Your Friends And Neighbors, November 30, 2003
If the rivers ran whiskey, now wouldn't that be nice? Mishka Shubaly rocks Luxx, in a former life.
American Altitude -- - American Altitude
Masters of a kind of woodsy clarity, American Altitude make records like Chippendale makes furniture: beautiful, sturdy, stark with elegance of line. These are big pieces, too; no ornate-but-modest end-tables here, rather, American Altitude presents lengthy songs with the polish and rough-hewn dignity of a wardrobe or chest of drawers. If some of the drawers are locked, that's okay; it adds to the mystery, especially since those that are open contain antique curios, odd and unidentified items, sheafs of paper, property deeds, wires, old tools. Maybe it's your grandfather's desk -- you're stumbling around in his den on a night when all of the grown-ups are upstairs asleep. You turn the oversized key to the big drawer, and it swings open to show you the inner catacomb of containers and shelves, the clockwork precision of the design, its imposing beauty. It feels dusty, attractive and forbidden. You rifle through the papers; some you understand, most you don't. They tell the story of a life heretofore revealed to you only in bits and snatches -- they grant it a disturbing multidimensionality that you always knew was there, but didn't wholly want to see. American Altitude swings that desk drawer open on pastoral New Jersey. Just as Murmur hinted, perpetually, at the mysterious, dark and cannibalistic history of Georgia rapidly being obscured by the image of the New South, American Altitude evokes the wide sweep of the Jersey swamps, hillocks and grasslands beneath the edge-city high rises and pharmaceutical complexes. Gorgeous, lyrical, rambling at times but never uninteresting; spellbinding, shrouded, intelligent, haunted. And exquisitely performed, too.
Bishop Allen -- Charm School
I know what you're thinking, you Jersey kid and frequent reader of this page; you're frustrated, you figure, here's Tris McCall, going on and on over the past few years about how Garden State groups lack irony and sophistication, and then turning around and praising country and western acts like the Roadside Graves and American Altitude. I agree, there's a contradiction at work here, but it's not the one you believe it is. In the first place, neither American Altitude nor the Roadside Graves do "country" music -- they might use country idioms to make some of their points, but hey, so does everybody from the Rolling Stones to Al Gore. No, these guys are folk-rock bands. During a more fortuitous time, the Garden State grew folk-rock like tomatoes and early corn; you couldn't get through a weekend at Maxwell's without hearing the local favorites jangling their way through their own personal iteration of "Turn, Turn, Turn" or "Radio Free Europe". In 2003, U2 has thoroughly replaced R.E.M as the font of local indie-rock inspiration. But before that disastrous irruption happened, we were well on our way to forging a sonic identity for the state. I see the Graves and American Altitude (and LMI, too, despite their Philly reorientation) as purveyors of a specific Jersey tradition of music; one that engages with the strange hybrid of pastoral signification and unplanned urbanization that makes our state unique. So I don't associate American Altitude with Steve Earle or even the work of hipster C&W ironists like Lyle Lovett; rather, I discern their antecedents within the long line of Jersey folk-rock explorations, including Nebraska and "Downbound Train", the work of Spiral Jetty and Tiny Lights, Crazy Rhythms and Only Life, the first Speed*The*Plough album, Shore Leave by Yung Wu, Cropduster's Drunk Uncle, Drums Along The Hudson, and the early albums of Yo La Tengo. For the Roadside Graves, country idioms are grist for John Gleason's manic storytelling; for American Altitude, they're landscape-painting, delicate brushstrokes generating a sense of openness, expansiveness, the mystery of the meadow crosshatched by power cables. Those are artful and writerly moves, and I object to neither. What I object to is the employ of country signifiers to suggest the simplicity of primal emotional experience and an accompanying unironic integrity. Besides being deeply insulting to the country and those who live in rural America, when we trot out backwoods music to advertise that what we're feeling is pure, childlike, and painfully sincere, we're no better than Hollywood scriptwriters who keep the "wise" black janitor or nursemaid on hand to impart street-smart, hard-knock knowledge to the protagonist. They're vulgar plot devices, and ones that depend on our worst cultural prejudices to operate. Brooklyn musicians, most of whom ought to know better, have been among the worst offenders. While Pete's Candy Store has been the site of many astonishingly revelatory musical moments, it's also been home to some of the most gruesome dramatizations of our destructive assumptions about ignorant hicks -- all done in the name of the glorious purity and sincerity of their experience. I doubt Bishop Allen have ever played at Pete's, and for all I know they're not even Brooklynites, but Charm School nonetheless shows the messy fingerprints of the Williamsburg's undertheorized alt-country community. Because of their songwriting acumen and nifty hand with a pop hook, Bishop Allen are a group you really want to root for, and the fact that they've clearly grounded their country excursions in a firm knowledge of Muswell Hillbillies-era Kinks encourages you to give them a flier for their good taste. But Davies was always careful to keep the emphasis on Muswell Hill; the "billy" was brought on board to further a very specific argument about British traditionalism and preservation. Bishop Allen has no such agenda. Their extremely catchy, well-built songs instead detail the emotional experiences of their narrators, and true to form, the more heartbroken they get, the more punctually the slide guitar and plaintive female backing vocals appear. On "Busted Heart", the singer even contrives a cowboy dialect and makes a convincing hook out of it: "did you ever thoink?!!" he implores, over plucked electric guitar treated to sound like a banjo. It's musically effective, but ideologically troubling. And Brooklynites have an unfortunate tendency to categorize and compare groups based solely on superficial sonic resemblances. Just as mimicking the tone and structure of Entertainment doesn't make Radio 4 truly comparable to Gang Of Four, Bishop Allen's compositional references to the Kinks do not make them inheritors of Ray Davies's cool. To earn that, their dabbling in country idioms would have to point in the direction of a wider critique and a broader argument.
