33 rebellions per minute
"Quadrophonic gin-and-tonic fever dream"
1986
Game Theory, BIG SHOT CHRONICLES
Game Theory were Scott Miller's band in the '80's, before he started the
Loud Family, one of my favorite '90's bands. On the one hand, it is
absolutely remarkable how much of his style he'd already learned so
young: the ambitious, endlessly morphing melodies; the modest but
crucial adances beyond verse/chorus/brdge/chorus; especially the lyrics,
rhyming in proud polysyllables ("gifted children, link your arms in
rhyme") and aiming to make More Songs About Bitterness And Girls (and
city planners) into a philosophical master's thesis. He does churn out
the occasional one-or-two-liner with a distressing knack for summarizing
bits of my life: "Too awake for night, I've gone outside/ too o'clock
for sleeping off, I've tried", or in my grumblier moments, "While some
get far through effort, all I get is exercise".
Mostly, though, he's inclined to
analyze why he's getting dumped by his girlfriend and what to think
about this. "Here It Is Tomorrow", a fast-paced whoosh opening a
midtempo-to-slow album, starts "Quick judger, long-time begrudger,
dialed in to the pyramid structure. Efficacious B-follows-A-cious,
something you can shove in their faces", and finds both regret and
self-satisfaction in "Ah, you've got me drinking in Canadian bars, trade
sad stories with the New England coast guard. Man you blew me off like
there was no tomorrow, and here it is tomorrow. Here it is tomorrow.
What the hell do you know?" "Erica's Word", sporting a neat strummed
guitar hook, plies a similar theme and is made darker by its brief
implausible effort to well-wish: "Maybe you'll find that promised love,
the tingle to the touch/ Girl and I hope it comes through for you in a
clutch. But I wouldn't bet much". Still, most albums plying similar
themes at 1/10 the vocabulary size don't sport the catchy little
keyboard riff of "Crash Into June", the Let's Active-y guitar stomp of
"Never Mind", the unearthly melodic delicacy of "Like A Girl Jesus". Or
at least if any album _does_ sport them too precisely, the copyright law
will let Scott enforce the irritation implied in "What's all the hurry
to show yourself when you're succeeding as someone else?" He's "tried
subtlety before, but I will not anymore", you know.
On the other hand, if you have any preference for bands that rock out,
or that explore unusual sounds, the Loud Family (who do delicacy as a
mere optional flavor) really is better than this early effort. BIG SHOT
CHRONICLES suffers from simple problems like wispy, much-too-understated
production and Scott Miller's thin, high-pitched, slightly raspy voice,
an acquirable taste but it still helps that he later learned to sing
better. Interesting pop worth some effort, though.
1987
Game Theory, LOLITA NATION
In the six months since I acquired the brilliant LOLITA NATION in Aug '98, it has quite possibly been the record I've listened to most often. Or maybe it hasn't; I don't count this stuff, sheesh. Either way, reviewing it has been a task hampered by the fact that I already got it mostly right, after one listen, for the first paragraph of my PLANTS AND BIRDS AND ROCKS AND THINGS review (see below), wherein I took a long paragraph to supply details to an implied thesis statement of "What the fuck? No wait, I mean why the fuck? Or no, I did mean what". As stated, LOLITA is a record of pop songs, but it is also the record where Game Theory unofficially, just for one album at first, become the Loud Family: from mildly ambitious pop to melodic bizarro-world rock. From the then-obscure pop-culture reference that opens the disc--- "Kenneth, What's The Frequency?", as Dan Rather was asked while being assaulted--- and the first of the album's several attempts to rewrite "You can pick your nose, and you can pick your friends, but you can't pick your friends's noses" into something profound muttered through processors under shards of noise, the disc is off running in several directions at once.
