33 rpm (Delgados)

33 rebellions per minute


"Checking our history notes, seeing if we're strong enough"




1999

Delgados, PELOTON

The paragraph review for people In The Know: PELOTON sounds like the boho/alt, gifted-but-lazy guitar rock of the Grifters or Pavement, injected with the enthusiasm, naïve sparkle, casual ingenuity, and boy/girl harmonies of some Sarah Records act like the Field Mice, Even As We Speak, or the Vaselines. I would also note that, when checking their official band site, I read that they had opened for Flashing Lights and for Polaris on their American tour, but I misread that as opened for Flaming Lips and Polara - because hey, that would have made perfect sense. Further note that, on a CD single, the Delgados (who, like Del Amitri, are Scottish) have covered "a Very Cellular Song", by the whimsical instrument-collecting hippie folkers the Incredible String Band.
PELOTON, unlike their guitar-based debut DOMESTIQUES, fades in on some gentle flute-play - played correctly, not in the Ian Anderson tongue-flute style that I would normally prefer. "Everything Goes Around The Water" is, like the majority of the songs here, a waltz, and introduces the band's key elements: decorous guitar-playing; Stewart Henderson's gentle, dorky, boyish tenor; Emma Pollock's stronger and more accurate, but still gentle and lightly accented, soprano; flute integrated like an obvious part of the song; and wistful, insecure lyrics on the order of "I would never really know what to say, until it's been said". "The Arcane Model" introduces itself on aggressive acoustic strumming, though that's a feint; and adds supportive cello, which turns out to belong. It also features some sharper guitar distortion and more urgent, almost X-inflected (but competent) harmonies for the chorus. "Clarinet", later, aided by bongos and tambourine and strings and a casually pitch-bending guitar lead, gives Stewart an endearingly awkward unaccompanied vocal. The lovely "Pull The Wires From The Wall" follows with Emma's showcase, as well as a gorgeous bells melody and a virtual garage orchestra of trombone, clarinet, and string quartet. "Repeat Failure" takes an amiably jangly guitar-pop song worthy of the early Posies and buries it brutally under impenetrable sheets of high feedback, bass-playing worthy of Babe The Blue Ox, and vocals bounced off every wall of a gymnasium like someone was making a trick pinball shot with them. Then it strips back to the simple little song (Emma takes over the vox); a softly thumping kick-drum nudges the pace; and the entire sequence repeats. Though not in my opinion as failure, or even as second-time farce; I actually enjoy the subversion of the expectation that you build towards, not away from, the chaos.
"And So The Talking Stopped" proves they can press a more ordinarily rocking style throughout a whole song if they want (Smashing Pumpkins with a girl singer, maybe), and that the drummer really does enjoy walloping things now and then. "Don't Stop" hints towards "Norwegian Wood"'s melody, perhaps as rendered by Elliott Smith on one of his ghostlier days, before erupting in Modern RockTM distortion and loud chords. "Blackpool" starts out the way I always pictured the dwarvish ballads of mourning in the Hobbit, abruptly ratchets the energy level into battle song (with mystical creatures howling in the background), and then into the uncontrolled noises of a battle being hijacked by free magic, before edging back to safe, refreshed mourning. "Russian Orthodox" employs guitar feedback in an independent, slithering fashion, and exemplifies the frayed energy of spectrum-filling hard rock. "The Weaker Argument Defeats The Stronger", the last song and my favorite, brings grace to the snotty off-handedness of "I think you know/ I'd like to go/ cuz all the ladies are stinkin'", brings snideness to "I saw your friends today and they all said you're great", and brings the stout fatefulness of a medieval counting song to an arrangement that unites the lazy jingleness of a country restaurant's ad campaign and the hectic sonic playfulness of Robyn Hitchcock's "the Yip Song" or the Beatles' "Good Morning!".
I don't recommend finding a lyric sheet for this band (indeed, I stopped reading a third of the way through myself). Pinned down, their lyrics are certainly intelligent, but I find, for me, that they've been remarkably evocative in pieces, as puzzles. PELOTON is apparently supposed to be a wistful album with flares of restrained anger, but it can also be heard as playful, as nostalgiac, as analytical, as pretty for the sake of pretty. The Delgados break no new ground: not quite as orchestrated as THE SOFT BULLETIN, a little less tumblingly tuneful than the Loud Family, never quite as gentle as Gorky's Zygotic Mynci or quite as harsh as Curve. But they take on an unusually ambitious range of sounds, integrate them as if they always belong, and present it all with the winsome, self-deprecating modesty of people who know they could do better with training. Probably they will, but you can only be innocent and ragged for a limited time, and some wonders can be achieved no other way.


