33 rebellions per minute
"No point in leaving well enough alone"
1998
Herb Heinz, FAILURE
"On FAILURE I have set out to fail. My objective is to try to communicate the notion of trying to communicate and failing. And failing. Or perhaps the other way around. Clearly that's not what I meant. Thank you for your patronage." --- from the liner notes
Herb Heinz is the guitar-playing Man in Amy X Neuberg & Men, here using Amy as backing vocalist, "assistant producer, vocal coach, and sanity check" for his solo debut. It's a synthesizer focused, lyrically and musically unified work (examining aspects of failure, yes), in which I find a perversely dignified beauty. That despite the self-aware petulance of "Not What I Wanted" ("but it's certainly kind of... interesting... It's not what I planned for. Try doing it right next time!") and despite the occasional guitar solos which words like "strangled", "chicken-wire", and "squawking" don't quite fully describe ("staccato" and "treble" lend some objective guide). Herb's nasal, slightly gruff singing sounds an awful lot like Tim Walters of the band Pledge Drive, rather than any trained singer, especially at its most aggressive; and the low-pitched "Going downtown!"s of the eerily echoplexed "First Off" set a grim mood. But then Heinz whips off somthing as delicately pretty as "Blood" (like if 1980 Human League or Wire aimed to soothe), or as cautiously majestic as "Everything Is Small". "Song Of Songs" has a normal enough groove to its sing-song, a very pretty pause for Amy's vocals, and what seems to be a distant earthquake disguising itself as a stolid, dramatic bass chord pattern. "Failure" has elements of both the grandest classic rock and that guy who composed "Chariots Of Fire". "Beautiful Thing", the oddest track and my favorite, sets up a 7/8 swing for Herb and Amy to duet in jaunty quasi-Sesame Street tunefulness, then one of those guitar solos signifies an increasing breakdown as ideas race on and off stage in five second turns, then resolves by picking up the prettiest vocal section and bringing it back all by itself as a mantra and a genuinely gorgeous resolution.
This isn't a good review, because the album sounds too different from anything else for me to really hint at what you'll hear (it's something like the electronic parts of Amy's UTECHMA, but most of FAILURE's songs can most aptly be compared to each other, big help). The album, for me, is a success for this exact reason: it's different and interesting. It gives me a new example of "beautiful", which can always use more examples. It gives me Herb's voice, which I've decided against mere rationality to like. It gives me more synthesizer music, which I'm always on the lookout for. And it's different, and interesting.
FAILURE can be ordered for $12 from IS Productions, PO Box 3856, Oakland, CA 94609.
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