"Not Because You Can", its rat-a-tat 3/4 time-sig drums emerging straight from the echoes of "frequency-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y?", is the first of many pop songs here, quickly resolving into a bopping midtempo 4/4 guitar-and-whistling-synth hookfest. Other equally rollicking tunes are spread throughout: the complex but effervescent "We Love You Carol And Allison" introduces Donnette Thayer's girlishly excited harmonies. "The World's Easiest Job" is in the genre of XTC's "This Is Pop" and Carter USM's "Worry Bomb", ramming an utterly bizarre hook repeatedly into your head whether you wish it did or not (I'm happy with it). "Slip" is like Buddy Holly's rock mode, albeit heavier. "The Real Sheila" is optimistic and bouncy. "Mammoth Gardens", written and sung by Donette, is Bangles-ish and rushing and squeaky and flat-out joyous. "Chardonnay" is simplistic and catchy.
Against these are a variety of slower songs, and if you ask "what's odd about that?", I'd say not too much, except that slow songs meant as pacing wouldn't normally be this schizophrenically varied. "Go Ahead, You're Dying To" and "Exactly What We Don't Want To Hear" are soft, attactive, venomous, and under a minute long. "Nothing New" and "Last Day That We're Young" are shamlessly melodramatic and sentimental (yes, I kind of mean that as a compliment). "Look Away", Donnette's other star turn, could be transformed easily from jangle-pop into country-western (Donnette's voice, like Tanya Donnelly of Belly's, strikes me as a born multiplatinum C+W voice tragically derailed by good taste in music). "Andy In Ten Years" is piano-based and vaguely jazzy. "Dripping With Looks" is slow, but massively loud, using the two-guitar/ drums/ bass line-up as a firewall from which catchy bits of synthesizer dart out for a second and retreat. The dry sung/spoken "One More For Saint Michael" is driven inexorably by the drums and jangle-guitar and chants of "challenge him, challenge him" trhough a couple of different genres. "Turn Me On Dead Man" is a brief shard of psychedelic guitar phasing.
Then, of course, there's the silly tape experiments and ridiculous titles. There's also instrumentals, one by drummer Gil Ray ("Where They Have To Let You In"), one in prime bubble-noir High Noon style by keyboardist Shelley LeFreniere ("Toby Ornette"), both following the reliable song-structure guideline that if you put three different sections close enough to each other that they can't breath separately, then repeat them in approximate sequence, they must be the part of the same song, end of discussion. These songs, in retrospect, were more than anything what I meant when I saw a resemblance between Toenut's TWO IN THE PINATA and this album.
But above all, LOLITA NATION has "the Waist And The Knees". Like the majority of these songs, it is clever and betrayed-romantic and angry. Unlike any other song I can think of, it combines an absolutely elemental rock'n'roll drive much like the Modern Lovers' "Roadrunner" with the insistence of smearing ghastly random synth noises every four beats, with an euqally pounding 6/4 midsection, and with a still-unique ever-shifting overlap of processed vocals reciting all the many things the band's record company is not liable for: "losses due to theft, impulse buying, poor sportsmanship, birth of two-headed infant, hubby red-faced after bizarre weight-losss ritual! ritual! ritual!... let the signer understand that no one wins by being unreasonable". If "unreasonable" behavior includes LOLITA NATION being out of print (so far), that's true. If "unreasonable" includes the fact that a major label ever agreed to release this in the first place... well, I guess it does mean that, kind of.
1993
Loud Family, PLANTS AND BIRDS AND ROCKS AND THINGS
Five years after Game Theory's final album TWO STEPS FROM THE MIDDLE
AGES, Scott Miller returned with a new band recruited from ex-members of
This Very Window, and a new album regarded by Scott and fans as being a
smoother integraton of LOLITA NATION('87)'s goofy noise experiments. I'm
not convinced; if so, it has very little to do with PLANTS's greatness.
