33 rebellions per minute
"Sail up the stream, travel far, but always leave the boat"
1990
Jesus Jones, DOUBT
You know the song "Right Here, Right Now", don't you? That perfect
marker for the end of the Cold War: "I was alive and I waited for
this... right hewre, right now, watching the world wake up from
history"? I am pleased to announce that this single is a fine and
accurate advertisement for its album. Admittedly you won't find Mike
Edwards's perfect falsetto ("and there's your siiiiign of the times")
again, and there's only one other guitar solo of note (on "Nothing To
Hold Me"). But the computerized dance drive, the unfashionably giddy
endorsement of freedom and living, Mike Edwards's quite pleasant
non-falsetto, and even large portions of the same melody keep cropping
up, and keep _working_, as often as pacing permits.
"Right Here, Right Now"'s fans should be throughly pleased aand at-home
with "International Bright Young Thing" ("please introduce yourself,
let's shock the world with what we know; squeeze the world 'til it's
small enough to join us heel to toe"), with the album's most interesting
melody; and "Real, Real, Real" ("give me a sign that you show some
emotion"), where the female-sung "oooh, oooh, oooh" over soft acoustic
percussion introduce a great bass-heavy dance groove; and "Are You
Satisfied?" ("when the time's gone by, will you ask why there was so
much left to try?"), where a siren plays nice as if it were a cute
twittering bird bragging of its prowess while the nature-lovers go
"Ahhhh"; and "Two and Two" ("always equals four, but did you never hope
for something more?") with its booming kick-drum and roiling basslines;
and "Blissed" ("let me feel the air wash over me, let the ground sink
beneath my feet, and I expect so much more from today than just a time
between tomorrow and yesterday"), with its sanded-down-to-soothing bleat
of emergency-room monitors.
"Trust Me" rocks a lot harder and faster,
"Stripped" is adventurously noisy and aggressive, "I'm Burning" is
softly recorded to a basic click-track, "Nothing To Hold Me" is blurred
and partly spoken, and none of them are individual highlights but
they're easily good enough to be useful contrasts as the Basic Jesus
Jones Sound (Version 1.1, sequel to '89's LIQUIDIZER) shines. And
"Welcome Back Victoria", with its Casio-preset wordless monks and the
cathedral echo and eventual 1890's pop-swing, I find entirely striking,
and shows an unexpected sharp tongue for social commentary ("Welcome
back, Victoria, so the pendulum swings back. So you went away, okay, we
got a little slack... We'll be no threat when we're deaf, dumb and
blind. Welcome back Victoria: clean books, clean screens, clean words,
dirty minds"). But basically, this is an album from folks with no other
place they'd rather be.
If you've ever wondered how the emotional power of recorded music
compares to that of other high technologies, well, my computer froze up
an incredible four times while I was writing this review. Four times I
hit control-apple-reset, endured the boot-up, watched the computer
patiently instruct me on the proper way to Shut Down (the one that
involves using the mouse it keeps sedating), noted in passing my
apparent fondness for the Biblically illogical phrase "Jesus fucking
Christ". And tonight, I finish this album wanting to go smash stuff. But
the point, normally, is how well _their_ computers work, and how cool it
is that we can benefit.
1997
Jesus Jones, ALREADY
Although Jesus Jones's DOUBT was a happy, extroverted, sonically
inventive album that easily overcame petty concerns like "didn't you use
that same tune in three songs already?", songwriter Mike Edwards did
understand that that trick only works in one-album doses. His immediate
solution, for PERVERSE ('93), was to write no real melodies at all--- or
maybe that's unfair, but after two discouraging listens with friends, I
feel no impulse to spend my own time and money re-examining that
impression. But take four more years off, and miracles can happen:
ALREADY (finished within a year of Paul Westerberg's EVENTUALLY and Too
Much Joy's FINALLY) sees Edwards with a whole new sheaf of simple but
worthy tunes to hang songs on. The sounds and beats borrow a lot from
Jesus Jones's "Machester Sound" past and from the less radical new
developments in club dance sound. But Jesus Jones have long taken pride
in their use of samplers to take weird sounds from their environment and
shape them into something new; and by now, dang it, they've gotten real
good, giving un-imitative mechanical buzzing to "Chemical #1" and
(differently) "Motion", a shiny legato mutant-doorbell solo to "They're
Out There", attractive bass chimera to part of "Rails", and possible
revisionings of church organ for future virtual collectives of
downloaded religious minds (especially "Wishing It Away", "Motion",
"February").
Attitudinally, the ALREADY/ FINALLY/ EVENTUALLY contrast says a lot
about the respective bands, and "For A Moment" ("If I could be all that
I want to be, the greats of this world would hang their heads in
despair. If you could hear what I want you to hear, you'd think you
couldn't breathe without that sound... Free for a moment high above,
just for a moment I am in the arms of love") is just wonderful, as
contagiously joyful a song as the synth-pop world has produced, closer
to its "what I want you to hear" than Mike probably knows. Still, much
of the optimistic burden is placed on the exciting, fast-moving,
major-key music itself this album. The sidewinding rush of "Run On
Empty" announces "the sky is falling down on you"; it places its faith
in "I see declining empires fade away/ their games were getting ugly
anyway", but 1998 is more a time of empire growing. And they know it:
the sad "Wishing It Away", string section proud in its artificiality,
says "Nothing is sacred, not life nor happiness, least of all the world
we live in unless we make it pay". "Addiction, Obsession, and Me", an
endorphin high from the beats-per-minute, goes "Drawn to a storm of
things I have to have/ with patience, like other virtues, getting in the
way... it's harder telling good from bad with your senses asking 'Was it
good for you?'". The 12th, officially last, song is "February", with
solo hymn singing, the "Itopia" keyboard sound (sad fake-choir),
hollowly echoing percussion, and dark synth-marimba, in unsmiling accord
with "The promises you break outweigh the ones you keep... you'd love to
change the system but it works too well for you".
But in the reductio absurdum of Nirvana's least healthy legacy, this
album comes with 2 bonus tracks, helpfully listed on the cover and
labelled "bonus tracks!", and with their own separate CD tracks; if only
one had been named "Endful, Nameful", this could be a funeral for the
right corpse. Anyway, "Together" crystallizes the album with a gorgeous,
minor-key melody leading into an ecstatic chorus, and "Man On The
Moon"'s hi-tech, sampled, gleaming dance beat steers the ambiguous
"There's a man on the moon and he's not coming back, but he's thinking
of you every time the world spins around" forcefully into anthem status.
Smile, everybody! While you still can...
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