33 rebellions per minute
"Pumping through the heart like mud"
1997
Lauren Hoffman, MEGIDDO
Two alternate short reviews here: MEGIDDO is what Jen Trynin’s GUN SHY TRIGGER HAPPY would sound like if you peeled off all the guitar fuzz in exchange for better drum parts and slight Mideast and country affectations; or, MEGIDDO sounds like Thin White Rope trying to make a mainstream indie-rock-chick album, missing by a sizeable margin, but achieving the sideline goal of finally winning me as a fan (cash value only 99.9999% less). Also, the liner notes reveal the steady collaboration of Aimee Mann sidekick Jon Brion, and while this won't be mistaken for Aimee's work, there's some very Brion-like arrangement details here and there.
Most of the album is subdued and fairly slow, made with cleanly-picked guitars, drums aided by tambourines, organ and piano and optigon (which on “Fall Away” sounds like those lonely scaling-down keyboard notes at the end of NIN’s “Closer”). The key of G is standard here, which itself makes the melodies pleasantly distinctive. Waltz tempo is as common as 4/4, and “Cold And Gray”, my favorite of the slow songs (I especially like the nice slow-but-disjointed piano fills), stretches a few measures to six beats. I also look forward to the midtempo strut of “Strange Man”: the somewhat Vincent-Price-y organ part, 4 notes up, is impossible to follow while also following the jazzy bass, 4 notes down, while Hoffman tries out a beat-poet whisper-speak reminiscent of Suzanne Vega’s “In My Movie” trying to be ominous. Actually her whole voice is like a street-tough Vega. Which has me picturing poor Luka growling “Just don’t ask me what it was. Cuz if you do, you’ll regret it. Got it, punk?”. That’s a horribly corrosive vision--- the worst acid trips are the sulfuric ones--- and I’m making a mental note to write nice reviews of Vega’s DAYS OF OPEN HAND and 99.9 F as an apology. But MEGIDDO is--- for all Lauren’s used-and-stained, quasi walk on-the-wild-side lyrics--- just as impressive an album to me as those are. There are too few albums of understated grooves in my life, or at least too few I can tolerate, and I’m grateful for this one.
Problem is, I’d much rather hear her rock. “Lolita” is quiet in its verses, but the chorus has stun-guitar that sounds like more like a Yamaha program for “electric guitar” being fed through a seriously pissed-off compressor. “Alive” is what Classic Rock would have sounded like had it retained the hummable 3-minute pop song and the 7/8 (but occasionally 9/8) time signature as an ideal. “The Cannibal Ed”, a fun little kiddie song, is what snake-charmer music turns to when the snake already trusts you and you’re now selling it on a grand outback adventure.
But it’s “Hope You Don’t Mind”, a simple riff-piece that takes 1:57 to play and might well have taken 1:56 to write, that has kept me coming back enough to learn to love the record it’s dumped in the middle of. I’ll link to its lyrics if I can find them online, because any profundities that brief already, won’t survive summarization. I _think_ it's profound, anyway. Maybe I'm just a sucker for boppy C-major songs (with inserted Bb's). Maybe I'm distracted by how her autobiographical verses remind me of how my friend Sarah turned into a truly splendid human being despite her spending Junior High School racing through all the Sweet Valley High books (a fact which became talismanic for me on dark weekend workshifts at the public library circ desk, when I'd struggle, with each new young customer, to not stare up from their corporate-product novels, each book with its own prize competition on the back page, and scream "Go watch TV, ya little pervert! It's better for you!"). Maybe Lauren has simply cued my readiness to enjoy tra-la choruses of "The world's fucked up and we're all gonna die". The song is, I guess, flukish, a spell from a wand, and it's not my right to demand the wand yield endless reuses. But packing this, its first summoned elemental, along with 11 nice accompaning songs, is a good touch.
