33 rebellions per minute
1991
Kingmaker, EAT YOURSELF WHOLE
A strong early example of what would soon become known as "Britpop", the tuneful, elegant, carefully
produced, usually somewhat wimpy genre best known for including Suede, Blur, Oasis, and Pulp.
Kingmaker's debut, which was quite commercially successful in the UK, was primarily interesting for its
intelligence and its ties to punk. Not that they sounded like the Sex Pistols; the guitar stylings recall early
U2, the tenor vocalist (Loz Hardy)'s periodic attempts to bark harshly don't change that he sounds good and
respectable, like the singer from Something Happens (that didn't help I bet). The occasional cellos hark back
to the Britpop label I just affixed. Drummer John Andrew, however, is talented, loud, and mixed to the
forefront, and he often plays, interestingly, like he was trained in marches with the British Army, giving the
album a propulsiveness which we suddenly realize we can greet as "danceable" only because we have the
excellent good fortune not to be slogging a steady left-right through jungles, scanning nervously for
ambush, carrying all our possessions in our heavy backpacks.
From the lyrics, of course, this security might be our fault and anyway temporary. The first song "Really
Scrape The Sky", an ambivalent non-anthem, starts "What a perfect day to climb the stairs into the clouds!
what a perfect day to be uncovered from beneath a shroud. A voice from every corner screams 'So nice!'
into my ears. 'Shut up!', I say, 'Enough's enough!'". The song's clearest declaration, presented in punk
defiance of "They", is "What a perfect day to burn and have no use at all", but even that surrenders to "I'm
standing with my back against the wall, cuz then I won't be stabbed by you or fall". Hardy catches a
powerful spirit of youthful idealism ("the rabbi can teach what the bagman can't sell") stretched on the rack
of a Thatcherized world where "the traffic lights are red for the honest man", where "no one is freeborn and
nowhere unzoned", and where the girls he goes out with are too bloody self-centered (youthful idealism
doesn't stay entirely focused, of course...). I like the residual faith in human spirit behind the clumsily
phrased criticism "You've always instituted retribution for misguided members of institutions. You've
always denied deliverance for fooled followers of ignorance". Still, maybe too much empathy is getting him
down. Get the foolers, get the misguiders! "What a perfect day to paint all that isn't red, red"! Rat-a-tat-tat,
rat-a-tat-tat, HUP, 2, 3, 4!
1993
Kingmaker, SLEEPWALKING
Exactly like a Suede album, only with great songs.
Okay, so you don't know what Suede sound like. Be difficult, why don't you? SLEEPWALKING, using
standard guitar-bass-drums instrumentation, consists of catchy-to-lovely pop songs with a sad, deceptively
aristocratic feel. Where Seude derive directly from rock's glamour tradition--- we're richer than you, we
have nicer accents than you, we're more decadent than you, and just because we sing in minor key doesn't
mean we're not entirely proud of ourselves--- Kingmaker, whose Loz Hardy has learned to sound
completely indistinguishable from Suede's Brett Anderson, look around at the fully-decayed and try to chart
what went wrong. Intentionally or not (I'd guess it is), SLEEPWALKING is a concept album about,
essentially, the death of punk, Loz having been in his early-to-mid-teens back when punk was new and
seemed like it might change something. It fades in slowly from silence to "Playground Brutality", dominated
by an echoey wash of U2-ish guitar in an almost ambient-metal vein, where the memorable line "Everything
looks vulgar/ sometimes I'll write that out a hundred times" is less to-the-point than the repeated "Is
anybody there? Does anybody care?".
Much of the album is betrayed and angry, castigating the punks for missing the point and the
opportunity. The classic 4-chord rush of "Armchair Anarchist" and "Help Yourself" mock punks who've
retreated into fashion: "I was planning a bombing. First the House Of Lords, then on to the BRIT [the UK's
Grammy] awards", or "Pretty boys, pretty boys, no more glamour of disease. Pity boys, pity boys, that it's
your common sense everyone needs instead of a 'Help yourself'". The back-porch dance tune "Ten Years
Asleep" attacks political apathy: "All the young dudes work for all the young brutes in expensive suits. Ten
years asleep cuz your grave is empty, but it's already dug. Ten years spreading knees instead of news, so
don't pretend that it couldn't have happened to a nicer planet". "Sequinned Thug" is for those who've
internalized the willingness for violence and forgotten all but the fig-leaf of justification: "You're a
sequinned thug. You war against suburban hordes, committing crimes on behalf of the shyer youths of
today". Some of the songs are just sad, mourning the dead (the melodramatic, but nice, "Sad To See You
Go") and the merely defeated (the understated voice-and-shimmering-guitar "Sleepalking In The 5 O'clock
Shadow": "When you think, do you really think that we're all living downwind? When you fear, do you
really fear to forget your sunblock at Armageddon?"), or being a pathetically obvious failure in offering
hope (the adrenalized "Stay Free", trapped by its own awareness of economic necessity: "She'd like to stay
in bed forever, but that wouldn't even pay for the rope").
The hooky reggae "Queen Jane" actually offers encouragement to a friend/ally in need, and recalls her
"watching the goose-step of the crowd. You were a picture of rebellion, a kleptomaniac and proud". But the
more representative statement of purpose is "Tomorrow's World", where eternal Sisyphean struggle
(against "habitual lies, all the time, sensible life, live long and die") is in the sound of the very guitar lines.
And the final statement is "Pyromaniacs Anonymous". But maybe you don't need an album to cheer you up.
Maybe you need one to shame you into usefulness. And if you don't, then buy it for someone who does.
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