Black Moustache -- Black Moustache
Behind this lies the most damning critique of the celebrated Williamsburg rock revival; the only one that really sticks. It's been a fun ride, an explosive ride, colorful, fashionable, and viscerally exciting. But if you wanted to argue that all the engagement has been superficial; that this urban scene likes the look of the car but doesn't want to be bothered to get under the hood, I have no real way to contest this. I'm a Brooklyn booster, so I'd like to answer the charge that Williamsburg rockers have, over the past few years, engaged in a contest to see who can best approximate the experience of hearing certain twenty-year old records in as offhand a manner as possible -- perhaps while shopping, or dimly, muffled, through walls at a party. I'd like to, but I can't. Like all Jerseyans -- even we few Burgophiles -- I harbor a nagging suspicion that Brooklyn artists are making no fundamental emotional or intellectual connection with their audiences, and instead are being evaluated on their ability to present a racy and cinematic backdrop for the lives of certain select tastemakers. In fact, a cursory look at the most popular NYC music blogs suggests that the most celebrated groups are those who are going out of their way not to offer any such emotional or intellectual connections. Now, there is no New York City band unmotivated by an elaborated ideology (no, not even Stellastarr*), but very few are brave enough to make that ideology visible. Those that do are generally considered silly or downright schoolmarmish, and in any case, nowhere near as blasé-cool as Julian Casablancas. Ultimately, this was the undoing of the short-lived electroclash cadre: its commitment to calling attention to its own non-naturalism looked gauche next to the more studiously apolitical garage-rock and post-punk artists. (Well, to be fair, the movement's failure to produce a single memorable song probably had something to do with it, too.) Black Moustache has its origins in electroclash -- frontman Spencer Product was one of the original organizers of the Luxx late-night parties -- and perhaps in retaliation for the forced disintegration of his genre, he's decided to amp up its stealth politicism into something far more overt. Electroclash songs tended to sound like the filler on late Devo and M albums; here, Product has kept the tossed-off vibe and added some desultory guitar licks to fill in some of the blanks. But the music here is nearly incidental, or, more specifically, it exists only to give you a clue about the writer's commitments: this is a guy looking for a platform for his social observations. Most are exactly what you'd expect from a diligent new-wave revivalist -- the ubiquity of clones, the impossibility of originality, glorying in dehumanization, a transcontinental disdain for American culture. Behind the Numanesque stance, however, lurks a Dylanesque social critic: what Product really wants to do is take shots at his own milieu. "Pink scarf/ Pointed shoes/ Short mohawk/ Old news", he sneers at an electroclash type before heading "to CBGB/ to grab a freebie". "Is my voice like yours?/ Are my jeans as torn?/ Does your boyfriend know the difference anymore?" he says; morphing into his intended love object, he provides himself a synechdoche for an urban scene where ego boundaries blur in the face of fashion. "I used to find comfort in the teachings of Jung/ he was overcompensating for not being well-hung". While funny at times and almost always sympathetic, Product nonetheless undermines his own force through his adherence to the generic conventions of new wave -- his voice just isn't suited for either the material or the robotic delivery. His manifest intention is to suggest cold new-wave impassivity, but his inner protest singer constantly gets the best of him, and as he declaims, he ends up sounding like a hectoring social studies teacher. Admittedly, that's still more fun than Zach de la Rocha, but it creates cognitive dissonance when coupled with the pro forma synthpop tracks, and thus discourages protracted exposure. It's hard to sing convincingly about alienation when you're so clearly engaged. No matter how much he wants to tell you he's just a clone, the vibrancy of his personality belies his assumed two-dimensionality. He's not a robot or a carbon copy; he's a fucking freakazoid. Next time, perhaps he should bust out the acoustic guitar and do this the old fashioned way.
Chris Pierson -- The White Demo
I don't mean to imply here that I don't like Spencer Product's singing; even though his voice carries no authority, it's still cracked, whiny, declamatory, and entirely his own. The idiom he believes is the logical carrier of his cultural statements is actually unfit for him -- he's not cold-blooded and robotic, he's a soapbox shouter consumed with his own intellectual passions. As a music listener and cultural commentator sick to death of ostentatiously "emotional" music, I'm sympathetic to the deadpan intonation of classic new wave vocalists, most of whom, whether they know it or not, are committed to undermining conventional notions of originality. That said, my favorite singers tend to err in the opposite direction. I tend to respond best to unique and personal voices -- especially those, from Mishka's to Jesse Blockton's to Rachel Warren's, that might seem initially off-putting in their idiosyncrasy. Because that's what "soul" is, isn't it?, the mark of an individual and fully-formed character. Expressing that particularity -- that's soul singing, in form if not in social signification, right? And cultivating vocal i.d. is, in general, the first step toward making the kind of records that communicate enough character and setting to allow listeners to inhabit them as visitors and observers. Chris Pierson, former singer of Velour 44 and the Angry Monsters, has always shown that kind of soul -- his voice, a bizarre hybrid of Billy Corgan and Brainy Smurf, screams out of stereo speakers with the chaotic energy of twisting winds. Apparently not content with the disquieting effect of his natural tone, Pierson, solo at last, runs his instrument through some of the most warped vocal treatments I've heard on a pop record since Jesse Fuchs first played me the Somerset Hills Gaming Club collection. This ought to be an out-an-out disaster; instead, the ironically-titled White Demo succeeds beyond any reasonable expectation. Much of that is due to Pierson's songwriting smarts -- his melodies are great, expansive, hyperactive, at once alt-unusual and pop-comfortable. But simply being the most committed melodicist in Hub City butters no parsnips, and at its thunderously beating heart, The White Demo isn't a showcase for Pierson's well-chronicled skill set. This is an epistolary document, comprised in the main of open letters to several young women, and if it succeeds wildly where so much bedsit-diary music fails, it does so because the diarist himself uses all the weapons in his arsenal to provide the listener with a fully-realized character. That means augmenting rather than masking the panoply of tics, swoops, and odd percussive elocutions (his hoarse, gasping intakes of breath almost provide an alternate rhythm track) that scar his voice like fissures in a fiercely winding road. With an upper register of almost astonishing explosive power and a lower register that slides from a star-struck coo to a menacing whisper, Pierson winds his way through his evocative accounts of strained relationships with sinuous power. Recorded on what often sounds like two-track media, The White Demo communicates with a rawness that never gets in the way of Pierson's ideas. Dave Marsh once said he thought a pop singer should be a huge presence, a force of nature, dominating the track like a revival preacher in a Chautuaqua tent (okay, I added that last bit myself). Chris Pierson probably wasn't what Marsh had in mind, but he satisfies all the vital critera.
