33 rebellions per minute
"Until you started smoking, and I ended up the butt of your jokes"
© 1997 bokonin@hotmail.com
1990
A House, I WANT TOO MUCH
Okay, so how open-minded are you about the vocalists you listen to? A House are an Irish band, punk-folk-rock in amiable major key and generally fast tempos. They play good songs well. And those songs last long enough for Dave Couse to sing all his lyrics, then they end. Did I say sing? Well, certainly he does sing, sometimes in a loud, plain, reputably ragged voice. Sometimes he launches various forms of falsetto, be it Indian war whoop, yodel, soul croon, fragile little waver, or opera practice in the waterfall of a suspicious monster-arrayed cave. Or his singing starts going from one note to another several away without a breath pause, simply letting us hear each of the little microtones along the way; he also does vicious parodies of both country-western and monkish singing on "Marry Me", not necessarily with that intent. He can sing real low too, and I believe he switches among registers by generating random numbers on his calculator (enter a number, take it to some multidecimaled exponential power, read as many #'s as you need from the result's last digit; that's how _I_ generate them anyway, faster than dice and, since I don't play against idiot savants from Oliver Sacks books, just as unpredictable). His tone can get pretty hectoring too. He's always singing notes, though, generally the right one or pretty close, and it is my belief that he has practiced each of these vocal variations carefully with a tape recorder and a cowering focus group, the way that I'll occasionally, during a too-earnest conversation, quietly show off all the ridiculous faces I've practiced before mirrors. Dave Couse, my friends, is a great singer.
I'm not sure I'd feel a need to review this album had Couse played straight-man, but it'd still be good. Dermot Wylie learned everything he needed to know about drumming in kintergarden and employs it brilliantly here, varying his patterns from the snare-drum of "I Give You You" (Wham! rest Wham! rest Wham! rest Wham! rest; Wham! Wham! Wham! Wham! on chorus) to the kick-drum with simultaneous cymbals of "I Think I'm Going Mad" (Wham! rest Wham! rest Wham! rest Wham! rest; Wham! Wham! Wham! Wham! on chorus). The guitarist, Ferg Bunbury, should impress even unsmiling overtrained musos, imitating banjo on "13 Wonderful Love Songs", electric pedal steel on "Talking", heavy-metal high-note soloing on "I Want Too Much", folk strum on "Marry Me", quietly tuning on "...Going Mad", an asthmatic cat with a vocorder trying to imitate a train whistle on "Now That I'm Sick", and the "Bull In The Heather" intro sound on a couple of songs (you know, where it sounds as if guitars somehow involve pistons, which at the moments are about to fall off). Plus he invents grunge on a couple songs, and there's this nice effect on "Talking" where he plays one little string at a time but it's set to 11 while everyone else is set at 4 so it sounds like impending catastrophe (which in guitar-rock is a good thing of course).
The songs are modest, reasonably intelligent ones about being in love, being covetous (but I repeat myself), being mediocre and not minding too much, being physically weak, being poor and angry about it, being scared. "The girl's afraid to walk home on dark streets all alone... and the fear engulfs us. Outside it's manstrong, outside it's evil". But as long as Dave aims his voice properly, I don't think no-one's gonna mess with him.
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