33 rebellions per minute
"A cold hard look at the facts, through thick and cloudy cataracts"
2000
Fake Brain, DEPARTMENT OF OUR WAYS
The first two adjectives I thought of to describe DEPARTMENT OF OUR WAYS, Fake Brain's 2nd album, were "bouncy" and "spiky". Together the words suggest an activity exhilirating, fun, and potentially injurious, which seems about right. Fake Brain here sound like if the Wrens modified their caterwauling, angular, self-sabotaging, wall-of-melodic-feedback punk/pop style a bit more than halfway towards the snotty 3-chord accessibility of Blink 182 -- and then proceed to scare off any chance of success by littering several songs with synthesizers played to the American Dental Association's specifications for new drills. DEPARTMENT, available from CD Baby, is grabby and energetic; also intelligent and deeply cynical, in a way the Wrens' buried vocals make easier to ignore.
"Fake Brain Explained" generously serves to clear up who will have fun with this and who won't, right at the beginning. A mangled blues guitar riff and loud quarter-note cowbell set a base for electronic whooshes, a melodic guitar solo on Middle Eastern scales, sputtering bass overdrive, a whiny "la la la la la" monotone, and a distorted voice singing "We crawled out of our incubators, transluscent membranes covering our faces" in the aural equivalent of words made from pasting individual letters out of magazines.
"You're So Great" and "Jesus Pamphlets" follow up with equally convincing proof that these guys could get on alt-rock radio if they only repeated their choruses enough to get past the 2:15 length mark. They'd be filling the teenage brattiness quotas, of course. The former is jumpy and syncopated, the latter fast but muscular, both vocalized clearly and hoarsely like a guesstimate at what Dexter Holland of the Offspring would sound like if he'd learned to sing notes. "Sub-Sublime" would be the mainstreaming follow-up single: slowed down, with quiet verses using undistorted guitar, with genuinely clear and pleasant tenor vocals, melodically almost direct; the twisty, oddly rapid key changes are saved for the end of the second chorus.
Gideon's neatly articulated vocals quickly reveal themselves as abnormally perceptive and wordy for the genre, with obvious potential as notebook quotes and AOL profile markers of alienated teenagers seeking other alienated teenagers for bad times and possible matrimony. "You deserve the best of everything/ but I don't even know if I can lift my arms/ to hand it all graciously and lovingly to you/ How can you expect me to move/ when even the air has mass and weight/ and I'm so weak" -- you could interpret this as a sarcastic copout, or as the sincere stark terror of someone who found himself attracting someone's trust and interest, on purpose, before he'd worked out what obligations this might entail. "You can end up with the wrong answers, even asking the right questions" is either mean, or a worrisome reminder that earning philosophical extra credit is harder than it looks. "All it takes is a little effort/ all it takes is a little time/ to see the flaws in even the most/ beautiful design" could be adopted by time-saving legislation as the suicide note of everyone who doesn't have terminal physical pain as an excuse.
"X-Rays", an attractively dramatic piece slightly Wrens-ward of the Stone Temple Pilots' TINY MUSIC efforts at power-pop, could convince us to interpret all the lyrics as "these guys are probably jerks". Fake Brain dissect bad relationships with devastating enough insight, on behalf of all participants, that in a logical world their music would never ever get them any groupies no matter how many records they sold. "Did You Calculate?" -- catchily suggesting the early ragged Buzzcocks collaborating with a toy fire alarm on a slightly ska-inflected "Turning Japanese" remake -- offers a murder of a girlfriend as a logical policy of triage for the terminally inconsiderate. "Erasable Mattress", the sensitive acoustic guitar song, accepts blame for a relationship's end: "I thought you were a bathroom/ you thought I was a metronome/ now I've got my doubts/ why don't you get some of your own ... You were generous patient courteous and kind/ and I was trying to pretend i wasn't bored out of my mind". The frantic "Letmeadjustyourknobs", something like the Pixies mutilating a Mission Of Burma song, almost accepts blame for treating his mate as a mere font of potential worth reconstructing, a little here and a little there, but "You let me get away with this/ maybe that's why I despise you". "Increments", doo-wop despite the mild synthesizer blitzes, observes that "some people don't know what they want out of life/ so they fall in love instead". "Doomed" is a song of love-as-rescue, when read, even when sung over guitar triplets in a tone reminiscent of Buddy Holly's ballad "Everyday". But by the time it arrives, any listener will expect, correctly, that the three minutes after the lyrics end get steadily more claustrophobic in their slow, queasy chord changes. It is Fake Brain's accomplishment, like it or lump it, that most listeners will have had enough opportunity to fit relationships (theirs or others) to the preceding songs that the end of "Doomed" will seem fair, as well as inevitable.