I'll review L.N. when I own it, but my reaction on one with-visiting-friend listen
was "God! Who would have the chutzpah to release this?!!". Part of that
reaction, surely, was due to the fact that the tracks "All Clockwork and
No Bodily Fluids Makes Hal A Dull Metal Humbert - In Heaven Every
Elephant Baby Wants To Be So Full Of Sting - Paul Simon In The Park With
Canticle - But You Can't Pick Your Friends - Vacuum Genesis - DEFMACROS
- HOWSOMETH - INGDOTIME - SALENGTHS - OMETHINGL - ETBFOLLOW - AAFTERNOO
- NGETPRESE - NTMOMENTI - FTHINGSWO - NTALWAYSB - ETHISWAYT - BCACAUSEA
- BWASTEAFT - ERNOONWHE - NEQBMERET - URNFROMSH - OWLITTLEG - REENPLACE
- 27" combine to about two minutes of what I won't redeem as "music",
although the first of those titles is a fabulous Stanley Kubrick tribute
and the DEFMACROS-to-REENPLACE titles apparently do make a working LISP
computer program. But L.N. was full of weirdness, peaking with the
superbly-crafted 6-minute preposterousness of "the Waist And the Knees"
(which does, I should clarify, _rock_), and while on balance it was an
(indie) pop album, my three first-listen faves "Chardonnay", "One More
For St. Michael", and "Not Because You Can" sound like the work of five
different bands. And while "Mammoth Gardens" is probably a good song,
its honeyed female vocals and late-Bangles ultrapolished backup, in
L.N.'s context, prompted my visitor to say "this song is so bad it isn't
even funny" and I could barely summon the breath to go "What?!? It is
_so_ funny!".
PLANTS has elements of this, from the two brief fake openings of the
first track, to the the brief messed-up tape loop "No one twisting his
arm!" (a "Waist and the Knees" reference), to the closing warped
banjo-sounding guitar line and Scott giggling "I don't know why I did
that". Here and there it's even musically important: "the Second Grade
Applauds" would be way less fun without the explosions, the transmission
noise, the whooshing, and the second grade applause, while "the Ballad
Of How You Can All Shut Up" justifies a negligible song by using it as
decoration for a schizoid Game-Theory-referential nonconversation
between a female human and a male robot with a severe speech disorder.
But I'm not sure "Sword Swallower" benefits from the how a line of it is
processed and sent overhead, strafing the rest of the song; no, it
benefits from its rushing tunefulness and the cock-rock strut as it
opens and closes. "Aerodeliria" gets an exciting wrong-amped piano solo
that I'm not convinced Paul Weineke played without the help of ambitious
tape editing, but the real crux is Scott's unaccustomed lyrical vantage,
where the typically pop-cultural but whoa!, empathetic "Go back to
sleep, Little Susie, what else would you find? Arrogant laws still
hoping to draw your lines" leads into "Love is real and will care for
you, so take all the love that's there for you. Where one gets refused,
we could blow down the doors in twos. I don't think we'd ever lose". And
there's nothing but pop in the sound of "Give-In World", where the
cynical "See the play/ play the hit/ hit the spot/ spot the fake/ fake
the count/ count the take/ take the lead/ lead the way/ weigh the risk/
risk the change/ change the plan/ plan the time/ time the move/ move the
mouth/ mouth the name/ name the place/ place the blame" is set-up for a
plea for love and commitment despite a world in which "they know you
just becuse they've found a flaw".
