their sound to the whims of passing A&R people, the Negatones walk the edge. They do so at shows and on record, teetering on the brink of chaotic collapse, pushing pop songs to the bursting point, wildly adding elements in the teeth of the current fashion for subtraction and minimalism. And they do so at their own risk, remaining aloof, uncommercial, paranoid and self-sufficient, choice by reluctant choice. The Negatones would like to be stars. Most, in their position and with their professional ambitions, would make a few amendments to their sound; strip away some of the density to create something more inhabitable. The Braun brothers know what would help them, but refuse to compromise. These guys are from Westchester; they're working with a certain sense of entitlement. They demand that the world come to them. To the Negatones, amendment and alteration for the purposes of attracting industry attention would mean dumbing-down, and that's unacceptable. There's a perfectionism working here that's uncommon among Brooklyn artists. The Heavy EP -- currently the only Negatones recording available -- runs a scant ten minutes; five tracks, one instrumental. This from a group with an impressive catalog, this from a group with their own operational and reputable studio. No shortage of material, only a shortage of patience and an extremely zealous editing policy. The Braun brothers would sooner throw themselves out of their own club than settle for error or padding. Every second is made to count; everything else has been scraped into the trash can. In a borough filled with ersatz egalitarians whose records are stuffed to overflow with reiterative tracks, this gang of elitists and atavists have the temerity to pare down their interaction with the public to the handful of tracks that pass the highest inspection, and to make it painfully clear they are ready and willing to pare themselves down to nonexistence if that is what's necessary to satisfy their unceasing demands for quality control. Not for nothing are they called the Negatones.
• Interpretive assessment: J Braun speaks out, in the grand tradition of ironists and satirists throughout literary history, against dilettantism. He is paranoid, conspiracy-minded, and frequently defensive, but he keeps it together well enough to deliver his broadsides against feigned interest, phony engagement, and anybody he deems too tentative to take a genuine stand. "You seem to have a lot of questions for somebody who isn't looking for answers," he spits in "Thin Automation," just before the band brings the hammer down in a devastating crunch of electric guitar and carousel organ. Braun goes on to clarify: his contempt is not necessarily for the addressee's hypocrisy or even her feigned cluelessness (though surely that annoys him), but rather for her half-assed desire to open subjects she has no intention of investigating in earnest. "Tape Machines," a minute and a half outburst of hilarious venom complete with the most derisive-sounding xylophone this side of the Violent Femmes, pillories the democratization of NYC recording culture, and casts it as a metaphor for a general lowering of standards and a pandemic lack of rigor and commitment. "Everybody jumps to the extremes/everybody's got a tape machine/everybody's charging money and they think it's funny/it's exactly what it seems." Braun can countenance the sloppy product (at times); what he can't put up with is the conceit that the machine owners are treating their projects -- and, by extension, the rock enterprise - with the requisite gravity when it's readily apparent to him they aren't. "Everybody does the best they could/everybody hopes it'll turn out good." When his peers are unwilling to pay close enough attention to see what, to him, is an evident absence of seriousness, he becomes frustrated, and that frustration leads inexorably to a feeling of besiegement. Possessor of one of the more fruitful Star Wars obsessions in rock, Braun turns the fate of Han Solo in Empire Strikes Back into a frightening metaphor for imposed stasis and betrayal. Over a monstrous riff -- supplied with freakish muscularity by brother Justin -- Braun spills out the story of his own alienation in the terrifying "Carbon Freeze": "When you're cash poor and under the weight/and those who could save you arrive too late/and even if you're on the lease/someone else has got the keys." Trusting no one, let down by their compatriots who are "driving down the road with no lights," the Negatones are the sound of the car careening off the highway -- because nobody is at the wheel, and, struggling from the backseat, it keeps slipping out of Braun's grasping fingers.
• Correlative assessment: What place does this group have in the modern Brooklyn underground; these rock and roll astronauts who reject so many of the conventions that define Williamsburg music? In a borough that wears minimalism as a badge, the Negatones revel in overdub-happy maximalism; where it is fashionable to follow MC5 and garage rock, the Braun brothers cling to their Rush records with unflinching loyalty. While slapdash record-making on fetishized analog media has become the norm, The Heavy EP sounds hyper-processed, fretted over, defiantly digital. Can they find their archetype and fit in the growing mythology of Brooklyn music? Well, if Mooney Suzuki are Arthur, powerful, direct, perhaps a little willfully slow-witted, the Negatones are Merlin, conjuring magic behind the throne, moving backward through history, arraying wit and wisdom to produce effects of astonishing force. If Oneida is Zeus, virile, commanding, hurling thunderbolts from atop the clouds, the Negatones are Hephaestus, ugly, hunted, huddled beneath a smoking mountain, forging tools of massive power, ennobled by the dignity of the workshop. (Umm… how far can I take this?) Er…if Longwave are Odin, majestic, a bit righteous, powerful but too classy to be as pugnacious as their peers, the Negatones are Loki, mischievous, caustic, phenomenally daring, fired by schemes and plans. If The Strokes are crafty Vainamoinen, the Negatones are ambivalent Kullervo, if Palomar is the brilliant, dangerous Ishtar, the Negatones are Marduk, lord of the city, its scabs and decadence, home to the creative and destructive power of ingenuity and technology. The Negatones are every mythological figure that was cast off the mountain and found power not by courtesy of the mysteries of the divine, but by twisting the implements of the built environment to purposes of which the gods never dreamed.

