33 rebellions per minute
"Too many mirrors and not enough time"
2000
Fidget, GLAD TO BE YOUR ENEMY
Today's bonus piece of unsolicited music-seeking advice is: always make sure you have friends in the United States _and_ Europe. I'm sure an Aussie or a Zealander or someone in Japan wouldn't hurt either. One reason, of course, is logistical: no matter where you live, someone is going to be recording wonderful music elsewhere and then impudently failing to get a record contract in your whereabouts. Thus, there is no certain requirement that your extracontinental contact person actually know a lot about the music you're seeking. The gal who bought me dEUS, Kenickie, Scarlet, and Kingmaker CD's in a one-shot visit to London last summer was working entirely on a list I'd sent and on the faith that she'd get something beneficial out of listening to her pickups before she sent them my way; it worked wonderfully, for both of us. But it's even better if your foreign contact is the sort who subscribes to music mailing lists, and I just now got up and put on my fedora so I could tip it to my recent e-acquaintance Anna-Maria, of Uppsala, Sweden. Because with friends like that, you can find lovely stuff you hadn't been looking for at all.
Did you know, for example, that Scandinavia has an active scene of bands that seem completely unaware that the year 1981 is over and gone? First Floor Power have just started an EP-and-single career making electropop with snarky New Wave touches; A. Numinen's synthpop is clanky and clownish. My favorite Swede pop import of the moment, however, is Fidget, a sextet who use their large rock'n'synth lineup not to sound at all dense, but merely to assemble full songs without any player needing to master more than one or two simple patterns per song. They don't _really_ sound like 1981, honestly. I went back listening to old a-ha and Human League records before I wrote this, and Fidget's distorted guitar energy turns out to be a far more identifiably '90's touch than I'd recalled, more like Bis's SOCIAL DANCING (but able and willing to try tuneful elegance), or Angel Corpus Christi's WHITE COURTESY PHONE (but more reckless and unpredictable). On the other hand, the Cars have been useless since 1985's GREATEST HITS, so let's enjoy the idioms we have.
"Golden Neolife" opens the album in bubbly 16th-notes. Undistorted guitar, run only through a cheeziness pedal, cycles twice per measure through a complete 4-chord sequence, sonically hinting at the faux-ethnicity of Magnetic Fields hosting a luau. Which doesn't prevent the proper punk/grunge fuzz-pedal abuse of the chorus. "Underdog"'s hollow patter of drums thump restainedly enough that you can hear the theremin, soft piano, and simulated harmonica. "To Hell With Music", leading with a blistering imitation of Dick Dale surf-guitar, is hard rock paced by handclaps, beeps, and warbles, like the B-52's hijacking a Clash anthem. "Aero Explosion", hollow and echoey and pedal-steely, is a brief Cowboy Junkies-style interlude with just enough overtly computerized soundscaping to fit the record. But "Rock And Roll Is Back Again" starts layering its eerily propulsive hooks right from the opening melody, apparently played on speakerphone by an undead kazoo master, and ends up with a fascinating 2-minute demonstration that even a hitworthy chorus tagline can become a minimalist, Steve-Reichian background if you repeat it over and over and over, while all the instruments that _should_ be background are dropping in and out on the way to a gigantic crescendo.
"Tomorrow Is Too Late"'s instrumentation answers the question "what would THE JOSHUA TREE have sounded like as low-budget synth-pop?", and makes me feel momentarily silly for never having asked. "We Can Go Far" sounds disturbingly akin to this mid-1980's TV commercial for a supposed art school that would evaluate your drawings of a rabbit and suchlike things if you sent them in with a check, and also rips the synth line from the track on A CHRISTMAS WITH JOHN DENVER AND THE MUPPETS where John tells a story that leads into "Where The River Meets The Sea"; I know it's a less than 1% chance that I helped you with these comparisons, or that Fidget themselves have any idea what I'm talking about, but just picture going for spiritual sustanence to a guru who used to be an organ grinder's monkey. I wouldn't like it on its own, probably, but it leads directly into the barreling "Sick Of You", like Joan Jett trying to turn the Breeders' "Cannonball" into Nine Inch Nails' "Big Man With A Gun". "Out of the Blue", an ominous slow-burn that never interrupts its base four-beat minor scale upward, could be an Elastica based on Wire's CHAIRS MISSING/154 instead of on PINK FLAG.
"Loud, Confident, and Wrong" would be Angels/ Crystals early-60's girl group pop (albeit with theremin) if the bass guitar grind didn't sound so much like a mechanical malfunction. "Sweettalker" has the exact same out-of-place sensitive-acoustic guitar chords as Fake Brain's "Erasable Mattress", but with soft sustained church-organ chords just synthetic enough to fit, and with 55 seconds of the Atari Teenage Riot-ous monotone "You Are The One For Me, Baby" to reassert credentials afterwards. "Autobahn" closes the CD on an unexpectedly slow and beautiful note, but assembles it from fitting ingredients: cleanly picked guitar that never tries to master more than a couple notes at once; evolving synthesizer bass drones that may well have come from the pre-set sound bank; isolated rumbles of feedback; and nicely refined guitar harmonics. The last five seconds of the album are the fading monotone stums of an echoey guitar, and "I hate music, it has too many notes!" was always more a motto of New Wave than of the bar band (the Replacements) who originated it.
Nina Natri, the singer, deserves special praise. Her voice is rather husky, and I've no idea whether her lilting Swedish accent charms everyone as it charms me, but she moves easily from cooing, to desolate Lisa Germano hesitation, to guttural growling, to cocky stridency, to a matter-of-fact narrative singsong that overlaps the non-feral elements of Bjork's voice. The lyrics, about technology and love, are harmless-to-intelligent, with flashes of insight: as when an already convincing song from a stalker's point-of-view explains "Remember asking gently? Asking gently is asking for a no", or when a girl refusing to be dumped acknowledges "being fed with love on a daily basis, it kills your braincells". (I also like "To hell with logic! It makes no sense".) The beats are strong, even fierce when appropriate, or when the beats are absent there's something intriguing going on to justify it. The pacing assures that if any one song doesn't immediately sound like Fidget, any average of two songs does. Hit songs never had Fidget's somewhat abrasive edge, but they used to share Fidget's general logic. I used to care a lot more about hit songs, too.
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