Ciampi -- Ciampi
Jeez, I said I'd keep these short this time around, and here I am on entry number five with a word count over twenty-five hundred. Hm, guess I had more to say than I thought I did. Yet still I somehow feel as if I'm short-shrifting Pierson's achievement. For instance, I didn't get around to mentioning anything about impact of the lyrics. I could quote some, but without the bizarre inflections, you're missing half the charm. (Try singing "Dara felt betrayed/the breakup was a shaaaaaam/ checked in all the churches, but neglected the museee-am"; and imagine attempting to dislodge a piece of bubblegum stuck to your back teeth as you grind your way through the diphthongs, and you might get the general idea.) Combined with the relatively sparse indiepop production and epistolary representational style, The White Demo feels like a compelling missive from a weirdo holed up in his New Brunswick basement apartment on a snowy midwinter evening, scribbling out letters in a violent torrent of compassion and criticism. Contrast this to the work of the Angry Monsters, a group that offered recordings which seemed broadcast straight from the Court Tavern stage. It's a retreat, away from clear public engagement and toward a the kind of insularity that often envelops Jersey artists; "mountain goats", as Wavemaster Mike Hollitcher recently referred to us, isolated as we are on contiguous, lofty, but lonely peaks. The Monsters' split spun its few components away from the demands and tastes of the crowd, and if Pierson's work on The White Demo emerged from a remote and claustrophobic bedroom, former bandmate Jonathan Andrew's Ciampi (recorded with singer and guitarist Mike Ferraro) rises wispily from a thicket in the backyard. That's not to say that Ciampi's music is any stranger than Pierson's. It's not -- but the four songs on their debut recording are woodsier and more remote, beholden to the tradition of spectral Jersey folk-rock. "Good vs. Evil" scrapes along on a sinewy groove until the bass and drums drop out, revealing a scratchy rhythm guitar; that guitar makes a repeat appearance on "Healthy Choice", supporting a muscular and somewhat inebriated-sounding singalong chorus. "No Rewards" retreats further into the shadows -- here the harmony vocals don't augment the melody as much as they pleasantly smother it, communicating hazy regret and a wholly internalized, introverted longing. "I swear I care", sing Andrew and Ferraro, and they sound as if they're trying desperately to convince each other. Slower and even more painful, the elegiac "Taste & Forget" twinkles vaguely like a burned-out star, and offers typically Jerseyan advice: allow yourself the brief experience, and then willfully fade into oblivion. The songs thematize communication anxiety, fear of words and speech; and the frequently mumbled vocals contribute to the feeling of a perspective enveloped by the gloom of self-imposed insularity. A musical expression of the act of turning your eyes down, swinging your shoulder, and walking away by yourself.
Elizabeth Harper -- "Rock Like A Baby" b/w "Low Tide"
And that, folks, is the Jersey folk-rock tradition in a nutshell. What's marvelous about it -- and make no mistake, Ciampi definitely gets at that wraithlike, haunting marvellousness -- is that it is not solipsistic: the act of social rejection it so often dramatizes presupposes the existence of other people to turn away from. Contrast with so many local emo-rock groups, most of whom inhabit a universe consisting entirely of their own hurt feelings, half-reconstituted memories, and girls who are obviously imaginary. This might be excusable if you're from Omaha, and you were raised in a cornfield where it's a twenty-minute tractor ride to the general store. If you are from New Jersey, you live in the most densely-populated part of a densely-populated country, and that really ought to show up in your work. From "The Boy With Perpetual Nervousness" to Ciampi, what makes our non-engagement anthems so effective is that they are manifestly expressions of the social anxiety of being surrounded by so many people. That anxiety is inscribed in the records and is generally believable; what I do wish for Jersey folk-rockers in general is that they'd flesh out their addressees a little better. I know that part of the game is being elliptical and Stipishly laconic, but I always come away from the records wishing I knew more about these people who are causing the narrators so much trepidation. No folk-rocker wants to come off drunk on literary devices, sure, but a little big city waspishness -- or maybe just attention to detail -- might go a long way. Despite her proclivity for acoustic performance, Elizabeth Harper isn't a folkster; her most obvious musical antecedent is Johnny Marr. Nonetheless, through context if not intention, she passes for one, because she's so frequently seen in their company. She's always been willing to wear her literary aspirations on her sleeve, but in New York City, that's not what distinguishes her -- Suzanne Vega, after all, has already created running room for formidably intelligent women with acoustic guitars and crisply-penned autobiographies. Because of the tremolo and the swoop of her impossibly elegant singing voice, Harper gets a rep for being precious -- it's not unearned, but it's also misleading. Behind the gossamer strands and all that waxwing butterfly junk lurks a very incisive commentator, and if her medium is delicate watercolor rather than bold oil paint, she's still a portrait-artist first and a confessor only after that. Over the past four years, Harper and collaborator Scott Rosenthal have, on record, developed for themselves an evocative impressionism, vivid with images and rich with powerful characterization. "Rock Like A Baby" and "Low Tide" are either the apotheosis of this approach, or a springboard for a recording career of no small magnificence. I think it's the latter. Certainly they've got the material for it: a back catalogue of twenty outstanding songs or so, many of which have received cursory studio treatments before they were able to figure out how to translate Harper's theatrical-delicate vocals into a pop song idiom. No such problems here; the singing is masterful, ranging from a breathy Margo Timmins-like contralto to a stratospheric and pure upper register. The melodies are supported by Rosenthal's impeccable arrangement algebra -- washes of vibrato guitar, gentle piano, brushed drums, misty non-instrument specific reverb. All of that is great. But, you know, I don't listen to Edith Piaf; for me, there's got to be content behind the beauty. Harper delivers with a pair of indelible seaside narratives, populated by wholly believable characters drawn in her characteristic clear-eyed style. The world has waited long enough -- I demand a whole album of this.
