33 rebellions per minute
"We never see the sights, we're out too late at night"
1997
Kenickie, AT THE CLUB
Kenickie's primary songwriter, Lauren Laverne (given name Gofton, real name Laverne imho as long as she wants it), met her AT THE CLUB co-songwriter Marie Du Santiago in grammar school when Marie would regularly steal her food. It fits, somehow.
On the surface, CLUB is the sound of mainlined adolescent brashness, and it's a remarkably appealing surface worth some focus. Lauren and Marie shout-sing with real melodic and harmonic skill supplemented by apparent years of cheerleader training. On most songs-- take "P.V.C" or "Punka" or "Nightlife" as representative-- guitar and bass and drums hide in the background, loud but unobtrusive, playing expected chords with gusto, placing the big bass drum beats where the momentum buildups require them. If the Spice Girls played a set of Offspring songs, Kenickie would still be writing catchier choruses and exuding more genuine menace, but the overall sound would be similar. Kenickie also downshift into somewhat slower songs with similar arrangements but more fluttery, agile melodies: "People We Want"'s melody, for example, suggests full-band They Might Be Giants suddenly pondering the serious implications of their lyrics and tumbling a full octave through minor key notes before recovering. "Spies" heads the other direction, slashing and direct like Elastica plus guitar splatter. "Classy" hints at synthpop beneath the adrenalized surface. There are also two outright experiments. "Robot Song" IS synthpop, if you can detect Pop in a construction of monotonous syn-bass chords, a percussion of Space Invaders mothership noises, and chilly vocal attempts to justify the title -- or if you wait patiently for the fragile bridge, as lullabye as anything involving broken boughs, fallen cradles, and crushed babies would be. "Acetone", closing the album, uses a cello, cycling vocal rounds, and mournful country inflection.
Lyrically, you get songs of adolescent brashness filtered through too many years (Laverne was 19 when the album came out) of nightlife. How to interpret everything is a free choice issue. I don't relate to these songs directly. Indeed, as someone who basically stayed in as a teen-- with friends, to be sure, but well away from parties, drinking, or any serious chance of getting a date-- I could easily make the case that my lifestyle (er…) was more fun than Lauren's (or Marie's), or even claim that she'd agree in retrospect. From "In Your Car"'s "I'm in heaven, I've been told" and "People…"'s "Well it's nice to be loved by someone/ this lovelife is taking too long", she moves to more specific complaints. "I can't work with heavy coats, they're not revealing/ have to see each other's clothes, so we're all freezing", she says, unsponsored by the multi-billion dollar clothing and cosmetics industries, and "P.V.C."'s tribute to a specific clothing brand would make a great commercial only because the irony is very lightly implied. The contempt or perhaps worry is self-evident in "She's eating lipstick and drinking champagne/ she's dancing home and taking cocaine", and it's a relief that I've never cared about anyone like that.
"How I Was Made" attacks en masse friendship: "There are too many moths around me when I shine". "Spies" portrays a romance as "doing the work of two", the menace of "I'm licensed to kill your bloodless face, your voiceless mouth" undermined by the felt obligation to do so instead of watching things fall apart from apathy. "Robot Song", occurring (in spirit) as the discouraging sequel, meets the breakup with "I wish I had a car, and bits of wire/ to tie you to the seat, and drive you to the sea, and keep on going", the sort of lines that elegantly ruin the robot feel-nothing fantasy, as if "I wish I had the skill to concentrate each breath, to make sure that it's done. It's not instinctive" wasn't horrifying enough. Do what your fellow humans all do, when and where they do it, and you'll envy Commander Data: that could be the album's lesson.
