33 rebellions per minute
"Edifice and pavement and furnaces, holding the land at bay"
1989
Thinking Plague, IN THIS LIFE
1. This is my single favorite Serious Art album of all time. Blending goth, prog-rock, industrial, avant-orchestral, dramatic film score, and minimalist musical stylings so thoroughly that you’d never guess any of them except minimalism had ever existed in separate form, this Wayside Music record goes beyond mere eclecticism (and yeah, I adore mere eclecticism) to forge something genuinely new, radical, and I think quite powerful.
2. This album rocks, dude! Well, mostly. In its way.
It is not, of course, the obligation of Thinking Plague composer Mike Johnson to have his band “rock”, any more than Beethoven or Bach or Haydn were obliged to. It is also not his obligation to have a non-boring name, although you’d really think someone this deserving of having his work preserved in megaselling scores to be ruined by junior-high orchestras could have picked something more distinctive, such as Joe Green (wait, Giuseppe Verdi took that already). Nonetheless, you’re sitting here reading the musical experiences of a guy who considers Midnight Oil’s RED SAILS IN THE SUNSET to be a pinnacle of human artistic achievement, of someone whose single complaint about Stravinsky and Bartok is how they insistently alternate between allegro (“interesting”) and lento (“boring”) movements, so get real: I like to know where the beat is. I’m happy to have it shift between 5/4 and 6/4 (the eventually-catchy opening of “Lycanthrope”, say), or among 7/8, 9/8, and the occasional 10/8 or straight 8/8 of “Guardian”, which will probably be the first song to creep into the average listener’s head. Or 4/4 is fine too: at the album’s extreme of non-extremity, Michael Stipe could have done the vocals to ”Fountain Of All Tears” and stuck it onto NEW ADVENTURES IN HI-FI without it seeming out of place. Whatever the numerology, it’s just rather nice to have a pair of drummers, or a pounding bass/ violin quarter-note stomp, or a skittering piano part, or lap steel with pizzicato violin even, marking the time in one authoritative way or another. So it goes here. And the playing, especially from the endlessly versatile Shane Hotle on keyboards and synthesizer, is just unbeleivably good. I mean, sometimes Shane seems to be banging his fists on the keys, but it don’t sound that good when _I_ bang them; and sometimes the acrobacy is obvious beyond all denial.
Also important, to me, is that these are _songs_, not just suites, at least in the sense that tuneful vocals are provided by one Susanne Lewis. She does a lot of the beat-keeping herself, actually. She writes the words herself, and puts obvious effort into the task: sample lyric: “Once the pebble of an avalanche army, now the guardian retreats in cool shade, unaware of the numbers bled and by whom the desert war was led. The war, like a large blind bird, flew hard, slow and clumsy.” Still, she tends to sing in a rhythmic function, cutting words into individual syllables or simply shifting emphases to keep the right up-down sound for the music, which, with this music, can be quite strange. Her voice itself is quite pure, which along with the disjointedness comes to sound like the Sundays’ Harriet Wheeler after some vocal toughening and lowering in a rigourous alto drill-camp for the choir of the Church Of Satan (no, not the Anton LaVey cult, sucking up to God by memorizing every Christian tenet so they can pencil a "Fuck You" in the correct blank of each exam question; the _real_ Satan).
Structurally, there’s nine tracks lasting a total 72 minutes, the perversely hummable and quasi-Eastern “The Guardian” and the briefly hyperkinetic piano/ clarinet/ sax squall (then deconstructed as pleasantly unsettling New Age stuff) “Run Amok” coming in under six minutes as the runts of the litter, the radio edits. I tried to do one of those ABCABD section maps of “Organism” and “Moonsongs”, the longest pieces, and got up to E on both with no problem, but then noticed that further setions were unclassifiable: wait, that dungeons & dragons monster-through-a-tuned-sampler didn’t go with those vocals before, those vocals went with that mandolin part, which is now appearing with _that_ drumline from before, only now there’s an acceleration. And “Organism” finishes its already recombinant self by stripping its percussive parts down for an evolving Steve-Reich-inspired danse macabre remix. I think this is the sort of stuff I was supposed to learn to appreciate when Dad played me his favorite symphonies, and to some degree I did and do appreciate them. Heck, I still listen to Rite Of Spring and The Miraculous Mandarin from time to time. But I want my MTV. I want my rock and roll to be here to stay, in whatever dramatic new art form it wants to take. And it’s always just possible, you know, that Mike Johnson is simply better than those dead guys were. Given population growth, someone should be, right?
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