Kevin Devine -- Make The Clocks Move
The first thing you notice is a magic-markered cover sketch of a sad-looking Devine besieged by a scrawl of words; open the case and the CD itself is choked with handwritten text as well. As the most logorrheic member of the young-man-hurt-feeling brigade, Devine warns you right off the bat that if you demand your rock laconic, Make The Clocks Move probably isn't for you. Me, I like Devine precisely because he's not overly worried about pop hooks -- he's got a tremendous amount to say (albeit generally about a handful of very personal subjects) and he's not going to stop talking until his allotted time is up. On Every Famous Last Words, his lecturer's impulse was occasionally hemmed in by his group's desire to rock out; here, with a few notable exceptions, the music is stripped back to acoustic, voice, and ancillary but non-obtrusive accompaniment. As it turns out, the effect isn't all that different -- Devine's got enough of that Kwellerish whine in his voice to cut above electric rhythm guitar and big drums, so Clocks sounds more or less continuous with his work with Miracle of '86. The move to acoustic guitar is more symbolic than anything else -- a step out of to the lip of the stage, an accompanying increase in vulnerability, or perhaps an acknowledgement that all the wattage wasn't really helping him communicate. The implications are on Devine's mind, and because he's a very bright stream-of-consciousness writer first and a word organizer only afterward (and only, to be honest, intermittently), he sizes up the contours of his internal debate in the very first song: "I know the kid with the guitar/so drunk and anxious/has been done to death/so tell me what hasn't?/I'll try it/Because I'm selfish enough to want to get better/But I'm backward enough not to take any steps to get there." Yes, this is how he puts together his lyrics, what's it to you? Is it any more logical to write choruses that repeat the same line over and over, or to confine yourself to strict metrical verses? Personally, I believe that the rock convention of the repeated chorus is a waste of space; I'm going to remember it's the same melody you sang last time around, so c'mon, Avril, give me some fresh observations. I'm glad Devine sees every line and every new verse as an occasion for variations on his themes. The resulting verbosity might be offputting to garage-rock purists, but over the course of a full-length record, the accumulated detail shakes itself into something resembling a coherent worldview. Devine spends the first half of Clocks examining the instability built into the institutions he's inherited (the rambling pseudopolitical "Noose Dressed Like A Necklace", the strange self-pity/anti-war logic of "Ballgame", the anthemic but oh-so-delicately whispered "Whistling Dixie") and then, during the second half, he applies his uncertainty to his relationships with women. The payoff comes during two lovingly-detailed romantic short stories -- "The Longer I'm Out Here" and the devastated "Country Sky Glow" -- and by the time he reaches the climax of "Splitting Up Christmas", you'd probably have to be the most unsentimental bastard on earth not to be moved. Devine's method of generating sympathy for his narrators is roughly the same as his technique for getting chicks: bury the intended audience in verbiage, and hope some of it sticks. That it works as well as it does is further testament to the fact that feelings, like everything else, are discursively constructed; you can howl all you want, but to register and communicate emotion, you've got to use words.
Liza Garelik -- Liza Garelik And The Wonder Wheels
I still think that Mike Robertson, the offset guitarrist in Miracle Of '86, is the member of that crew to watch most closely, but he's yet to put together a collection of his extremely bracing Springsteen-influenced songs. When Robertson's solo album is released (and given the insane productivity level of Mike Skinner and everybody involved in 80-20 Studio, I'm expecting it soon), it'll be interesting to try to ascertain what kind of an imprint Devine's consistently inspiring solo project has had on his writing. It's a guessing game, but often one that gets you closer to the bullseye than the usual blind conjectures about influence -- based as those most often are on superficial sonic resemblance. If you're doing this indie rock thing, you're involved in an indie rock community, and therefore, unless you're an iceberg or a total asshole, your principal influence is your friends. The lived experience of practicing, doing shows, and sharing bills trumps anything you could possibly glean from old Iggy Pop records, and when you sit down to make a record, chances are you're responding to cues from your most immediate context. Liza Garelik comes from the same writerly Brooklyn circle of folk-rockers as does Paula Carino; they share bass players (the adept Andy Mattina) and I'm pretty sure they've gigged together at Freddy's and other quasi-literati Park Slope joints. A city intellectual with a guitar, Garelik, like Carino, structures her songs with the parallelism and craft of a short-story writer and the occasional wit of a brainy comedienne. Singing in a straightforward, self-possessed and unaffected voice and frequently sounding like a precocious teenager, Garelik foregrounds her narratives, favoring the same kind of spare-yet-rocking arrangement aesthetic that Carino has always chosen for herself (Garelik's guitarist, Ian Roure -- better known from The Larch -- plays a similar role to the one David Benjoya did in Carino's Regular Einstein, and the bass player, as I said, is the same guy). But while the Carino of Aquacade obscured her social commentary within ornately-designed verbal puzzle boxes -- and for the most part has avoided making explicit topical statements in song -- Liza Garelik And The Wonder Wheels is dominated by overt political commentary and direct appeals for cultural rebellion. "You're selling fish that is already rotted/ You think we're so complacent no one will ask where you got it", Garelik hurls at the "cultural overseers and production managers" on "Wicked Wind", and no matter how placid her vocal delivery, there's no disguising her venom. One song earlier, Garelik is decrying "This Channel 6 democracy" as "just a well-lit lullaby", before attempting to define the American push toward "civil war and slavery". Most remarkable of all, "Dead Man Talking" finds Garelik ventriloquizing the last words of Texas death row inmate over a bone-dry groove: "My name is Shaka, Shaka Sankofa/The state is murdering me tonight". Visually, there's nothing about Garelik that suggests the provocateur -- on the record cover she looks positively gleeful, and in the liner notes, she's smiling, posing with a guitar in a blue dress like a wannabe ingenue. The packaging iconography, complete with a big shot of the Wonderwheel, suggests whimsy rather than vitriol, and the group, while commendably energetic, rarely strikes a chord in anger. On the artist's website, she describes her music as "happy, glamorous". Whaaaat? Could it be that Garelik herself is oblivious to her own objectives? That seems unlikely; my guess -- a wild one, yes, but as I said before, not wholly uninformed -- is that Garelik slipped into the idiom familiar to her friends and associates and assumed their stance and presentation aesthetic. If that's the case, it's understandable; they're smart, she's smart, they like pop records and good literature, and surely Garelik does, too. Some cross-identification was not only inevitable but also commendable. But Liza Garelik doesn't actually want to be Freedy Johnston, she wants to get on a soapbox and lodge articulate and occasionally irate global protests. I encourage that impulse, because I applaud protest singers. Like Spencer Product, she should probably just go for it.