So it goes through an album where "Jimmy Still Comes Around"--- the
heartland I-IV-V power-chords plus piano scale on the chorus, and Zach
Smith's best Van Halen solo, signifying a surefire 1987 breakthrough
hit--- is an unequivocal triumph; where the quieter momentum of "Take Me
Down", great even without that occasional sound effect with the
spinning-top kinesthesis, is the obvious follow-up; where "Rosy
Overdrive"'s complex harmonies benefit from a straightforward near-metal
accompaniment; where "Slit My Writs" demonstrates that if you're
campaigning for the award for Most Beautiful Acoustic Guitar Duet you
won't get sued over anyone's suicide; where "Last Honest Face", well
decorated by a simple keyboard hook, plays like a last and best VH1 Big
'80's hit for Corey "Sunglasses At Night" Hart; where Scott
finally sings like a high-pitched _guy_ instead of an anorexic girl. Not
to mention the funky spoken-word "Spot The Setup", my choice for a
single since this was _not_ 1987, with the combined wisdom and novelty
value of "I used to go out with supermodels. But that didn't make my
life okay. I used to be the cold stare, don't care, stay fresh in the
Frigidaire. I just assumed that was amore. I didn't spot the setup".
Great songs, great band, and if Jozef Becker's skillful loud drumming
can be beneficially fucked with in the mix, I regard this as a cool bonus,
not, this time, a one-way lullaby to a weird place.
1994
Loud Family, TAPE OF ONLY LINDA
I enjoy this album, but I agree with the overwhelming Loud-fan consensus
that this is the Loud Family's weakest of four to date. LINDA is loud
and dense, with a tendency towards letting songs last minutes longer
than their ideas do ("Marcia and Etrusca" and "Ballet Hetero" could've
been remade with Bono's vocals and added to U2's POP without many folks
noticing anything wrong). But "It Just Wouldn't Be Christmas" aims for
immediate hooks, a corrosively cynical song with "Money For Nothing"-ish
synth and fab heavy bass. Guitarist Zach Smith writes a sincere romantic
nasally-sung punk-pop song, "For Beginners Only", that reminds me of my
favorite Social Distortion songs, almost ("Social Distortion have
learned a fourth chord! Hear it on their new single!"). "My Superior"
and "Still Its Own Reward" are fully up to leader Scott Miller's high
melodic standards, and "Hyde Street Virgins" would be too if it didn't
have an icky residue of Christmas carol all over it (Zach on guitar
makes the save again). The lyrics, Zach's especially, are detailed,
careful, and good by normal standards, but the only really remarkable
short excerpts are in "My Superior", and I refuse to quote good lines
about how awful it is to be stuck dating a gorgeous woman.
THE TAPE OF ONLY LINDA is a good title: the injoke reference, to a
rumored tape of a Wings concert with Paul McCartney's voice edited out
and Linda's alone supposedly being embarrassing, linked in Scott's mind
to "linda" as Spanish for "beautiful" and had him pondering what beauty
could possibly mean in a world of nothing but. And what could a rating
of 10 mean if there were no lesser albums?--- I fear Scott took the need
for contrast too literally. A nice album for the converted, otherwise
ignore.
1996
Loud Family, INTERBABE CONCERN
Presenting: the greatest pop record of the 1990's! It begins with a
raucous electronic drone that fades to near-silence so a near-inaudible
voice can speak, then the drone resumes, merging with the spoken
declaration "That's it, that's it, that's it". Then a pop song starts,
and it's in standard 4/4 time--- virtually all Loud Family songs are---
but people keep accusing Loud household-head Scott Miller of tricky time
changes, and he does make 4/4 sound avant-garde here. But less than a
minute later, there's a perfect sing-along hook. It goes "She's a little
like/ tendon-slash dimension crash entropica/ cryogen magenta kevlar
ebola", and you needn't overthink that one, it means just like it looks
it should mean, i.e., not quite as troublesome as the last iteration
before "and the zero times she calls me back refines my soul":
"cell-disrupting will-corrupting vertigo/ existential exponential
horror-show". A clear sign of divorce-in-progress, yep, and I'm not sure
1996 produced a better melody. But by the song's end it's produced a
solid alternate candidate, testing your knowledge of shampoo ingredients
with the hopeful leftover brag (?) "My girlfriend's got sodium laureth
sulf/ sodium laureth sulf-a-a-a-a-ate ha-ai-ai-ai-air". Then comes the
great fuzzbox-and chant minute "North San Bruno Dishonor Trip" ("thank
you goddess nature/ we don't rape no"), then a marble keeps time for a
somewhat more show-tuney version of the Amazingly Great Tune concept
("Don't Respond, She Can Tell"--- and hey, Scott and company spent _hours_ getting that marble timed right). "I'm Not Really A Spring",
strummed guitar and pounding drums and "Ooh, ooh ooh, oooh ooh"
harmonies, seemed like no more, and no less perfect, than a pure
unfolding gusher of melody until I tried to include it on a mix tape and
had to reckon with its noise beginning and syncopated monotonous strum
of an end, both of which work (as do the lyrics: "I can't sit here and
make myself want nothing/ but I won't go knocking on doors to see how
many tickets to me I can sell").