There, J, let's see you put that in your presskit.

The Realistics - The Realistics

It's bursting with vibrant color, dizzy with energy and animation, blurred, intense, kaleidoscopic, hot pink. And that's just the album cover. Staten Island's restless Realistics bury the listener under an avalanche of rock musicality -- merry-go-round organ and Jerry Lee pounding piano, a rhythm section combining power and precision, a surprisingly tuneful and showy (and even occasionally baroque) vocal style, and songs that echo the clever melodicism and formidable compositional structure of Graham Parker and his pub-rock peers. Their impossibly energetic live show has taken the group across the country -- even to Asia, where they made musical history by becoming one of the first rock bands to penetrate China -- and the project has become site for industry attention and rampant speculation. My great fear for the Realistics is that a top-gun producer, retained by a major label, will attempt to strip some of the flash and hyperactive musicianship away and add a B-DARG in an effort to make their sound conform more strictly to current hit radio convention. But on The Realistics, the band is still calling their own shots; unsurprisingly, guided by their own rock school proclivities and mildly experimental sensibilities, they choose to journey into some confidently virtuosic territory. The rhythm guitar here is almost nonexistent -- "Angie", one of the best cuts here, omits it entirely, filling the midrange instead with creamy organ, hyperactive top-end bass playing, and a theatrical vocal performance that suggests Spiraling's Tom Brislin at his most self-confident. "Why Didn't You Stay" showcases bassist Mike Dos Santos's wildly elastic sensibility; springing like a randy kangaroo from note to note, sliding and growling, dancing through riffs that feel constructed according to non-Euclidian geometry. In a hail of cymbals and tom-toms, "Go Ahead" marries Will Schalda's Spencer Davis organ to Dave Patrikios's swaggering beat. The musical fireworks come courtesy of the instrumentalists' undeniable skill, but they are easily accessible to the listener because the rhythm guitar is never allowed to muddy up the track. No band in New York would be poorer-served by the B-DARG than the Realistics, and before they hit the big time and are forced to make the amendments to their sound that all radio rockers are forced by convention to make, it's important to get it on the record that the group clearly recognizes this, and if left to follow their own instincts, they'd surely keep gravitating toward arrangements that are intricate, harmonically sophisticated, and theatrical.