Mike Skinner -- Staring Into Space
Not that writing topical verse is easy to do. All nasty jokes about Tracy Chapman aside, putting together a sophisticated lyric that genuinely engages political concerns requires representational strategies that rock writers infrequently avail themselves of. Nonetheless, it's not the neuroscience some make it out to be, and there's more than one play that'll get you to the goal line. Dan Skinner, aka Sabado Domingo, showed himself savvy, philosophical, oblique when necessary but always thoroughly capable on The First Day Of Our Reinvention. Kevin Devine, on the other hand, comes raw with "The war's starting soon/and all the flags will be waving/ And Daniel's 20-year old friend will be ready/ and willing and waiting/ He's a Marine, and he told me/ And that makes me sad/ Really fucking sad". I understand if that, to you, seems a little reductive, but by God, it still works for me. Mike Skinner (Dan's brother) produced or co-produced both of those albums, and considering he's also the permanent drummer for Black Moustache, it's safe to say he's probably more of a polemical facilitator than he thinks he is. Like most engineers, Skinner's principal commitments are abstract and non-discursive -- sound, texture, beat, groove, ambience. Hang around agitators long enough, though, and you're bound to develop an argumentative edge yourself, or at the very least, a fighting impulse. Staring Into Space, his largely uncirculated solo record, offers flashes into Skinner's own self-concept; certainly it's not political in any meaningful sense (it's largely instrumental), but it is hellaciously edgy, creepy, experimental, always teetering on the brink of menace. The album marches in with a hypercompressed drum loop that repeats without interruption or accompaniment for two minutes solid; when it's finally interrupted by echoed declaiming by the auteur, it's legitimately unnerving. Here, Skinner talk-sings with the kind of dehumanized new-wave impassivity that eludes Spencer Product on Black Moustache; twisting his voice through some serious HAL-2000 echoes, his vocal eventually dissipates into disturbing word-fragments, and, finally, sheer noise. The album then takes a sharp turn toward odd hand-drum experiments, drifting dreamlike through disconcerting sonic backdrops before at last exploding into a riotous pop song about the sun. If the overall effect is something like Kip Hanrahan gone robotic, the textural grandeur and flashes of world-music alchemy keep the experimentation engrossing. Beyond that, Staring Into Space foreshadows many of the production techniques Skinner would later use to facilitate the more logocentric efforts of his pals at 80-20 studios: the silky ambiance of Miika Grady's Curtains, the crisp, nervy machine rhythms of Black Moustache, the raucous singalong dynamism of Make The Clocks Move. I want more words, because that's what I'm all about; still, I can't but admire Skinner's achievement here.
Mike Tichy -- Self-Titled
Obvious musical ineptitude isn't a requirement for indiepop recording, but it sure doesn't hurt. Mike Tichy intends to make an indiepop record here -- or at any rate, something bedroomy and intimate, beholden to a personal logic -- but his virtuosity presents him a challenge. Tichy is, technically speaking, an ace guitar player: he does things with his electric and acoustic six-string that you don't expect to hear on an independent release, and throughout Self-Titled, he displays an easy, comfortable versatility on both instruments. Hell, it sounds like he even hauls out the sitar on a track or two, and instead of just twanging away idly at it like Apples In Stereo might, he actually has the balls to play the thing. It's a strangely courageous decision, but then Tichy is all about making musicianly choices without apology: whether he's soloing (as on "Come Home") or just picking ("Palatine") he does so with a facility that betrays evident training. In many New York City circles, these rock-school moves would be considered uncool, but Tichy is a Jersey music hero precisely because it would never occur to him to dumb down his playing for the sake of some mistily-conceived punk-populist virtue. Jerseyans don't shy away from talent on display: as I've written many times before, in aesthetics we cling to a rust-belt meritocratic value system that elevates hard work, practice, and the institutional legitimacy of lessons and schooling over big city glitz, fashion, genre, and politics. Now, it's fair play for New Yorkers to call us naïve, or to make fun of our style-choices. What isn't fair is damning every Jersey artist with an unrepentant desire to show off his musicianship by comparison to the Dave Matthews Band. Tichy won't be the last Jersey-music-student-turned-champion-rocker to be so tarred, but in his case, it's particularly cruel -- before the release of Self-Titled, the guitarist was doing hard time as bass player in NYC-based mod-revival act Mooney Suzuki. Now, whatever Mooney Suzuki's virtues are, it's hard to deny that they're the very caricature of the willfully stoopid three-chord NYC stomp approach. Nominally, Tichy left Mooney so he could make indiepop records like Self-Titled, but playing the same reductive blues progressions over and over again must have made a musician of his caliber positively ache for the door. Wanting to flex stylistic and creative muscles does not make you a Dave Matthews wannabe, and room must be made for expressions of talent in independent rock music -- otherwise we'll only get records from people who have none.
