33 rebellions per minute
"As long as they buzz, then we can relax"
1993
Boo Radleys, GIANT STEPS
Since those rare musical artists who can be counted on to make a wonderful record every outing tend to take about two years per album, I've developed a mental tendency to draft other talented artists as substitutes. To fill my Rheostatics gaps I can listen to People From Earth and Mia Sheard (who, by being directly influenced, volunteered for the duty) and dEUS (who didn't). To fill my XTC gaps, which got a bit large in their 7-year vanishment, I'll listen to XTC associates like Martin Newell or Yazbek. The Boomtown Rats, by changing style every album, destroyed their chances of being a true role model, but Midnight Oil's mid-'80's prime runs like an inspiringly clanky amalgam of Rats albums 2 through 5. They Might Be Giants, unfortunately, are in a league to themselves, and none of Tori's proteges (Sarah McLachlan, Emma Townshend) do much for me. But the Loud Family, by what I'm sure is purest accident given LOLITA NATION's sales totals (around 15,000 worldwide), turn out to have serious competition in the field of ambitious, soaring pop melodies married to difficult, guitar-heavy, anal-retentive production (anal-retentive, when used before the noun it modifies rather than after, does have a hyphen). Oddly, that competition, the Boo Radleys, are pop stars in their native Britain. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
The first Boo Radleys album, the obscure ICHABOD AND I, had no melodies worth mentioning, because it sucked. Their second album, EVERYTHING'S ALRIGHT FOREVER, had no melodies worth mentioning because the Boos were busy establishing themselves in the Chapterhouse/ Slowdive/ Ride/ My Bloody Valentine wing of "shoegazer" bands, where making an intimidatingly detailed surface noise was the essential, indeed sole, point. Thus where the Loud Family reached their style in incremental progress from being a weedy, swoopingly tuneful, barely-produced bunch of hyperliterate bubblegumsters, the Boo Radleys made GIANT STEPS their hesitant stab _towards_ bubblegum. The result is an album which
- Sounds extremely impressive even on one listen,
- Is an album I therefore adopted immediately into my heart on the assumption "It'll actually make sense eventually", and
- Turns out to keep my affections by presenting me with a persuasive reason why it _doesn't_ make sense, and shouldn't.
"I Hang Suspended" opens the album with the sound of someone strggling to start a car that runs on hail and gusts, with the failures being narrated in the background by druids and stock-market reporters. Then it opens up into expansive guitars, a cymbal beat, and a vocal melody like a pointillist interpretation of someone sweeping down a piano scale with a fist. The rest of the song stays catchy, even as a sedate feedback counterpoint starts, but it segues directly into an unnerving drone/squall which turns into the jazz/reggae bass groove of "Upon 9th And Fairchild". "Wish I Was Skinny" interrupts with a stuttering electric Nashville guitar line, and a sunny melody is accompanied by french horn, but soon we have a low keyboard groove accompanied by a cheezy sound I've heard called "roller-rink organ" only in this case it better be one solemn, religious roller rink. It fades into a dissonant 2-note bass vamp accompanies by a blooping detonator and mad applause, then into a simple guitar strum. "Leaves And Sand", starting with as forthright a one-note blast of feedback as has been heard, follows a strum/ blast/ strum/ blast/ strum pattern faithfully, but "Butterfly McQueen", starting with a double-speed strum, becomes an experiment in seeing how many instruments they can layer in such a way that each is best described by the adjective "wobbly". After it returns to the strum, a very catchy hook is attained by, I believe, running the keyboard through a MIDI-adapted giant mosquito. A symphonic buildup (dig the tympani) is interrupted by "Rodney King"'s opening, which razors a choppy dance-beat out of, perhaps, the clock samples from Pink Floyd's "Time". It's another very pretty, especially the hook that's too relaxing to be a theremin but isn't far off. "Thinking Of Ways" introduces with harpsichord, adds trumpet, and proves for one vocal line that the Boo Radleys are familiar with the concept of "instruments dropping out"--- which you'd never guess otherwise, and which they quickly correct by bringing in free-jazz clarinet and a general mood of fanfare in which a herd of buffalo try, not entirely accurately, to join in.