Trouble is, how do you then explain the raucous pride of "Do what you like, and you can't fail/ to get in someone's way". They clearly don't intend any hollowness in "Classy"'s accurate brag "We've got class, we've got style!!!". The assertions of "Come Out 2Nite"-- "Take what you can, eat off the man, wear high heels, get a record deal"-- have the value of being true, or at least more true, so far, than my de facto preference of shyly unaided home-recording has been (a lot of synth-geeks get their music career off the ground in their 30's, which is still 11 years they lost to Kenickie). "We make things out of dust, so we can smash them up" is a method of learning, one that hasn't served me badly on those occasions that I've adopted it. Letting other people go first, listening to what they have to say and learning from their mistakes: that has its own assets. It's less painful, for one thing. It may well be a better way of making friends. People join your life at your invite after you've watched them a bit, with the result that _my_ friends are as remarkable a right-end-of-the-bell-curve collection of intelligence, subversiveness, idealism, kindness, and humor as I could ask; whereas when you hang out with everybody who hangs out, you'll probably meet five people who come on as best friends then steal from you for every one who (like Marie Du Santiago) goes the other direction. Standing aside from the social mill also leaves a lot more room to learn your unique interests, random talents and eccentricities, and my last AT THE CLUB quote will be "Don't make my mistakes/ close your eyes, fill your head with things you like". It's good advice. But it's advice that slows you down, and I'm not sure it would be a good thing if everyone followed it.
1999
Kenickie, GET IN
For Lauren Laverne's second album, her main songwriting partner is guitarist Johnny X (given name Gofton), and if it doesn't change her worldview, it changed the music enough that the two opinions of GET IN I had before buying it both added up to a reluctantly favorable version of "what the hell _happened_!?!?". Specifically, there isn't a single song on GET IN that wouldn't have fit okay on the debut, and yet the overall effect is that the musical style which dominated the debut is simply gone. Absent. How long it would have taken me to notice this on my own, I'm honestly not sure; while I adore AT THE CLUB in entirety, in mixtapes I tended to reduce it to "Robot Song", "Classy", and sometimes "Acetone", a minimalist/ punkpop/ cello smorgasbord. Obviously I was ready for more outlying data points. Yet the one-album transformation to _all_ outliers is almost unique, previewed only, in my awareness, by the Boomtown Rats' shift from FINE ART OF SURFACING to MONDO BONGO. Kenickie broke up after the record was finished, and one possible explanation is shock.
The first and last tracks are the frightening ones. "Stay In The Sun" is a discofied Carnival Cruise ad in waiting, "Something's Got To Give" is the sort of commercial that uses piano jazz/ blues. In between, however, "I Would Fix You", "60's Bitch", and "Psychic Defense" are all shamelessly pretty orchestral-pop songs that Phil Spector might've recorded on a good day if he'd had the right multitrack technology. "Lunch At Lassiter's" adds a shuffling mechanical beat and shifts the hook to a superglossed synthetic evocation of what metallophones might sound like in a Philharmonic conductor's dreams. "Run Me Over" puts the beat and bleeping noises to the forefront in the album's closest approach to Kenickie's audacious gang-vocal charisma. "And That's Why" is orchestrally referenced in that it uses a string section, but nothing much else, and to be hollow, claustrophobic. "Magnatron", "5 AM", and "411" confirm Kenickie's potential to reform as one of the more imaginative synthesizer bands.
The sounds, thus, are much nicer, and in a more modest way the words are too. "And…" may be brutal in explaining exactly why "no one wants you", but it does try to explain, and its key dilemma ("no one wants to see you struggle") might, with luck and ingenuity, be solvable. "Stay…", hoping to preserve a relationship, puts no more emphasis on "You don't know how much I love you" than it does on "don't you know you've got no place to go", but at least both are there. "Psychic…" invites "Before I take you home, because we all need a home, take note: do what I don't do", though there's acid behind the uplift: "If you've got a smile, smile it - cuz you can sell". Yet "I Would Fix You" seems, unambiguously, to be Lauren accepting the role of the helpful adult. Acknowledging "Sometimes the sun shines on unkind people", she pledges "You've been broken too. Haven't you? I would fix you", without any suggestion, at all, that the "too" in "broken" asks anything back. "I am strong to break your fists on" is, I suspect and hope, a metaphor, but one it still takes strength to formulate. And they're right: it's not the kind of strength that would convince if it depended on cheerleading group voice and surging guitar blasts.
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