33 rebellions per minute
"If you don't know what to do, I'll look it up for you"
1996
Sam Phillips, OMNIPOP (IT'S ONLY A FLESH WOUND LAMBCHOP)
I bought OMNIPOP, in large part, because a favorable review (probably in Musician, which likes this sort of detail) mentioned that Ms. Phillips constructed a studio entirely from leftover SGT PEPPER equipment in order to record it. Indeed, there's plenty of evidence on OMNIPOP that she could record a leftover late-Beatles record if that had been the plan. She's aiming for something much more indirect, however. Even the poppiest, most overtly melodic-with-choruses songs lack a "Good Morning, Good Morning" brightness, and would even if her voice didn't heave a weary, low-pitched jadedness somewhere near where Tracy Bonham's might be with a background (as Sam had) in church choir and Christian pop. "Power World"'s jangly, reverbed power-pop, with fiddle and organ and screechy violin feedback, could be one of the more Mellencampian moments in Lisa Germano's catalog. The seduction song "Faster Pussycat To The Library!" is in minor key, its piano and shaker and right-in-your-ear pitterpat of hi-hat drums supplemented by an unidentifiable echoey synth?/guitar?/kettle-drum? hook that reminds me of Midnight Oil's eerie "Dead Heart". "Entertainmen" (not a typo) is driven by a solid tambourine groove, syncopated drumrolls, bass guitar, Sonic Youth-y feedback, acoustic double-bass, and cello. "Compulsive Gambler" is cheerful, percussive, and 48 seconds long. The rest of the songs, on the other hand, are kind of odd.
The snare-drum-driven "Animals On Wheels", for example, is melodically equipped to be a single (which I think it in fact was), but it's too slow for that, sounds too much like a waltz in a carnival funhouse, phases Hawaiian steel-guitar in and out, has free-jazz horn and calliope in the background, and ends with the sound of cackling chimps. "Plastic Is Forever", also catchy, has nothing in the way of sustained sounds, fading constantly back into milliseconds of silence between the extreme wah-wah funk guitar, the tuba bleats, the blasts of compressed guitar. "Zero Zero Zero", the lead single, is like a John Philip Sousa march with a Martin Denny pseudo-Caribbean instrumental over it and a commercial jingle advertising loneliness perkily in front. "Help Yourself" could be crime-scene soundtrack music in which an overeager Dolby Noise-Reduction system kept erasing actual parts. "(Skeleton)" is exactly what the title indicates: a parenthetically far-away outline of a song wherein firecracker rumbles and feedback wails are set to a percussion track apparently devised by retrofitting Martian deathrays to work as windshield wipers.
It's the 6:58 "Your Hands" that finally clarified, for me, what this album functions as. "Your Hands" itself is like a normal (albeit ominous) 3-minute song which has beeen extended into a dance remix by adding experimental instrumental sections. What the _rest_ of OMNIPOP sounds like is a bunch of songs that had started out with "Your Hands"'s treatment, then erased the instruments from the song part and layered the vocal bits over the weird time-fillers. I can understand, I think, why all records are not made this way. But as a sample size of one, it's fascinating.
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