At their most direct and most blissful, the Boos grace GIANT STEPS with "Barney (...And Me)", where the minor-key foghorn bit could be a polite theft from the Chrysanthemums' "God And The Dave Clark Five", and where the big noise buildup is of the sort a gameshow would use to announcement the beginning of the comercially-donated prizes; "If You Want It, Take It", an assertive class-rock strut with organ and a Manchester dance beat; and the contemplative "Lose The Fear", where the only oddity is a very effective one-bar flugelhorn solo to interrupt the flow of choruses and regain listener attention for the next chorus. The most opaque tracks are probably "Spun Around", a gloomy track of wind-synthesizer with the garbled high-pitched announcement "Aab eeerst eeerst nau wof eerth thor now"; and "Run My Way Runway", two minutes of propeller noises to which the voice and sax (but not the sitar-like guitar line) sonically adapt themselves. But even those are attractive, to me; I've merely had it hinted that I need not force future mix tapes I make to include them.
This album requires patience, the ability to wait for ten listens before you start singing the choruses unpromted and to wait ten listens more before you figure out _which_ chorsuses you hum. I was probably helped by my strong nostalgiac empathy for Martin's lyrcial obsessions of cowardice and rejection: from "As the vultures circle/ and the bills and demands fill the floor/ it's been 3 weeks 3 days since I stepped out my door" (probably an exaggeration, unless he means the studio door) through "I'm thinking of ways to get out of things"; from "I've got nothing against not being proud" through "I keep on trying to find a way out, but it's okay, you don't lock the door anymore". And he also writes of escape in music--- however late-Beatles in inspiration "The White Noise Revisited" is, its "close your eyes and feel it running thru you, feel the hate well up inside" had a lot more to do with why the Cure used to be my favorite band. And the pro-airplane credo "as long as they buzz, then we can relax" sounds quite a lot like why Martin Carr loves his sounds better.
1995
Boo Radleys, WAKE UP!
While the level of melody and sonic ambition on GIANT STEPS was on a general par with SGT. PEPPER, that was as far as the similarity went: GIANT STEPS is a loud guitar and dance-beat album, heavily decorated to be sure. WAKE UP!, on which the Boos went from cult-level to #1 on the U.K. charts, seems more like a direct delusion of Beatledom. The good news is, the cheerfulness has rubbed off: at the extreme, the brief "Wake Up Boo!" and the extended "Martin Doom, It's 7:00 A.M.!" are each, in topic and spirit, parallel to "Good Morning, Good Morning!", though for the sake of reflecting Martin's personaliy they are expressd as a battle between buoyant wakefulness and Martin's defeated resistance. "It's Lulu", "Twinside", and "Find The Answer Within" are equally happy. The further good news is that "...Lulu" and "...Answer" in particular show the Boos confident enough to make completely unfettered pop, with the wonderful "...Answer" making effective use of non-harmony: the xylophone and voice and soft guitar play the same simple melody in sync, with a bit of syncopated drum kick.
The downside, for me, is that once we know the Boos have learned to write pop hits, it's frustrating to still hear long and winding, essentially directionless diversions made up of decidely PEPPER-ish gimmicks (processed backward speech, horn and string melodies). In STEPS, the singalong bits were still processed to sound something like the instrumental bits, giving a majestic half-formedness to everything; here one goes straight from the thin and direect tunefulness of "Charles Bukowski Is Dead" to a strange buildup of, um, something (well, several somethings), and it's as nonsensical to me now as it was when I first heard it years ago.
This does not mean, even remotely, that WAKE UP! isn't a high-quality album. In fact, for people who have trouble hearing tunes through a too-busily-employed 48-track recorder, it's probably the album to start with: I know my Mom, who introduced me to WAKE UP!, finds the other Boo Radleys albums impenetrable. But if I want to hear a substitute Beatles, it's a field that's been busily encroached on for three decades, and this album seems too vague to fit the bill best.
1997
Boo Radleys, C'MON KIDS!
Since I feel free to broadcast news of other people's opiniuons when they agree with me (Yazbek's 1996 THE LAUGHING MAN winning a Pop Album Of The Year award from the Association of Independant Record Distributors, say), it's only fair to admit when the album I'm hearing seems to be entirely different from the one the critical consensus is hearing. Of course, it probably only takes three people actually _listening_ to an album to make a critical consensus, so I'll still be disagreeable. C'MON KIDS!, I'm told, is the Boos' "art album", their "difficult album". Now, leave aside here that this is like designating the latest Bad Religion album as "their punk album", or the latest Mariah Carey album as "the one in which she oversings horribly". To me, C'MON is by a wide margin the Boos' most direct, easily understood, _rock_ album to date. Which, since they don't overdo it and turn into Kiss, is a fine thing indeed.