2000


Delgados, THE GREAT EASTERN
Reading my PELOTON review above, I'm surprised how modest my enthusiasm is. Perhaps that's fair -- I'm not sure if PELOTON is a genuine masterpiece -- but for a very good album, it hit remarkably close to the center of my musical tastes these days. The equivalent album for the me of ten years ago might be Joe Satriani's (very good and recommended) FLYING IN A BLUE DREAM ('89). I certainly don't insist on treating the intervening ten years as maturation on my part, but my tastes have, at least, shifted. Where FLYING revved into overdrive on shiny, hard-hitting guitar riffs, PELOTON's less frequent loud moments are shaped from feedback, drum churn, and ambient textures. Where FLYING offered some dazzling (and genuinely inventive) guitar solos, PELOTON supplies excitable lurches of flute and calliope. Where FLYING's meditative moments played either as A-list power ballads or as sparkling recordings of Satriani's 20th-year-student practice warmups, PELOTON's are ragged assemblages of acoustic instruments played with more determination than skill. Where Satriani's voice, though badly reviewed, struck me as expressive and pleasantly manly, the Delgados offer a shy, wallflowery male singer and a sweet, giftedly amateurish female one. Where FLYING's lyrics were vapid and harmless, PELOTON's are allusive ones that can hit home long before the listener understands them (I can't give you a blow-by-blow logical summary of "the Weaker Argument Defeats the Stronger" yet, but by April 2000 I was ready to see it as a romantic worrier's doubts about wishful thinking's use as a lifeline, the counter-argument to Marine Research's "Hopefulness to Hopelessness". I was also wishing I'd nominated the two as co-pop-songs of the year on my Best Of 1999 list).
On my end, the differences seem to best sum as: although I haven't lost my taste for dazzling skill, my heart now goes out more readily to the triumph of aspiration and ingenuity over modest talents. THE GREAT EASTERN, then, was an album I anticipated as much as almost any record this year. If the Delgados had moved in just one album from angular, shambling guitar-rock to something so all-inclusive as PELOTON, where might they reach next? The answer disappointed me for quite a while, because it's so easy to state: orchestral-rock. Not as bright-eyed or eclectic as XTC's APPLE VENUS; not as prone to weird tangents as Home's XIV; more melodically flowing than Mercury Rev; and most unexpectedly, much, much more seamless than Neutral Milk Hotel or the endsongs of dEUS's IN A BAR UNDER THE SEA. THE GREAT EASTERN, grand and melancholy, sounds to me almost exactly like the Eels' DAISIES OF THE GALAXY would have were their leader E to approach music primarily as a composer, rather than as a songwriter.
The trombone and tuba and croaky Stewart Henderson vocals that open the first song ("the Past That Suits You Best") in Victrola-era vinyl ambience; the whooshing UFO's-in-search-of-parking-spaces synthesizer and resonant kick/snare shuffle that break in; the assemblage of vibraphone and flutes and softly adorable vocal harmonies that start linking the something-old and something-new; the way that violin, cymbals, two-finger piano, submerged-gunfire percussion, and a robot singer briefly awakened from a hundred years of peaceful rust all take moments of prominence before the song ends: all of this is not merely a culture-juggling accomplishment on the ambition level of the Eels' old near-hits "Novocaine For The Soul" or "Last Stop: This Town", but actually moment-to-moment sounds like DAISIES' "Grace Kelly Blues", "Jeannie's Diary", or "Mr.E's Beautiful Blues".
THE GREAT EASTERN was released almost simultaneously with DAISIES, so it's a pure coincidence. The differences, quite starkly, are one, that where E makes his points in two verses and two choruses then goes home, "Past..." comfortably stretches to 6:20. Two is that E's grumpy images jump out at the listener for easy storage -- "Look at all the people like cows in a herd/ well, I like birds", or "I bought some rock star ashes/ from the back of Rolling Stone/ I guess he wouldn't mind/ they couldn't sell his soul", or "Some people like to call me Chuck/ well it's Charles, and you are shit out of luck". "Past..." has lines whose compact discouragement E might well applaud: "Bored of the truth, I return to my youth/ drinking Breaker at night on the cold Duchess light". But the song's conclusion is ambiguous: is "No path of truth led me where I could walk/ but the lies that I made led me out of the swamp" good or bad? Is this a motto of religious salvation, for better or worse? Could this be a motto for the novel Lois Bujold's Warrior's Apprentice actually turns out to be, in which the hero, far from being a Howard Roark, turns out as a bizarre fusion of Milo Minderbinder and the teacher from Dead Poets' Society, building an ever more precarious and less intended empire by inspiring people into heroisms based on spur-of-the-moment fictions? Or do I trust the motto at all, is it merely written from a different swamp? Not that I'd have to notice the words at all; where E has learned to sing (when he chooses) like a professional fee-for-wisecrack curmudgeon, or else like an aching romantic, the Delgados' singers play as two of the prettier instruments in a carefully balanced mini-orchestra.