The Siam Cats -- The Siam Cats

Like the Rumour or the Attractions -- the two groups on which they are most consciously modeling their sound - the Realistics are able to simultaneously show off their chops while presenting three-minute pop songs, and they never let their will to stretch out undermine their modern-rock radio aspirations. The decision to avoid the B-DARG makes sense when you listen to records by their role models: on some Attractions records, Get Happy!! in particular, the guitar is this puny thing scratching in the background while the organ, bass and drums fill the sonic tapestry. But whether you're a pub-rock band or not, all thoughtful musicians must ultimately arrive at the same understanding: in a group, the drummer handles the accelerator and the brakes, the bass player steers, and the singer navigates. Everybody else is backseat driving. That's not to say that guitar is unimportant -- it can be as exciting and engrossing as any other treble instrument when it's used properly. To use a basketball metaphor, the guitar should be a small forward who comes off the bench, provides instant offense, gives the team a pick-up, and then gets the hell out of the way. Stan Blackett of the Siam Cats is a gifted guitar player, and part of that gift is his unerring knowledge of when to stop playing. Like the Realistics, these guys have a head start because of their chosen antecedents -- as surely as Dos Santos and Patrikios are echoing Nick Lowe, the Jam, and Squeeze, the Cats follow Bowie, T. Rex, and Forever Changes into relatively spacious arrangement territory. Pietro Scorsone's gorgeous Vox Continental, recorded with the appropriate period reverb, dominates most of these mixes with a sound that is frequently more haunted-house than carnivalesque. Blackett doesn't play on The Siam Cats, instead ceding guitar responsibility to the glam-rocking Joshua Taggart (check out the fork-bending lead on "Without You") and Girl Harbor's ubiquitous and protean Jimmy Spoiler. He does, however, sing all ten proper songs, performing with an emotional elasticity that allows him to discharge everything from the Love-debonair "Courtyard" and an inspired cover of Smokey Robinson's "Get Ready" with genuine aplomb. "How you turn me to stone with your eyes/and now you take me under", he sings on the Bolan-to-the-letter "Cheetah", with a deft slur and an acid twinkle, perfectly matching the period specificity of Scorsone's track. Like Gene Dreamy and Gary Sincere, the group's claim to revivalist authenticity is more than backed up by an intimate knowledge of the formal features of past genres - but unlike the would-be flower-power duo, The Siam Cats refuse to brook anything that feels like an anachronism. Scorsone, Robinson, and co-writer Micah Brashear would sooner pawn their copies of Aladdin Sane than bow to the adoption of a production aesthetic that wouldn't have fit the needs of their sources. It's easy to knock purists, sure, but these days, if the alternative is capitulation to the B-DARG, I'm happy to assist in the scrupulous revival of any genre that avoids it.

Tiger Mountain - Analog Heads Gone French

Because the formidable erudition of their research is so evident, nobody but Arthur Lee himself would listen to The Siam Cats and say "oh, hell, that sounds like something I could do." Other groups make it a little tougher, or perhaps just wear their egalitarianism prouder. Tiger Mountain makes music that feels totally effortless, and because of that, there's a temptation to underplay the quality of Analog Heads Gone French, a record that has probably been in my CD changer more times than anything else I've reviewed here. Aiming for Stonesiness and arriving instead at something that sounds very much like, er… the first Joe Jackson album, this Brooklyn quartet offer an amazing-sounding collection of ten exquisitely composed rockers - populist and friendly-tough, intelligent and wide-eyed, instantly ingratiating. Bassist Dean Rispler comes from the Brought Low, but this is a much poppier sounding recording than anything you'd find on Tee Pee records. Guitarists Tyler Lenane and Mike Jackson contribute the vocals (not to mention some superb crunchy rhythm sounds) and together comprise a two-headed presentation team that rivals that of Double-Breasted -- each singer reinforces and deepens the strengths of his counterpart. The "Love Is Simple", "Read It & Weep", and "Swerve On" sensibility is brash and direct, occasionally pouty, self-assured, and given extra ballast and emphasis by the comparably thoughtful and illustrative narrator of "Song #3", and "Get So Low". Rispler and drummer Aaron Conte keep things moving with a rock-solid backbeat and groove; when they stop on a dime and go to half-time, as they do over the solo section of the magnificent "Night Town", the result is pure rock glory. At first blush, Analog Heads Gone French doesn't feel like a tremendous achievement -- rather, it seems superficially like a genre exercise -- but you'd be hard-pressed to find another ten song album where each track is so aesthetically successful, and you couldn't ask for anything more propulsive when you're rocking down the highway. Making a formally consistent quality album from pre-established sources only sounds easy until you try to do it; then you realize that there's great craft involved in making even the most familiar rock sounds work. Tiger Mountain has made a great rock album -- one that deserves raves -- and that they've done so while staying true to rock traditionalism doesn't mean they couldn't have made one just as great if their music had departed more regularly from expectation. As Scott Miller once said about Interbabe Concern, everything on this album was done on purpose. And everything is very much up to spec.