Mishka Shubaly -- So Long
Besides, Dave Matthews is an unfair catch-all comparison. His music is so schizophrenic that anybody who isn't doing reductive blues-rock is probably using an element that could remind somebody of DMB. Some of Self-Titled is undeniably reminiscent of Dave Matthews in its freewheeling amalgamation of styles and approaches, but at base, Tichy doesn't build songs (or play them) like Matthews does. There are legitimate and illuminating comparisons to be made instead -- Harry Nilsson, Tumbleweed Junction-era Elton John, George Harrison solo records, Bruce Hornsby at his least piano-centric -- and just because they aren't ones that jibe with the popular and desultory conception of Jersey music doesn't mean they're not instructive. Moreover, there are times on Self-Titled when Tichy's acoustic guitar and breathy vocals sound remarkably like Elliott Smith. Nobody would seriously compare Tichy to Smith, because Tichy is, in general, a bright and optimistic presence, and gruesome depression was Smith's organizing principle. So while Smith could easily have written the chords, melody, and accompaniment to "Bottom Of The Hill", he couldn't have discharged it with the reserves of confidence and self-possession I hear in Tichy's delivery. I think "Bottom Of The Hill" -- with its patience, its quiet satisfaction, and its rejection of aggressiveness -- is the quintessential Jersey love song of 2003, and there's no Jersey version of Elliott Smith, because we just don't produce depressed singers over on this side of the Hudson. Sure, there's darkness at the edge of all of Springsteen's albums, and the Feelies seem always on the verge of dissolving into vectors of speed and dislocation, but that's different; those are active and energetic dissatisfactions, and neither the Boss nor Bill Million have the patience to wallow in discontent. There's too much change, growth, and antsiness here for Jerseyans to sit in their bedroom and mope; the perpetual dilemma is to hit the streets with conviction or to turn inward with force of expression of imagination, and by and large, that's what you get here. (Part of the persistence of the Dave Matthews Band complaint has, I think, something to do with our refusal to countenance depression -- DMB always seems like a giddy frat party, and Hoboken always seems like a giddy frat party, so it's probably a natural, if lazy and thoughtless, association.) Brooklyn, by contrast, embraces fatalistic, intelligent downer-rock, and nobody has ever been more articulate while face down in the gutter than Mishka Shubaly. Shubaly doesn't get compared to Elliott Smith either, but that has everything to do with his manly, incensed growl of a singing voice, outraged and pained like a hunter too drunk to realize he's stepped in his own bear trap. So Long represents the third installment of Shubaly's front line dispatches from the narrator's own brutal battles with relationships, the bottle, and the ghosts of rock and roll. Some of the gallows humor of Thanks For Letting Me Crash -- so disturbingly effaced by hard-eyed, unsmiling cleverness on To Hell With You -- is back, but this is still a sad, broken-hearted, depressive recording, given over at times to fits of black desperation. Yet there's evidence he's coming out of his fit, or maybe the fever is just breaking a bit, or maybe he's grown accustomed to his hallucinations. "I wanna die, but I'd settle for sleep", he sings on "Kick Of Your Halo"; by Shubaly's standards, that's almost a party. Likewise, "Killing The Ghost Of The Girl", last heard as a dirge on Thanks For Letting Me Crash is reimagined here as furious, spirited sludge-rock. "I'm turning my back on the world" he sings, once again, but now he sounds like a homicidal shouter rather than suicidal whisperer. Again, it's an improvement in mood (of sorts), albeit one that's kinda scary. On "Drooping The Boom" from To Hell With You, Shubaly over a guitar sound that actually evoked smelly socks, described his urban bedroom as a kind of horrific permanent condition; now he can growl about how "he's never going back in that hole/filled with bodies". The room still dissolves into blackness, but somehow it feels more stable, suffused with soft light after a storm. J Braun's more expansive production also helps alleviate the stinking claustrophobia of the standard Shubaly approach; Allison Langerak adds some sweetening with tasteful Wurlitzer electric piano and appropriately mournful backing vocals. Shubaly is still capable of viewing his own vomit as an appropriate gift for the object of his affections, but he's now able to step out of himself far enough to make observations about her. In character, of course: "God, you're so beautiful, it's like you're fucking deformed". He might be waking up and moving on, but he ain't transforming.
Pinataland -- Songs From The Forgotten Future, Vol. 1
Shubaly once told me that the working title of So Long was Goodbye To All That. As a listener who's always been keen on Mishka's more playful side, displayed (though never preserved) on songs such as "Dollar Beer" and "We Came Together", I was pleased to hear it; I'm hoping the writer moves on from a milieu that in some ways is beneath his formidable intellectual capacities. I believe his three EPs constitute a powerful and coherent document, but he's been there and done that, and been there some more and done that some more, and by now he's pretty much got young-rocker horrendousness covered. A guy gifted enough to write a line as poetic as "a man's only true friend is a good taxi driver/passing you kleenex through the plastic divider" ought to turn his talents to a subject other than his own failures. I'd like to orient Shubaly's wit and pith toward, say, American politics, and see what happens. But Shubaly is a true traditionalist rocker in the Neil Young-Johnny Cash school, so he's probably laughing at me now. That topical writing is a breach of tradition is pretty indisputable, and in general, such writing and singing is done by musicians who proudly wear hallmarks of difference. Historical fiction, for instance, when entertained by rockers, is often a put-on, and accompanied by wigs, absurd costumes or left-field arrangements. Pinataland does historical fiction, and sure enough, what we've got here is a bunch of nerds with tubas, accordions, theremin and strings, geeky voices, specific referents to Tammany Hall and Ota Benge. Yet what's remarkable about Songs From The Forgotten Future isn't its eccentricity -- instead, it's the familiarity of its representational strategies. Pinataland plays on heartstrings as shamelessly as Thursday; they're just more studied about it, and therefore more likely to generate an emotional response in a listener who demands a little more context before identifying with a narrator. David Wechsler and Doug Stone draw on the World's Fair as a figure for the sadness of lost futurism, intersperse old recordings and found-texts between (and in one memorable case, within) their songs, and return frequently to the theme of aviation as a hopeful but inevitably frustrated escape from personal problems. As a matter of fact, Pinataland uses the history of flight the same way Shubaly uses whisky: these characters go up in a quest for freedom, but the flight itself is perilous and the exhilaration of seeing "the sky crack wide open" is contrasted with the consequences of being an inveterate "flyboy". Instead of hauling out the bottle of scotch, these guys juxtapose the story of Matthias Rust (bet you forgot all about him) with a tale of a lovelorn astronaut, and let listeners draw the connections. If Songs From The Forgotten Future encourages listeners to hit the books or the search engines, that's great; more likely, it's going to evoke an inward response not dissimilar to that you'd get from a standard singer-songwriter rock and roll record. Without sacrificing any intensity of feeling, Pinataland manages in their eggheaded way to enrich our understanding of American history. You, rock and roller, you're an educated person, and there's no reason you can't do the same. I would very much like more records like this one, and the only thing standing in your way is your fear of losing your tough-guy rep. Forget about it; be an intellectual rocker instead. This doesn't hurt, it's easy to do, and at the end of the day, you'll have a discursive document you can feel proud of; one you can play for your grandma and have an intelligent discussion about afterward. If the price you have to pay is getting called a bookworm, remember, they said the same thing about David Byrne.