The strength of EASTERN -- and this is probably part of what left me cold at first, since I didn't expect it -- is precisely in that it is _not_ over-ambitious. It is ambitious, more so than PELOTON, but Stewart and Emma and Alun Woodward and Paul Savage have advanced their abilities so rapidly that the constructions never teeter. There is a legitimate problem there, sure. They've so mastered their new motif, cramming so much of their range into each song so effortlessly, that it's not so easy to tell the songs apart. Bits stand out: the one with jangle-rock elements that switches between their usual 3/4 time and clip-clop rock tempo, that's "Accused of Stealing". The intro that could be church organ from a wind-racked temple or could be a lovely feedback-drone imitation, that's on "American Trilogy". The one where Stewart sings as much like an arena-rock bellower as anyone whose vocal chords retain a pathological fear of microphones ever could, that's "Reasons For Silence". The call-and-response duet vocals are on "Thirteen Gliding Principles", as are the keening Eastern-tinged violin/bass/flute blasts that remind me of Alanis Morissette's "Baba", as is the tense waltz-time simulation of Black Sabbath's tour with the London Philharmonic. The Brahms-ian piano/violin etude flits through "No Danger", which is also the obvious (if 6:32-length) pop single, its open-hearted Soul Asylum melody dressed in flamboyant clothing borrowed equally from Robyn Hitchcock and the young Elton John. "Aye Today"'s percussion lumbers in a rather distinctive fashion for awhile, "Witness" has mild country leanings .... but for every detail that stands out, one can be easily overwhelmed by the fact that virtually _every_ song makes smart use of piano and strings and guitar and 29 kinds of percussion, of tiptoe and sway and stomp. If these are the songs ambitious bands use as showstoppers -- and they are -- then ten of them in a row could cause permanent paralysis.
Luckily, I'd been anticipating THE GREAT EASTERN as much as almost any new album this year, and I kept playing it, and by now I'm making the Case Against purely from memory. I think it is a weakness to have one's musical tastes depend on too much skill, too much perfection, sure. If you won't accept brilliant ideas dropped into bodies less-than-ideal for expressing them, then the sheer widespreadness of human imperfection means that you'll miss most of the world's brilliant ideas, and that's your loss. Furthermore, a lot of the niftiest ideas, and niftiest sounds for that matter, are precisely the ones that happen when wiring is left exposed, when contraptions misfire and bump into the wrong other contraptions.
The human mind can be more like a Rube Goldberg machine than we care to admit, and all a Rube Goldberg machine that works properly does is whatever task it was designed for. Advanced microscopic chips, capable of performing 100 million operations per second, made of sand in super-cooled Japanese factories and imported via flying metal, direct their operations into a maze of the finest fiber-optic wire, seek guidance in search engines that can scan the stored body of human knowledge using advanced statistical weighting tactics, and come out with a picture of Tsunami singer Jenny Toomey to fulfill the momentary vague curiosity of the microchips' owner. The overheated lamp slowly expans the grain of the wood which moves the boot which kicks the cat which swipes the mouse which trips the switch which launches the bowling ball which squashes the orange which pours out into the glass as juice, or whatever. The Rube Goldberg cat waits patiently for its boot, instead of racing around after imaginary demons like _my_ cats do, so we don't learn whatever the demons are trying to tell it.
But systematic overkill does achieve goals, and some goals more than justify it. Beauty, majesty, and introspection, the Delgados remind me, are three goals never to underrate.

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