Tommy Strazza - Tommy Strazza

Rock day September 22, 2002: It's an hour and fifteen minutes from New York City to Asbury Park, but there's a renovated train station on main street that operates a direct line to Manhattan. If you lived close to the station, and you worked in Midtown, this would not be the world's most arduous commute. It's something to think about for a future lifetime, and it's advice I'd give to young Jersey rockers. Yes, it is a concrete ruin now, but in three years it won't be. In three years it will be the center of New Jersey rock; perhaps the center of creativity in the entire state. Asbury Park is on the way back, and any renovation will incorporate the city's lengthy and storied rock past into its master plan.

I am kidding around with Hilary on our way down the shore -- down past No-Funswick to Asbury and the Stone Pony, and the Spiraling record release party. Springsteen, I say, represented the voice of Asbury in decay, Tom Brislin and Spiraling represent the resurgent Asbury Park and the high-tech renovation thereof. Bwa ha ha. Tonight is nominally an Artist Amplification show, but though Andy Gesner is bound to be there, Spiraling is running this event: Tommy Strazza, who I've never heard of but I know is Brislin-related, will be warming up the crowd, with Planet Janet getting things started at six o' clock. Apparently the stone pony runs an early Sunday schedule. Perhaps there's a dance party on afterward. Or am I just imposing Brooklyn-Luxx logic?

We're heading down early to scope out the scene and the town. The last time we chilled in Asbury Park, we were literally chilling -- it was winter, and the temperatures were subzero. Hilary spent the day breaking into the boardwalk ruins and photographing them from the inside. We also wriggled our way into an abandoned motel and a deserted carpark, and some of the pictures from that explore wound up in the liner notes for If One Of These Bottles Should Happen To Fall. Since then, I've skipped all the Asbury Music Awards presentations and Fastlane and Stone Pony events, never venturing further south than New Brunswick for rock purposes. Indie groups don't ordinarily play the Asbury circuit, though I'm sure that'll change soon. Decayed or not, plenty of the late-Nineties Jersey rock royalty (Evelyn Forever, Kid With Man Head, etc.) were based in Asbury Park and there's always been a big skatefest and all-ages punk scene here. Just wait until the McGreevey money starts pouring in.

Kicking it down the boardwalk at three in the afternoon, we notice the unmistakeable footprint of developers: new padlocks on abandoned buildings, an "information" office in an old changing station, machine-made clearings around the entrance to ancient factories. The Stone Pony squats on a cement lot toward the south side of the boardwalk, across the street from the wrecked casino, and two blocks down from the shooting gallery building with the enormous mural of the grinning man that has surely induced children's nightmares for the past fifty years. It's a block from the Atlantic Ocean -- you can see the waves from its sidewalk -- and it seems strange to me that one could rock so close to the sea. I've been living in New Jersey all my life, I'm supposed to be this enormous devotee of the Boss, and yet I've never stepped foot inside the Stone Pony. To my friends in Brooklyn I represent Jersey music, but as anybody can see I am an enormous fraud.

I want to find Doug Forbes's "Be" art gallery -- the joint he left Hoboken to start up about a year and a half ago. Since then, Doug has practically dropped off the my radar, and I don't think it's entirely been my fault. We know from reports that Bobfields is essentially on hold, and there was some speculation that Asbury had swallowed him. Hmm, Doug's loss of world hegemony - from the undisputed patriarch of the New Jersey indie scene to conspicuously M.I.A. in eighteen months. How them wheels do turn. Doug's last substantial effort at extending the reach of his influence was an attempt to relocate the Independent Music Festival to Asbury Park. If only he had succeeded, the shapes of the lives of many New Jersey indie players would now be quite different -- less oriented toward Brooklyn and more rooted in our indigenous institutions and scenes. Doug was the counterweight that kept so many of us from blowing over into Williamsburg. I don't think he realized that, or the extent of the service he performed for New Jersey culture, so he pulled up stakes. Now we're adrift, and I'm in Brooklyn almost every day.

But not today. Today I am hanging with the ghosts of Jersey rock past and Jersey rock future (Jersey rock present, for the evening, is the absurdly corporeal Brislin and Sarah Fire of Planet Janet - they may be ephemeral, but they sure ain't ghosts). The Fastlane, another legendary name from the Springsteen biography, is set to reopen this winter, and on Main Street, a few blocks in from the beach, I finally catch a glimpse of the Saint, where both Jim Testa and Baby Dayliner(?!) will be doing shows come October. Right now, I am happy for any excuse to return to Asbury -- I am digging the decrepid but functional town center. The street bordering the lake by the south side of town used to be boarded up storefronts ("Now main street's whitewashed wind-ers/and vacant stores…"); today we see art gallery after art gallery, spacious windows and huge interiors. Damn, I wish it wasn't Sunday. We have to come back when we can wander around. No sign of "Be" though, but maybe we didn't look hard enough.

