33 rebellions per minute
"Feeding a kid on pages ripped out of a second hand copy of Beyond Good And Evil"
1993
Casey Scott, CREEP CITY
Start with the easy part: the Creeps, the band on this album, are the best garage band I've ever heard, by a wide margin. Anyone who's heard of any of them-- Justin McCarthy on bass, Greg Cartwright on guitar, and especially Patrick Julius on drums-- is invited to send me info about them. Within the first 30 seconds of lead track "Long Night", they've established enough of a range that they could carry an album on it. The guitar's opening minor chords, ringing seconds apart like a cartoon sleuth exaggeratedly imitating the nervous slow steps of the suspect who's listening for him, resolves by acceleration in a 4-chord pattern that continue to speed, with bass accompaniment, into a racing rock'n'roll juggernaut, completed as the muffled-but-loud bass drums clatter along in syncopated 16th-notes. The rest of the song plays with these dynamics, but "Sharp Metal Objects", like a preview of Tool, plies a steady pace and toys instead with crescendo and decrescendo: from faraway bass lines so soft that a fingernail creaking along a guitar string, or a clank of a sewer pipe, can jar; up through a punk semi-roar with defined feedback. "7th Of November" rests to let Casey Scott play her own acoustic guitar to soft whole-note snare drum. "Rattle My Bones" gives the drums a gong-like cadence, the guitar a distant screech like agitated rats, and centers on a hollow bass that seems to be imperfectly tuned, not in the sense of being the wrong pitch but in the sense of cheerfully including notes that don't really belong in the chord being played. "The Paradise Lost and Found" is insanely pummeling 5-chord (but mostly 2-chord) punk in 3/4 time, with tentative hints of surf guitar bowled over in the rush, which itself slows twice to a dramatic crawl, the better to re-assault us with.
"Mars" is spacious; its blasts of drums and guitar are celebratory random punctuation, with a jazz groove and furious guitar solo appearing, thrice, for just long enough to suggest that, if they didn't want it to disintegrate, it wouldn't. "Creep City"s underwater bass crawl hints at Nirvana's "Come As You Are" and, furthering the similarity a bit, builds up partway only in order to retreat (though Julius's drum fills end up making one feel very sorry for the drums); diversions into bubbly major-key feedback-rock, doomy metal chordings, and clickety-clack drum-fueled race-along are each swallowed back into the undercurrent. After "Rudy"-- deadpan and utterly credible doo-wop decorated only by cane and fingersnaps-- "Angela and the Eagle" sustains most of its huge dynamic variation over a back porch 2-chord acoustic guitar-picking. "8 Days" is boppy and straightforward '50's rock with a pronounced Duane Eddy twang and enthusiasm on the guitar leads. "Fish" closes the album softly on bass piano, hints of guitar jangle, and in the buildup, some brass-- and at the loud extreme it sounds, by accident I'm sure, startlingly like the "this computer is connecting to the Internet as we speak" noise. None of this is revolutionary, in fact it's traditional and reverent, but all of this is about what Patti Smith's band on HORSES should've sounded like to fully justify all the acclaim it got.
Speaking of Patti Smith... Casey Scott, our singer and songwriter, regards herself as a poet and a New Yorker, both of which, according to the bylaws, exempt her from normal considerations like singing ability. She _can_ sing well, actually; "7th..." and "Rudy" demonstrate adequately that she has a pretty if wavery voice when she chooses. The rest of the time, she rotates flexibly among and between variants of Patti Smith's baritone howl, Smith's "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine" intensity, Maggie Estep's snide urban comedy, Corin Tucker's screech, and Homer Simpson's broad, unkind imitations of Marge's speaking voice. She usually uses these purposefully, which isn't always an excuse, and sometimes she tosses in an ungodly voice just for the sake of variety. I do like, very much, the intense and Estep voices, persuasively selling everything from the spookily detailed mental inmate's song "Sharp Metal Objects" to the fading-into-offhandedness of "6'2" and weighing in at a virile 188 pounds, up and coming sophomore halfback (let's call him Hal, shall we?) (blond hair, blue eyes (why not?))" or the playful wonderment of "and Angela said 'Wow, I've never seen a real live metaphor before, wish I'd brought my camera'". Nonetheless, she does occasionally shriek, and more than occasionally lets her drama get in the way of tunefulness. I bought this album, for $1, at the recommendation of a trusted e-friend who considers it a masterpiece. I then sold my then-roommate Rob, a smart man and a genuinely gifted poet in his own right, on its masterpiece status after giving him his own $1 copy. I think it might be a masterpiece myself, and am fortified by their judgments. But I'm far from strapped for reasons why record stores would be stuck with $1 copies to palm off.
As a rock poet, though, I'd rate her far ahead of Smith, Estep, Beth Lisick, or even most of the savantisms of King Missile's John S. Hall. Her taste for difficult rhymes won't be for everyone, but she rarely lets it get in the way of memorable phrases, as simple as
"The faster that you run, the longer that the road is
and once you think you're done, you've won, they'll ask you what your motive was
and you'll say because of all the terrible things that not doing it does"
-- a simplicity in which is concealed most of what you need to know about both how people talk themselves into careers as corporate lawyers, lobbyists, advertisers, telemarketers, suit and-tie-and-shave-enforcing personnel officers, nitpicking processors of triplicate forms, and other degraders of civilized life; and why it's a failed excuse because, as each person seemingly has to learn on their own rather than accepting centuries of overpowering literary and journalistic and psychological evidence, it _doesn't even work_: that people making $10K/yr tell pollsters that happiness will arrive when they make $20K, but that people making $60K are telling pollsters that happiness arrives at $100K, while at least one congressman during the last Congressional pay-raise fight was permitted by his handlers to describe "middle-class" as "between $300K and $500K/yr" (Hollywood magnates making $3 million, I'm told, refer to themselves with absolute sincerity as "middle-class"). And so, in fear of never shedding their current torments, and in careful deliberate blindness to whatever choices they may be inflicting on others, people continue to choose "I was just following orders". At her more complicated, Casey's eye for details and hypnotic recitation style converge on such as "...Objects":
"They took my fountain pen and handed me a crayon
They took my history and cracked it like a crab for them to prey on
I'll skip the saltless stroganoff, I'll pass on the cardboard sauerkraut
At last when the lights go off and the nightshifters have nodded out
It's over the counter, under the counter
Through the counter, behind the counter
...
One for my for my infected ear, one for each of the voices I hear
One to stop the shaking of the bed, one blue one white one yellow one red
One more one more one more, on this entire floor
There are no sharp metal objects"
--a level of detail which could plausibly be from experience, or from imagination, or then again could just be a projection from her tutoring of elementary schoolkids who take Ritalin; whatever, I'm impressed. She has a fascination for unhappy things, from abortion clinics to worthwhile guys she can't manage to fall in love with; from slumlords to "Work Sex Sleep TV/ maybe take some classes at the PVC/ once you wanted something but it just can't be/ you've got responsibilities! Responsibilities!". But "Mars" is a beat-poetic account of a joyous time, "Angela..." is a bizarre shaggy dog joke, and "Watch" is a cheerful complaint about the watches Casey has managed to lose (I sympathize: I have the destructive tendency of treating watches as Slinkies conveniently attached, until I remove them for better play, to my wrist). CREEP CITY is an interesting mixed bag as social commentary, but succeeds as a panoramic account of a life. And a truly fabulous slab of rock'n'roll. If the singer doesn't frighten you too much.
Links to other sites on the Web
© 1997 bokonin@hotmail.com
Get your own Free Home Page