"C'mon Kids!", as a title and lead track, should be at least as hopped-up as "Wake Up Boo!", to read it. Which it is, although Sice's typically smooth singing voice suddenly transforms into Noel Gallagher's strained shout-sing as the whole thing acquires an Oasis swagger and a vaguely smarmy harmony prechorus to match. I suppose the weird constant low-pitched key changes of the "C'mon c'mon c'mon c'mon" (repeat) section are a needless arty touch, unless they are meant to remind us that this _isn't_ Oasis. But as soon as the snare hits and "waa-oohs" lead into "Meltin's Worm", we get a creative but solid groove and a boyish Television Personalities-ish melody (picture a REVOLVER era Beatles affected by somewhat more unsettling mood drugs if you missed that allusion), over drums and theremin, leading into a bouncy "Keep away! Keep away!" chorus that could anchor a TV show. "Get On The Bus", "Bullfrog Green", and "Shelter", later, will be equally unstinting in their pop ecstasies, granting that "...Bus" opens with what sounds like Pink Floyd redoing "Wish You Were Here" to the tune of "i'd rather be a hammer than a nail, yes I would", and that "Shelter" opens with thick staccato guitar harmonics and alternates its peppy chorus and soaring Jimmy Webb/ 5th Dimension bridge harmonies with a rapid sing-rap. Meanwhile, "What's In The Box" has not one but three separate choruses, all in a call-and-response format for maximum listener involvement, molded around verses that sound like choruses themselves. Sure, this is art, but exactly the sort of art that would give artists a lot more popular acclaim if this, not Robert Mapplethorpe piss-Christ photos, were the first public association with the term.
"Everything Is Sorrow" is the first model here of calm prettiness, solemnly arranging vocal harmonies over compressed half-note guitar blasts for awhile (til the guitar blasts are replaced by tambourine, you didn't think they'd keep an arrangement idea for the whole song or something??!). Even the first digression is pretty, and the nasty guitar solo is nothing you haven't had a chance to hear from Jimi Hendrix records. "New Brighton Promenade" does delicate Simon + Garfunkel harmonies over a shifting twelve-note acousic guitar cycle, has a soft-rock chorus, and, yes, a bridge of warped monotone vocals over an empatic eight-note drumbeat. "Ride The Tiger" is lengthy in a way that suits its processional pace: another lament over "I get by on being alive and having no life" (but sadly "I don't want to miss a trick"); it builds up from acoustic guitar in a way loosely comparable to "Stairway To Heaven" or the Loud Family's "Sister Sleep", or a hundred other built-up album-closers designed to inspire cigarette-lighter waving in concert. It's closing drum-and-organ fadeout does lead to the actual closer, but "One Last Hurrah" is even more sedate, albeit intially in the same way that tired Chinese orc militiamen towards the end of a march would do sedateness.
So where's the confusion? "Melodies For The Deaf" and the severely dark "Fortunate Son" are steeped in hip-hop/ industrial production values. The former is a bit like New Kids On The Block undergoing self-disgusted introspection. The latter ricochets real drumming against a synth line whose only visual analogues I can conjure are sort of disgusting, but which nonetheless sounds pretty cool (Smashing Pumpkins' "Eye", released a few months later, had a noise very very close), and the chord progressions are spine-tingling. But as far as I can see, the eleven-segment no-repetition "Four Saints" actually soaks up the most deviant impulses of the album at one go. The guitars are rock guitars and folk guitars mostly, not emrgenecy-alarm guitars (GIANT STEPS) or evasively submerged (WAKE UP!). Melodies don't float in and out, they stick around until replaced by the next melody, and often return. GIANT STEPS is still a wee bit closer to my heart, but that's because I _like_ to see such marvelous ability sharing a body with such naive self-dount and track-covering, and the way the melodies emerge as if created by accident appeals to me. That's just me. For even a normal rock music fan, though, C'MON KIDS! should be immensely enjoyable. And oh yeah, for me too.
1999
Boo Radleys, KINGSIZE
If you're one of the, I'd guesstimate, 30,000 or so people worldwide whose favorite records include both THE STONE ROSES and the Beach Boys' PET SOUNDS, skip this review and buy KINGSIZE now. You'll love it. For me it's taken more effort, and there's no reason to have my gloomier thoughts mar your pleasure.