Hmm… by the looks of the marquee outside the Stone Pony, the revival could probably use Doug's aesthetic assistance. The names read like a litany of Eighties crapola bands: Winger, Thin Lizzy, Skid Row, Warrant. These groups still exist? True, Guided By Voices is coming through in about a month or so, but so is the Banana Band for "Funk-o-Ween". What the hell kind of crowd frequents this joint? Ah, you can take the hair-metal out of New Jersey, but you can't, hmm… no, it's the other way around. The girls at the door don't look like metalheads, anyway, they're all wearing bright spanking new Spiraling tee-shirts, replete with a high-tech insignia that Tom Brislin's brother could have together on Adobe Illustrator after playing too much Quake. We're given tickets -- I like a club that bothers to print up tickets. We're immediately struck by the enormity and substantiality of the interior. It's about twice the size of Northsix, with a much bigger and better stage. Also, Planet Janet sounds terrific here. Evidently, there's a soundman working the booth who knows what he's doing. The lighting rig is complex, there are two bars and a café section in the far back, and the dance floor offers all kinds of an unobstructed views of the performance.

Some clubs are legendary for no reason, and some are legendary for a damned good reason. If the Stone Pony were to be transplanted to New York City, it would instantly be the best venue in town - not by a hair, but by a country mile. Sure, the decor would be different, and the crowd wouldn't be wearing sweatshirts and ill-fitting black cocktail dresses, but if you took the rudiments - the box itself - and dropped it somewhere on Driggs or Roebling, you'd have yourself the crown jewel of the New York scene. Certainly this is not my aesthetic: in some ways, the decor resembles that of a strip joint or a casino. I'm making this judgement predicated on its sonics, its sightlines, and its facility for presentation and a proper focus on the stage. What a shame that this club is wasted on Winger!

Between sets, we decide to explore the interior of the club a little more. The café area is serving popcorn and soda, which, again, is an extremely Jersey thing to do. Springsteen pictures and memorabilia are everywhere -- on the wall by the back bar, on the pillars, for sale at a huge merchandise table by the entrance. The "backstage" area, set to the side of the stage, looks vaguely like a baccarat pit -- here and elsewhere, the proximate location of Atlantic City appears to have had a considerable influence over the design choices. The deejay is playing "Where The Streets Have No Name" and "All You Need Is Love". fat, goateed beer drinkers with muscle shirts and underage dates wearing bell-bottom jeans and sneakers from Skechers mill about in groups. Toto, we're not in Brooklyn anymore.

Tommy Strazza turns out to be a skinny Italian guy; mid-twenties, I'd guess, and he's got a couple of the scrawniest arms you'll ever see on a frontman. Two guitars, bass, drums, a big riff or two, we've been down this road before. Yet there's something about Strazza himself that holds my attention, and by the third song, I'm hooked on his set and his earnestness. He makes weak-looking rock gestures onstage - a pumped fist, waving his arms, etc. -- but he does it so sincerely that it's tough not to forgive him his nebbishness. Also, while his backing group is offering next to nothing (I keep thinking they're about to break into the "Mike And The Mad Dog" radio jingle) Strazza himself is an unlikely lead titan; maybe not Tom Gerke-level, but certainly as good as anybody else I've heard around New Jersey. He's been taking these extremely lyrical solos, finding interesting notes, and I'm up front, hanging on everything he does. The songs are earnest heartland rock with winning lyrics: if Milton was from Long Beach Island rather than Larchmont, this might be the sort of thing he'd give you. Strazza puts on the harmonica for "Whatever Happened To Blood, Sweat & Tears"; it's all pro forma but undeniably great nonetheless. Maybe the milieu is going to my head. Halfway through his set he's already played twice as long as your average Negatones show - it's easy to forget when you never leave NYC that the standard length of a rock concert is not fifteen seconds. "Down & Out" is an eight-bar blues, and Strazza is making like Clapton, filling the spaces with lightning lead guitar, still behaving awkwardly and tentatively, but always true to the vocabulary of classic rock gesture. The song culminates in a wicked solo reminiscent of the best of the Tarts or Cropduster, and the audience, much bigger now, is cheering him on. This is a record-release party for Strazza, too, and he keeps thanking everybody who's helped him put his CD together, everybody running sound, everybody who came out, everybody. He pulls out an acoustic guitar for a cover of "Thunder Road", and the crowd sings along to every word. This is almost too much, know what I'm saying?, the Stone Pony, the Jersey Scene, Springsteen t-shirts on the wall, a working-class Italian guy with an acoustic guitar leading a rapt crowd through "Thunder Road" on the first night of autumn. His group retakes the stage, and we're all in heaven now -- they do a song called "The Best Day Of My Life", and it all comes together for me. This damn well could be the best day of this guy's life. With his obvious talent he might take this act to Madison Square Garden, but it's never going to be any richer for him than his record release at the Stone Pony, his first big night on a legendary stage. That's the excitement he's communicating. A cover of "Let's Go Crazy" is superfluous: he's already crazy, delirious with awe and appreciation for what rock and roll has already given him. Yes, despite all the complications...

