33 rebellions per minute
"You led a life devoid of color, except for mauve of course"
© 1997 bokonin@hotmail.com
1989
Chrysanthemums, LITTLE FLECKS OF FOAM AROUND BARKING
I try to equip you, in these columns, with a long and variegated list of records to look for when you're searching the CDNow catalog or the used record store. But I do hope you understand that recommendations can't be something you just insist on having. If you see a CD that is, for example, filled with songs called "the Cheeping Of The Robot Bees" and "God and the Dave Clark Five" and "the Overseer On the Indigo Farm" and "I Am A Hen (Lucinda Lambton)" and "Irreversible Syntax Error" and "Light Transforms the Peugeot Dealers" and "Totally Unacceptable (Full Of Holes)" and "Love Is For the Astronauts" and "Oh Dear What Shall We Do About the Christians" (to choose among 27 titles), and if, for example, it _has_ 27 songs, and if, for example, it devotes its liner notes to a fully Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy-worthy explanation of the "concept" linking the 27 songs, and especially if, for example, you happen to learn that the band's previous record is called IS THAT A FISH ON YOUR SHOULDER OR ARE YOU JUST HAPPY TO SEE ME?--- well I don't care if you'd heard of the album, it _is_ worth $12.
But I had to keep saying "for example" because this here Chrysanthemums album is all of that, and now you _have_ heard of it, and if you have any taste for mildly psychedelicized Britpop, oh boy do you need this. And since all the last copies have been sold, and the songwriter (Terry Burrows) refuses to let any more be made, I suppose the only decent thing for me to do is let you write to me and try to negotiate for dub copies and Xeroxed notes, even though Ira Robbins in his Trouser Press Guides (which don't mention the Chrysanthemums) doesn't offer that service. Anyway, LITTLE FLECKS, 70+ minutes of unceasing melody, calls to mind the best Beatles, if you accent their "Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite"/ "When I'm 64" music-hall influence. It calls to mind early Kinks and Martin Newell and Captain Sensible. It calls XTC's whimsical alter-egos The Dukes Of Stratosphear to mind and brings them tea and unfolds lounge-chairs so they'll stay there for the duration. It shows you exactly what '89-to-present Television Personalities would've sounded like if their leader Daniel Treacy hadn't been watching his life fall apart because he was too busy switching between "Yes Prime Minister", "the X-Files", and badly dubbed Portuguese versions of "Masterpiece Theater". My guess is that all of these resemblances are accidental, and that _really_ LITTLE FLECKS is the legendary lost double-album where Monty Python celebrated Spiro Agnew's resignation by remaking their (extremely) advance copy of Blur's PARKLIFE.
Or so it seemed to me several listens ago. Actually it's weirder than that. My own tendency is to focus immediately on moments of pop perfection: the infatuation classic "I Am a Hen", a full match for the ebullience ofToo Much Joy's "Crush Story"; or the Sesame Street bounce of "The Deathbed Song"; or the giddy-up percussiveness and amiably lunatic harmonies of "They Must Have Made It With Their Hats" and "Er"; or the call-and-response chorus of "Climb Aboard The Groove Tractor (Pencils)", where the sudden a capella-ness of the "Wilson death by zebra fury" bits only seems wrong on analysis; or the lilting "...Astronauts", where the soft, wondering solemnity of "A mode of thought prevailed in 1992/ when Nostrodamus's predictions all came true/ it's quite uncanny how that clever bugger knew/ we'd be invaded by giant hedgehog-like beings from another world/ whose internal organs looked like sets of traffic lights...." leads naturally into a chorus that is psychedelic only in the Beatles-patented, Flinstone Chewable LSD Tablet fashion. In such context, it's easy to let the less catchy songs waft by in the assumption that they are pleasant, but lesser.