KINGSIZE, reversing the rock tendency of C'MON KIDS!, marries delicate orchestrations to artificial, fairly predictable 1990-style dance beats, very occasional blues-rock guitar heroics suggesting the Stone Roses' John Squire, and a return to GIANT STEPS's apparent determination to toss every possibke style in the same blender. This has its very promising side, such as the leadoff "Blue Room In Archway", where classical guitar and vibes and an intrusion of violin are pestered by jungle-beat rat-a-tat snare yet triumphantly maintain the mood, and where a two-note cello alternation lends dramatic transition into a piano piece, then back into the piano piece after an Oasis-style (but imho much better and grander and sincerer) guitar/ drums/ strings rock momentum takes over. "The Old Newstand At Hamilton Square" is equally nice, designing a noir mood out of eight decades' worth of noir tactics.
That said, the bulk of KINGSIZE jerks randomly from genre to genre. Now, let's make our distinctions clear: "jerks randomly" is not what's new; to be a Boos fan is to enjoy that part, ipso facto, and they've not lost their gift for subtlety in their improbable transitions. It's the "genre to genre" that bugs me; they never used to settle into anything humankind had ever precisely heard before. "Jimmy Webb Is God", "She Is Everywhere", "Songs From The Blueroom", and most of "Monuments For A Dead Century" occupy a feather-light orchestral-pop area halfway between PET SOUNDS and Burt Bacharach, and the guitar section of "Monuments..." could still be great for cruise ship advertisements (although the acrobatic flute part is intriguingly out-of-place, and the whirling computer-generated voice that sings the last two repetitions of the title is a nice touch). "Heaven's At The Bottom Of This Glass" is full-band with trumpets and a heavy beat and piano, and could be a dance routine at the Miss America awards. "Kingsize" and "Eurostar" are pure Oasis balladry. "Put Your Arms Around Me And Tell Me Everything's Going To Be OK" is virtually country-rock.
In fairness, there's nothing at all wrong with professionalism itself, and the Boos do most of these songs (especially "Kingsize" and "Put..") with enough flair and melodic talent that I can't really rememeber why I'd want to object to their mode of being. Still, for a lot of people, much of the album' pleasure is going to rest on whether "Free Huey" and "the Future Is Now" function as anthems, or as tracks to program out. They are catchy in the way that makes one half-inclined to scream "yeah, so is leprosy!", repeating their hooks over and over. "Free Huey" works like a SCREAMADELICA-era Primal Scream number, with Rolling Stone rock and a dance beat and a shrieking gospel chorus; "Future..." evokes Parliament funk, Weather Report synth-jazz hooks, and Stevie Wonder melody but keeps interrupting with a rhythmically clumsy white-boy chant of "all your classicisms and history don't impress me" (say that five times fast. Well good, you were able to, it's not a tongue twister. Now, why did you _want_ to?).
Luckily, I do like them. "Free Huey"'s verses are appealing enough to give the "You gotta be all you can be, don't you know" repetitions their first benefit of the doubt, and I was won over by the distorted, distant mass-vocal bridge that seemed to go "If you didn't have a job, then I wouldn't need a job", easily one of the most striking political arguments I've heard in pop music. If taken a bit less than literally, it makes good sense: first off, if unemployment is high enough, prices go down and there's a mass pressure for welfare, and welfare is good because it breeds pop bands; secondly, it is surely the case that were it not for people who voluntarily spend 70 hours a week at the office (due to love of work, desire to escape home, deisre to show off, conviction that the office will fall apart without them), it is surely true that people _with_ jobs could get away with fewer hours of drudgery and more time to "be". Thus, this mantra is an excellent war chant against the malignantly infectious curse of overwork, and I shall keep it even after checking the lyric sheet and seeing it's not "job", but "gun". Still, in the context of the "Free Huey" title and the Boos' support of Rodney King and Lenny Bruce, the song seems to be turning "Be All That You Can Be" into a slogan of armed revolution. That's pretty cool too.
As for "Future", I probably just like it from self-preservation: it lasts 8 minutes, so I better. But like everything here, it lifts sources and usues them slickly in the best possible sense. It doesn't remind me of the Loud Family anymore, or even of the Beatles. But it still, on balance, reminds of the Boo Radleys. A good thing, definitely.
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