Mind you, Fake Brain are perfectly happy to look down on you even if you don't date them. "Punk Rock Star" attacks annoying shock-tactic rockers, which seems odd, but perhaps they're drawing a crucial distinction based on thoroughness. Between "n.o.i.g.t.a.t.z.o.y.a." and "Better Than It Sounds", Fake Brain storytell a world of traffic jams, chemical spills, contaminated meat, ill-maintained buildings, radiation, homelessness, wife abuse, child labor, worship of inane celebrities, acne, hot weather, insects, bland food, baldness, the tendency of gravy to congeal, and the tendency of generosity to be accompanied by lack of wealth. "N.o.i.g...." slithers along aided by guest Julie M. on creepy New Wave organ, a la Barry Andrews in his XTC days. "Better...", though, is the lumbering, power-chorded, hoarsely harmonized equivalent of "Mr. E's Beautiful Blues", by the Eels. "Goddam right, it's a beautiful day" or "it's a lot better than it sounds", the cheery epiphanies are unearned, either in the song's lyrics or in the songs surrounding. But if you can't enjoy an unearned epiphany, you probably don't deserve an earned one.
Besides, Fake Brain have sneakier insights. The smallest, proudly unexplained, would be the track that consists entirely of a drum machine programmed to wind-tunnel echoes, simple organ outlines of chord changes, and the chant "stuck behind a truck with a website on the mudflap". "The Invisible Song", an improbable merger of Fugazi grind and They Might Be Giants kiddie-show absurdity, tosses out "Pythagoras was a clever man/ wish I had his autograph" on the way to "love is free supposedly/ but someone owns that melody/ and holds so warm and tenderly the royalty" {copyright 2000 Fake Songs}, two reflections on the inherent awkwardness of giving private value to publicly shared ideas. "Department Of Her Ways", lightly psyechedicized guitar'n'harmony like the Flaming Lips trying to be the Byrds, elegantly metaphorizes care for a high-maintence girlfriend as a governemnt task. Which legitimately raises a question. If $129/day isn't enough government funding to get decent care for the mentally retarded -- which is certainly what the investigative reporting seems to hint -- how much would it cost to maintain full-time professional deference and I-love-yous for the emotionally needy? And why on earth does that seem absurd when providing those same people with bland hamburgers, or interchangeable fashion'n'diet magazines, does not?
"Department..." contains, to be sure, the declaration that "I'm not coming to work today in the department of her ways", and perhaps days off are completely rational. Barbara Ehrenrich, left-wing essayist, has suggested that a marriage should have at least four people in it, to allow specialization, and time off, and distribution of tasks. The people in Fake Brain are fully qualified to offer, to any needy marriage, sardonic wit, imagination, and a genuine interest (no matter how corrosive the disguise) in relationship ethics. Perhaps they'd have a lot less to whine about if they could pass on their weaknesses to someone else. Perhaps they'd have a lot less to whine about if they could demand whatever they're seeking from more than one person. Perhaps all the "people running round til their buried in the ground" would find out what they wanted from life if they couldn't wave the perfect man/woman around as an excuse. But of course, then Fake Brain would have to write about some other topic, and then their music might Mature, and as long as the pogo is the only dance I'm genuinely good at, I don't think I want that.
Links to other sites on the Web
© 1997 bokonin@hotmail.com
Get your own Free Home Page