Pop*Star*Kids -- The Revenge Of Pop*Star*Kids
Look, I'm not calling for rock operettas about the election of 1824. (That said, if you were ever so inclined to do one, I'd be first in line to get my copy). Nonetheless, the extent New York musicians will go to disguise their own erudition is bothersome and tedious. It's also rarely convincing. I don't believe the Mooney Suzuki have nothing in their houses but black clothes and Iggy Pop records. Actively shutting down influences in the name of minimalism can be defended as arty, I guess, but from my perspective it feels like a lazy unwillingness to engage in the enormous multidiscursive pageant of local culture. The Pop*Star*Kids have an analogous problem to Mike Tichy's: in their case, it's not their musicianship that marks them as outsiders (although they're clearly accomplished), rather, it's their catholic taste. Principal songwriter Andee Hinds has been affected by everything from early eighties arena rock like Asia to white-label throwaway electronica to contemporary R&B, and he shoots for a synthesis of the forms. If the resulting hybrid feels more like Modern Life Is Rubbish or the first two Echobelly albums than anything from fashionable America or declassé Europe, I doubt that was intentional; those were synthetic projects, too, and pulled from disparate sources. Just as Tichy wins plaudits from me for never shying away from a tasteful opportunity to show off his technical skill, I commend Hinds for putting the wide panoply of his musical influences on display. Here is a guy who has plainly listened to a lot of records in his life, some of which were doubtlessly uncool, and he's apologizing for none of that. He's also accumulated quite a repository of cheap and wonderful guitar and synthesizer tricks from eighties radio music, and on Revenge Of Pop*Star*Kids he shoots the works: stiff Fixx guitar on "Flowerbeds, Broken Heads", twinkly satellite noises on "Kelly Scale Down", post-Ronson glam-rock riffing on "Black Days, Techno Nights". If the resulting amalgam plays like the hyperactive efforts of an auteur terrified of boring the listener even for a second, it also prevents Pop*Star*Kids from ever settling into a stale groove. Hinds is a fine singer as well, as apt to borrow inflections from Prince as Daniel Ash, and harmonizing tightly with his bandmates like the Albarn of "Popscene". By refusing to bow to the pressure to respect generic boundaries, the Pop*Star*Kids point out how arbitrary they are in the first place -- they're cultural markers, really, boundaries circumscribing the limits of communities of listeners and participants. If the Pop*Star*Kids were the sort of act that pretended to be above those communities, their disregard would feel elitist. Instead, their lyrics are a bright, colorful celebration of NYC artistry and pop culture. Theirs is a language with a rich vocabulary, and they are trying to talk to you. The dialect may be a bit funny at times, but hey, this is New York City. Even if you've got a crazy foreigner yapping at you, you listen as best as you can, because you owe it to the town, you owe it to the concept.
Sander Hicks -- Casio Bastard: The Greatest Hits Of Sander Hicks
Andee Hinds drives the Eighties point home with a personal fashion aesthetic that's among the most distinctive in New York City -- with his nose ring, torn mesh shirts, and bleached-blonde mohawk, he looks like he's stepped straight out of a Sigue Sigue Sputnik video. This is "punk", in quotation marks; it evokes the current style by calling attention to its historical precedents. If you asked him, I doubt he'd say there's anything particularly punk about his music or his stance -- his use of punk signifiers is roughly equivalent to the pillaging he's done of the classic R&B songbook. He's a magpie, he'll take what's valuable there. Sander Hicks, on the other hand, is a punk by self-definition; White Collar Crime is, to him, a punk band, and the five tracks that kick off Casio Bastard are the soundtrack to "Sarcoxie & Sealove, the Punk Rock Musical". In the interview with KTAO radio that's appended to the collection, the first words out of Hicks's mouth are "punk rock". To Hicks, punk is an ideological category: it connotes resistance culture. Both White Collar Crime and Sarcoxie & Sealove were constructed to be vessels of agitation, and it is the rare Sander Hicks song or story that does not carry, at its root and impetus, a damning critique of either mainstream ideology or consumerism. Hicks might point to the long trajectory of leftist punk groups from Fugazi to Mission of Burma and situate his songwriting within that tradition. Regardless, without the contextualization -- and even, it has to be said, with it -- nobody would ever listen to this music and think "punk". Working from a varied and sophisticated harmonic base that's more Sondheim than Sid Vicious, Hicks constructs uptempo piano rock; wordy, occasionally lengthy songs that rarely conform to a standard verse-chorus logic. With White Collar Crime, he's frequently joined by aggressive bass and drums, but no matter how hard they hit, they can't beat the Broadway out of this music. That's just fine with me, I dig show tunes, and show tunes about radical theology and economic justice are even better. WCC's muscular and characteristic sound -- all spastic piano, sizzling crash cymbal, sinuous bass, and leftist lyrics -- represents further evidence against the need for rhythm electric guitar. The Sarcoxie tracks are bare by contrast, but don't beg for further orchestration: "You Are Not Mine", the sole straight love song on this collection (and a staggeringly open piece of confessional writing worthy of Alanis Morissette) is given a spare, aching arrangement that underscores its potency. Best of all is "In Desperation You Go So Far", a requiem for Fortunate Son author Jim Hatfield: "Still I have to ask why/the only guy/who would have asked why/no fighter planes hit the sky 'til 9:35 had to die." This could be a grim listen, but throughout, Hicks remains one of the most hopeful-sounding singers in New York rock -- like a smiling newborn Jello Biafra, declaiming without bitterness, and persevering in an ardent faith that salvation will be present in the next can of apple juice he opens. The religious sentiment enthusiastically articulated on the amazing "God Is Kick Ass" ("Imagine Him coming in glory! Imagine all the people who are wrong!") is no joke; it's genuine, and it saturates this collection, offering a spiritual underpinning to these calls for resistance. It's a sweetener, coming from an already sweet perspective; a voice of protest that feels like an exhortation to celebrate, no matter how dark the times.