"Rise Of The Chokehold Princess", for all the note-eliding
synth-woodwind wheeze, really is unadulterated beauty, as, later on, are "Not Expecting Both Contempo And Classique",
"Where They Go Back To School And Get Depressed" and "Where They Walk
Over St. Therese"--- I'm amazed how Scott's voice, so accurately
self-described as a "miserable whine" in his '80's days leading Game
Theory, has grown to work in this context. But his speaking voice,
swaggering "Top-Dollar Survivalist Hardware" past "Pour Some Sugar On
Me" into hair-metal superstardom, remains the real asset, setting the
sung lines ("Alexander lived in times before the Duke Of Earl/ his
fellow Greeks all said he threw the discus like a girl/ didn't have a
healthy outlet for his anger, so he took over the world") to a
got-peanut-butter-in-my-chocolate perfection (Ugh! I just quoted an ad
line without irony! But then, it is possible to hype honestly worthy
products. Hence my hobby here).
Had this album been nothing but the bittersweet reflections on romance
set to the tunes in generic pop arrangements, it still would be a 10 on
a scale of 10--- and re those reflections, he needed help to write "I
didn't know how your kisses felt/ until I saw you kiss someone else",
but he managed the directness of "I'm not expecting to wind up with you
just because I need to/ I shouldn't count on having air around me just
because I breathe" by himself, as well as the marvelous dumped
bitterness of "You need a world without my manicured complacency
offending you/ and a certain someone who would never steal, unless you
ended up with something he wanted.... or snap your last thread of
self-respect, all other things remaining equal". But his example here
does, despite his disavowal, "plead the case for isolation". A simply
great Sadly Beautiful divorce album is still less special than this one,
which keeps those adjecvtives, even while being herky-jerky,
triumphantly self amused, and crowded, always, with too many notes.
1998
Loud Family, DAYS FOR DAYS
"When people are good at something, it's only natural they look for a
chance to do this thing. It so happens I'm not good at homicidal rage.
So instead of going into homicidal rages, I read to the blind. In other
words I know my limits. I'm willing to settle for less" --- Babette, in
Dom DeLillo's novel White Noise
World-class tunesmith Scott Miller wrote DAYS's songs, he says, during
the happiest year of his life to date. To celebrate, he hires a calmer,
quieter band for the Loud moniker. They often sound like if Radiohead,
fresh from alientating its THE BENDS fans and getting a whole bloody new
lot, decided to alienate _them_ by doing OK COMPUTER again, but this
time cheerful. The earlier LF were a rawk band, and synth-geek
extraordinaire Paul Weineke's ideas of "that's a _nice_ sound" are many
people's ideas of "are you sure your CD player is working okay?". But on
DAYS, Gil Ray drums with moderation and subtle timing, Scott (the only
guitarist this time) shows no acquaintance with Van Halen beyond "the
cover of FAIR WARNING where there's punching out of lights", and Alison
Faith Levy--- aided by Tim Walters, whose own 1997 album I review
favorably--- is nearly as creative as Weineke with her
synth-programming, but with a penchant for oddball prettiness; even the
noises on "Why We Don't Live In Mauritania" that would panic you if your
furnace made them, seem like lullaby here. Besides, from "Cortex The
Killer" to the elegaic closer "Sister Sleep", she's not forgetting that
"keyboardist" also means "pianist"--- and she's good, in a worthy
mainstream sense. As for Scott's happiest year, it's relative: "Good,
There Are No Lions In The Street" celebrates a new relationship by
noting that hmm, it doesn't seem to have fallen apart just yet: "Good
ventilation when smoke's coming off of me. We're super clean so there's
gloss and sheen. Will it remain so when cleaning is drudgery, grudgery?"