I'm going to find myself spinning his record, to be sure, and that show was a hell of an experience. I am happy to have inhabited Tommy Strazza's world for an hour. That very different Tom (Mr. Brislin if you're nasty) immediately takes the stage, but not to play -- he's there to tinker with his four thousand MIDI cables. He looks sharp in a buttoned-down black top and his dark hair spiked up. The name is Bond, Tom Brislin. It's impossible to imagine him onstage with Jon Anderson and Chris Squire; I mean, there's incongruity for you, a bunch of old British hippies and your prototypical American techno-slickster. The floor is really filling up now -- the club is close to wall to wall. Many Genesis fans wearing ancient Duke and Abacab t-shirts have come out of the woodwork; directly in front of me, two young women are actually discussing Tony Banks. Well, we always knew that the hot chicks like prog-rock, that's nothing new.

The lights go down and it's time for the main event. Damn, this crowd likes Spiraling -- I've never seen them do a home game before. It's good to see everybody on their toes and cheering, even before Brislin plays a note. He's smiling up there, posing for the cameras and basking in the spotlight. It's impossible not to contrast his press-conference politician's approach to Tommy Strazza's clumsy earnestness. Ideologically I favor the Brislin method, but if rock is risk, as I've often argued it is… well, enough of this philosophizing, it's time for the show. "Excellent Body" sounds pretty ferocious, but I'm losing some of his words. Maybe it's where I'm standing, or maybe his guitar player is up too loud. Hmm, the guitar player is up too loud. I'm not getting the articulation on his analog synth runs that I want, because the constant rhythm guitar is saturating too much of the frequency spectrum. This has been a recurring problem for me at Spiraling shows -- I fear that Brislin buries himself in his own mixes, or is, at any rate, complicit in the prevailing conventional approach that mixes synthesizers to the margins. Well, homie wants to get on the radio. Still, you could throw a stone on Bedford Avenue and watch it bounce off the asses of a hundred guys who are essentially interchangeable with the Spiraling guitarist. There's probably one Tom Brislin on the entire East Coast of the country. He ought to highlight his playing more.

The "Transmitter" analog synth solo is otherworldly. I'm looking down at my hands and wondering how the hell he does what he does. The group is so locked in -- and so enthralled by their leader's spidery charisma -- that it's almost frightening. Brislin loses some of his intensity on the midtempo numbers, but we're all right back in the pocket with "Lightning Strikes", which is such a fantastic song that it's hard to believe it's not a prog-rock standard from 1974. This is the song that Asia spent millions of dollars of David Geffen's money searching for. The set concludes with a cover of "Take On Me" that adds nothing to the original, but throws the floor into delirium. The only reason groups do things like this is because they want applause. I've got nothing against entertainment, but indie rock needs to be something more. Spiraling encores with one of the best songs of the night, complete with a chord progression that I need to rush home and rip off.

We split without saying goodbye, even to Andy Gesner. It's been a long day down the shore. So it's goodnight to ghosts of Jersey rock future and past, and it's time to chase the present through the streets of Hoboken. But I'm sure we'll be back in Asbury soon. Some enterprising S.O.B. needs to revive the Independent Music Festival and follow up on Doug's original idea of bringing it to Asbury Park. That'll get New Yorkers across the Hudson, and re-establish some kind of needed equilibrium.

 

Call me a coward, call me a queer. As long as you're calling for dollar beer.