The Atomic Missiles -- The Atomic Missiles Are Real
Which is another reason why it's misidentified as punk -- there's not a shred of nihilism in the Sander Hicks stance. If Hicks did ever become snide and defeatist, it'd probably scupper his whole project. Political rock of any sort requires a certain open-faced earnestness to keep it from turning to vinegar in the bottle. I do believe that any group in NYC should be writing about social issues and the world situation -- we were attacked, if I remember correctly -- and sometimes it's hard to balance that desire with my demands for arch and ironic representation. The Atomic Missiles aren't exactly a punk band either -- throughout Are Real, they generate a guitar squall reminiscent of early Ash -- but they do marry some outraged political statements to likeable wise-guy attitude. "The television news tells me that the war is over", sneers Sean Korman, presumably in early 2003; he's sour, disbelieving, he listens to Fox News and kicks himself for "pretending". Turns out Korman was right to be skeptical, and if he was angry either now or then, I'm certainly not going to blame him. Elsewhere, his disaffection alights on more present targets: girls, people with overdeveloped fashion consciousness, people who cut bait and move to California, people. Korman has a soft side, but it's almost incidental; he's a guy who opens his party anthem thusly: "shut up -- I ain't getting paid to sit around and listen to you talk all night." Possessor of a comic recklessness, he swerves through the obstacle course, ducking and weaving his way through his subject matter like a downhill skier on a slalom course. There's too much B-DARG on this record, and I want Korman to refine and elaborate his political consciousness, but they're young, and their impulses are all the right ones. Anybody willing to deadpan lines like "Bill O'Reilly's talking and he's telling me we're sure to win" is worth watching.
The Negatones -- Snacktronica
A few months ago I wrote a long, elaborate piece about The Heavy EP -- it was basically metadiscourse about rock criticism, but if you didn't walk away from it feeling like I'd praised the Negatones to the ceiling, I definitely failed in my principal objective. I made some absurd claims, took some really over-the-top positions, and concluded with a ridiculous metaphor pulled from classical mythology that was meant to be so damn silly in its effusiveness that it would have been completely ineffective in a press kit. Well, the Negatones are nothing if not perverse, so it came as no surprise to find that metaphor (along with the rest of the piece) worked its way into their publicity materials -- right next to some quintessential Christgau rhetoric and firm support from Chuck Eddy. See, the Negatones tend to evoke strong feelings -- particularly among the Negatones themselves -- and if you find yourself drawn into their orbit, chances are, you're going to be joining them in their legendary chafing against gravity. In any just universe, these guys would be rewarded stupendously for their creativity, or at least their willingness to take chances. Then again, in a just universe, I'd probably be dead by now, so if only for the sake of self-preservation, I tend to take the hard line against meritocracy. The four members of the Negatones, it should be said, do not share my views on meritocracy at all; they believe (and quite accurately, I hasten to add) that they merit top dollar compensation for their artistry, and that if any group in New York City receives praise, well, they at the very least deserve equal praise. This puts them in a funny position relative to my rock criticism. I've been championing them for years, and yet I don't believe in fairness; as a matter of fact, of all the people you know who writes seriously about music, I'd venture to say I'm the one who cares the least about musical merit when I'm making my assessments about what's worthy of discussion and what isn't. Consequently, as I pointed out in my Heavy EP review, sometimes the guys just don't know what to make of me: I praise them up and down, but then I also have kind words for stuff that is, by any objective standard of quality, pretty bad. I've got no interest in quality control; they're the NYC indie group for whom quality control is the highest possible virtue. From my perspective, there's no contradiction -- I tend to respond well to their choices, whatever they happen to be on any given day. If they want to squeeze me out four or five songs at a time, fine, that's what I'll settle for; if they want to toss some basement tapes at me, chances are, I'm going to dig that, too. My strong feeling is that it's time for them to loosen up their grip a bit and crank out a Negatones full-length -- that the ten-minute bites of perfect techno-rock they've so far produced are unsatisfying only in their brevity. Simply gluing Snacktronica onto the end of The Heavy EP won't do; the two CDs are too different, and too internally coherent to benefit from crossbreeding. I suppose you could intersperse tracks, but that would be to undermine the Negatones's sequencing logic: everything on their recordings is done deliberately, with great purpose, and you can be sure there's a damned good reason why one song follows the next. Anyway, that's not what you, John and Jane Negatones fan, want to know -- what you want to know is exactly how this recording differs from its heralded predecessor. Hmm, well, if The Heavy EP was a tricked-out Cadillac, all bright paint and solid body, Snacktronica is an Aston Martin, sleek and metallic, rife with dangerous gadgetry. If The Heavy EP was a B-1 bomber, massive, snub-nosed, frightening and potent, Snacktronica is a U-2 spy plane, sneaky, stealthy, camouflaged, lethal. If The Heavy EP was a Star Wars movie, classically-structured, sympathetic, exciting, warped into hyperspace, Snacktronica is a Loony Tune, threatening, invariably hilarious, full of vertiginous drops and gravity-defying stunts. If The Heavy EP was New York City, solid, immutable, dense and busy, founded on bedrock, Snacktronica is Los Angeles, assembled from parts, a pastiche, built on shifting and unstable territory. If The Heavy EP was… okay, okay, time to change tack and describe the songs -- the guys would want me to. "And So My Troubles Began" staggers in ominously on a monster riff before exploding into a riot of horns and absurdly hyperactive drum fills. "Nature likes it entropic/and that is why there is always a crisis at hand" sings J Braun, giving the group its statement of purpose. Likewise, "Flattened By The Sun" stretches like silly putty from tangle-of-electric- wire synthesizers to a huge singalong chorus. "I Suspect There's More" is even better; banjo clanging like dried bones, wheezy Moog and brittle Rhodes, and the most paranoid and affecting vocal Braun has ever recorded. The instrumental "Conflict Error" alternates between xylophone and forty-pound barbells of bass; it's so perfectly conceived that it's actually funny. The EP closes with "Everything Oscillates" and an off-the-wall sax solo rising like a charmed snake out of a pit of synth and guitar. It's brilliant, bracing, assured, meticulous, unstable, everything we've come to expect from the Melody Lanes team. But none of that is the real reason I admire the Negatones. I admire the Negatones because they are so clearly following a personal vision, and making musical choices based entirely on what happens to sound good to them at the time. For a group with major-label aspirations, these guys have to be one of the most uncompromising acts ever to pick up guitars. Everything about them screams "indie" and "self-sufficient"; for God's sake, they built their own studio so they could indulge in this mad-scientist approach to their music on a daily basis. They may yet get snapped up by Interscope, and no band in the city deserves it more. But no band in the city needs it less.