Instead, every listen makes it clearer why the credits list extends to saxophone, orchestral and brass arrangements, "regurgitations", "tapes", and "ukelele". "God..." stars an impossibly perky "La! La, la-la la-la" chorus and off-kilter guitar, but breaks twice into brief 3/4 carnival bridges before a complete extended circus-spook breakdown with vocal harmonies suggesting the band Yes after a name change to Aarghaarghpleaseno. "Irreversible..."'s melody keeps breaking into spy-movie fear notes. The reggae song "Double 'O' Gauge Dogs" breaks into a classical-piano and strings fury that the Wicked Witch Of The West could use as theme music next time she's on a Tschaikovsky kick. The piano solo on the melancholy "Last Great Dogfight" is jazz, though, and "Totally..." does a quick but effective Ray Manzarek (Doors) imitation. "The Burning Fascia" starts with beast-arising-from-the-furnace sounds before slipping into absurdly syncopated 7/8 cheer (with the cautionary motto "If Joan Of Arc had smelled something burning, she really ought to have worn asbestos"). Etectera. At worst, this ambition is harmless: it doesn't race out and conquer the whole disc, it doesn't even want your half. It merely aids the splendid tunefulness that's already there. The one problem with most pop music is that eventually it becomes too comprehensible and automatic: it is called Bubblegum Music on the premise that the flavor wears out one day. If there's a way to design everlasting gobstoppers, though, the Chrysanthemums' method on FLECKS was probably the one to try.
1997
Chrys&themums, THE BABY'S HEAD
Somewhere in the course of several albums I don't own and will probably never get a chance to, the Chysanthemums made a clever visual pun of their name to mark two major changes. Alan Jenkins, the co-songwriter who wrote FLECKS' liner notes, left and formed a band called Ruth's Refrigerator, who you should please mention to me if you ever see anything by. Then Terry Burrows, the other songwriter (who also releases albums under the name Yukio Yung), started mixing the albums at home using only keyboard, sampler, and sequencer.
Jenkins escaped with most of the silliness, the song title "Founding My Religion" notwithstanding. "Like Billy Ocean Said" takes on the subject of human memory: "We hang on every thought so nothing goes to waste/ creating recollections edited to out own taste/ We studied everything inside until we thought it black and white". "Founding..." is at least partly about what its title says, observing a boy who "Took a bag of nails and a box of wood/ he put the hammer down and saw that it was good/ then he got inside, and he wouldn't leave til he'd moved his head to the other side". The song's cynicism (the kid seems to have gotten himself in plenty of trouble on this side, and "as the smiling stops from inside the box, it occurs to me/ that he might as well be a devil child from the cemetary") also extends to the romantic analyses ("She'll give you anything, but Not That Much"), and the twaeking of the upper class ("Quality Street" is how XTC's "Respectable Street" might have turned out written in their voluntarily toothless latter days, though it still musters a good beer-commercial guitar riff). The exceptionally pretty "We've Gone Too Far" sees things as curable, though: maybe the problem is that "some of us don't know who we are". It's much more affecting when sung, of course, although I can't help wishing he still knew he was the guy who sang about hygrometers.
However, the result of an all-keyboard album are much more surprising: Burrows was using enough prime samples of his bandmates a continent away that THE BABY'S HEAD is one of the finest guitar records in the Britpop genre. Each of the first three songs includes some of the firiest 6-string soloing you're ever likely to run across, a fair variety of guitar and drum-smashing propulsion goes on throughout the record, "The Test Tone Five" is a decent surf instrumental, and that darn "Quality Street" riff is showing no signs of leaving my head anytime soon.
The melodies remain vibrant, the harmonies still look to the Beatles for guidance, and the arrangements still leave room for colour. "The Things Around The Picture", a song so entirely catchy that I refuse to stop and decode what it's about (other than "Doot doot doot doot doot-doot doot, the things around the picture!"), plays its verses like a mildly Prozacked outtake from Nine Inch Nails' PRETTY HATE MACHINE before going euphoric. "Billy Ocean..." has a string section. "Quality Street" feautures bells and something that is probably too lush to be a harp, but same concept. "1000 Tiny Pieces" has a Cars-like bassline and harmonies with the perverse flair of uncoordinated narcoleptics. A psychedelic effect, but not nearly as much so as the space-out closer, "Never Knowingly Understood". Still, it's clearly a pop album, voice and guitar and bass and drums (or samples thereof), essentially non-deranged. Some people, of course, think "non-deranged" is a compliment. And since you can actually buy this one for $12 from Flamingo Records--- contact Stewart Mason, flamingo@rt66.com --- wouldn't it be cool if you're of those?
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