(I don't know if I'm actually supposed to laugh hysterically when
"...Mauritania" then goes "She asked why my love would last for long,
what in her world I base it on? I said "what a 'girl' way to relate,
throw what works fine up for debate"). The most simply fun, balls-out
rocker of his career breaks the softness of this album, and its
singalong tagline is "Fit of depression right now!".
This is a happy album because Scott, who when I witnessed him
pre-concert was contentedly discussing Jacques Derrida's later
philosophical works with a fan, is concentrating on the world beyond his
own and his girfriend's navel, be it "...Mauritania"--- smooth
oddly-chorded pop with woodwind-y synth and a bit of cello--- analyzing
of the appeal of big-city life ("letting someone else do the driving,
who knows where we're arriving, despite hysteria... we like something
else going on") or the same song's Beach Boys homage ("New York scenes
with the way they talk, knock me out when they jazz the rock. Cold keeps
Chicago boyfriends warm, I dig how they defy the norm. The West Coast,
well, I'll admit it's still the most, hanging out near Manson slayings,
industrial decayings, inverse utopia", sincerity proven by the fact that
he, and 30 million others, still live in California where the
(distr)action is). Not to mention "Mozart Sonatas", with its improbably
infectious 10/8 melody-and-counterpoint lines and sarcastic 2-minute
blare about how willing we are to accept what we're told is art, yet
turn up our nose at spirituality, especially if it's not ours.
He's not suddenly endorsing Buddhism himself, mind you; he's just
learning empathy, nonjudgmentalism. Check the excellent advice on the
unbelievably gorgeous "Way Too Helpful" (in which Scott finally
formulates a _pleasing_ answer to They Might Be Giants' question "How
can I sing like a girl?"): "for once in your life, go home worth
unproved and the earth unmoved". "Businessman Are Okay",
creatively-produced near-alt-country, is no more likely to become a
fluke hit than Timbuk3's "the Future's So Bright, I Can Get By With A
Fairly Weak Flashlight" would've been, but its "I heard the Prophet
Elijah say businessmen are okay" is a sheepish Biblical reference to a
prophet whose bad luck turned around only after surrendering his core
ideas--- a change from '93 Scott's proposed revolution "to prove we've
got an overactive mind of our own", granting that went with "take me
down to hallucination town". "Cortex..." compares ideologies to "priapic
erections", which are an involuntary, near-constant,
medically-problematic readiness for, er, action. The nine little tracks,
experimentally re-working bits of the nine full songs, include similar
lines: "Good, there are no Wal-Marts worth looting, good, there are no
Warhols worth shooting"; "What words work with what worlds?". I don't,
to give an evasively thoughtless answer, think Scott's work in ours.
(I'm not even sure if _I_ prefer them to, say, the New Model Army's "I
believe in justice. I believe in vengeance! I believe in getting the
bastards, getting the bastards, getting the bastards!") But DAYS,
melodic, blessed by Alison's inventive vocal harmonies, and brimming
with songs that couldn't be subtitled "Slit My Wrists part II", could be
the Louds' best chance to prove me wrong. Though with Alias Records's
promotion strategy amounting to "spend the marketing budget on dog food,
then apologetically tell the dog how good the record is" (thank you,
Jeffrey Norman), don't bet on this.
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