1999
Lauren Hoffman, FROM THE BLUE HOUSE
Once an artist had made albums I love, I have faith. When Tori Amos, piano babe, became Tori Amos, loving pawn of sound-mangler Andy Gray, and a week after purchase I was still confused and dismayed, I listened to FROM THE CHOIRGIRL HOTEL four times in a row until I couldn't imagine why I didn't love it immediately. When Tim Walters, gifted quirk-pop songwriter, turned out to have a backlog of noise/ambient work, fine, it was time to learn about ambient. When R.E.M., a great guitar-rock band, turned to loops and synthesizers and folk melodies and Beach Boy harmonies, I had patience. They earned my faith: their craft and talent are a matter of record, so all I have to do is believe that their overriding goal, their definiton of "good music", hasn't suddenly veered off from mine. Does this extend to Lauren Hoffman when she opens her second LP with "Heavy Scene"s flawless evocation of Peggy Lee, Jo Stafford, and the sort of walking-bass, soft-shoe shuffle music that belongs to that desperately unhip era when any good dancer could demonstrate what a "soft-shoe shuffle" is? Well, no, it can't extend _that_ far. Good music began in 1963, with Simon & Garfunkel and the Beatles; everyone knows that. If it began earlier, you'd have to look at a whole extra set of shelves in the record store, and we don't want that.
A few weeks later: oh, okay. "Heavy Scene"'s softly blatting trombone is fun, and I'm not in the mood to dismiss an entire decade so rudely as to ignore a song that is, actually, sorta catchy. "Bring You Down", jazzy and angular, seems just as pre-rock, but it doesn't actually sound _like_ anyone, that I can tell, and the chorus could be a modest demo for Soundgarden, who probably needed more modesty. "Dust Off Your Dreams" is Lauren's kind answer to my request for more rock: flitting but energetic, trailing off at the end of each line to gather strength for the next; racing through a melody Liz Phair appallingly forgot to make room for between "Mesmerizing" and "Divorce Song", then going dreamy (but still strong) on the refrain. "Rare New Disease", then, is the spare hollow space left from having its soul sucked out by its preceding track, but it squirms and echoes chillingly, and Lauren's voice finally carries all the burden of emptiness she keeps writing herself into, and whoa, where did she become such a good guitarist, or at least so good at miking? Maybe her jettisoning all those instruments wasn't so horrible. Hmmm….
"Song For A Boy" and "Sister" are gently percussive, near where recent Suzanne Vega songs would've ended up were Vega still using her early folkie production. "Fortune On My Name" is back near Lee or Stafford in terms of singing, but the guitar rhythm is closer to the trad-folk of Chad Mitchell Trio. "Whoever You Are" is torch song, and I can skip it comfortably, but "Sugarpie" is bluegrass with a put-on Ozark twang, and "Magic Stick" is twinkling, ebullient rock for which she actually plugs her guitar in. "Look Like Shit" and "the Addict" are just her and her guitar, both too exhausted for precision but not too exhausted to stumble onto something better, and honestly it's not constructed that differently from the previous album's inventive production-number bummers. Her voice is still a smoky alto, her melodies are still strong, her song structures are still impressively efficient. Guess she's still cool.
Even cooler: I find myself respecting her lyrics. "Hope You Don't Mind" as a crucial aside, I never reacted to MEGIDDO for its words. Here, though, Hoffman has matured into a reliably effective scene-setter. Context gives some of them irony: the first song admits her inability to express feelings of love, the second is about her inability to complain, and I neither doubt her sincerity nor see an reason not to chuckle when she tells all us lucky purchasers of her album about it. But like everything here, they're well-expressed. Other songs portray a showbiz agent in mid-seduction; a woman suicidally modeling her body after Jennifer (wife of Brad "You weren't planning to eat this, were you?" Pitt) Aniston; a DJ serving as vital communion when it's too late for the bars; and the sorts of overconfident male denizens who make bars somewhat annoying anyway. She's also become confident enough for humor. If "Song For A Boy"s dead-lover scenario is glum, she still tries a jaunty chant of "I'll be sitting down to dinner/ and you'll be floating down the river/ and I'll be singing in the shower/ and you'll be fertilizing flowers". "Sugarpie"s love-em-and-leave-em motto is "Mama gave me a metal heart/ said honey, you've got more important body parts".
Not They Might Be Giants, I know, but a welcome ray of humanity regardless. Good songs, thoughtful but passably flip attitude, excellent acoustic guitar, and a far more varied "evil dictatorship anti-production" than I at first guessed. I still ain't buying no Peggy Lee albums, understand.
FROM THE BLUE HOUSE is available at Free Union Records.
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