33 rebellions per minute
"The rope that held you to your past is buried into twine"
© 1997 bokonin@hotmail.com
1995
Home, IX
If you own Pavement's CROOKED RAIN CROOKED RAIN, and if you are willing
to at least memorize my '97 review of Cheer-Accident's ENDURING THE
AMERICAN DREAM, then this review is simple: Home here take Pavement's
versions of pop song ("Cut Your Hair", "Range Life") and of low effort,
and marry it to ENDURING's instrumentation concepts. Otherwise, well.
This is an album I bought from reviews, which isn't odd for me, but what
is odd is that Home wasn't being compared to anyone I liked especially;
I just wanted to see how anyone could read Elton John and Can, David
Bowie and the Residents and Emerson Lake & Palmer into the same record.
I didn't find out. But that's okay.
One Bowie reference I'll make: my favorite chorus of all time,
sometimes, is a Bowie one, a hit from his slightly-avant-soul-man phase,
and it goes "Oooo-oo wah! Zso zso zso zso zso zso zso zso. Fa! Fa! Fa!
Fa! Fashion! Beep-beep!" Home lead off IX with "Freedohm Rd." and it
produces as decent and exciting a simulation as rock has generated
since: in rapid piano-led waltz, Eric Morrison and Brad Kopplin sing
alternating syllables of "1,2,1/ 2,1,2/ 1,2,1/ 2,1,2/ 1,2,1/ 2,1,2/
1,2,1/ 2,1,2/ 3!". That's a monotone till the drop-down on "3", but it
leads to a charged yet lilting melody, and very quickly I had one of my
new favorite power-pop gems. "Reprint Day" I love even more, from its
quick carnival-like one-finger organ solo to its bloopy electronic
grooves to the power-chord (on piano) drive of the chorus. I don't know
for sure what it's about--- "and I don't care anything beyond degrees!
and you can't see everything above 150 A.C.E.s!"--- but if the verse
phrases I'm piecing together are correct, it's an attack on grown-up
responsible workdays, and in that context making no sense whatever is an
apt statement of fidelity. It was only when I started putting these two
on mixtapes that the level of creativity made itself obvious to me, and
that's how pop should (in my opinion) go: _first_ you sing along, waving
your housekeys for rhythmic emphasis, _then_ you try to chart how a song
that starts at point A manages to end up at point 46 by way of point
chartreuse. "My Friend Maurice" is a bit more devoted to Pavement-pop simplicity, while "Lost It" stretches pop in a Pixies direction, as Eric
screams and foams and hyperventilates and slams against his leash as he
repeatedly asks you "areyououtofyourmind?!??!??!"
The rest of the songs stray into prettier or more riff-based directions,
or just into pale copies, and I'll admit the last few tracks, for
reasons of aimless pacing rather than weak concepts, seem endless (the
lengthy band-member conversation in a car outside a convenience store
could safely have been deleted). But where else will you find off-hand
quirky melodies delivered to constant little cymbal crashes, calliopes,
multiple banks of oddly-programmed keyboards, and warped volume-knob
games? That's not a rhetorical question: if you know another such album,
tell me. For now, IX is all I got.
1996
Home, ELF::GULF BORE WALTZ
A tremendously frustrating record that almost caused me to give on buying Home albums, ELF::GULF still has enough virtues to make it worth discussing. After IX, I'd wanted the band to focus their efforts into generating more pop songs, like "Freedohm Rd." and "Reprint Day". Unexpectedly, they did just that for me. If "effort" is the word. ELF::GULF features, I think, the best set of hooks they've come up with. There's the downhill arpeggiated barstool piano of "Wicked Ember Waltz" (which unlike Pretty Mighty Mighty's "Pretty Bride Waltz", or Miranda Sex Garden's "Willy Biddle And His Waltzing Maggot", is in fact a waltz, three beats per measure); the rapid chunky 3-chord hook of the Flaming Lips-like "Forgiveness", played first on guitar and then on vocals; the syncopated voice/ kettle-drum interplay of "Seganation", over thick guitar harmonics styled after Soul Asylum's first hit "Cartoon"; the piano melody and backward cymbals opening "Ride It Right", and the funhouse guitar/organ duel on its coda, in which both instruments independently race between 2 and 3 beats per measure on all caffeine and no schedule. Best of all, the skittering synthesizer on "Children's Suite: 2: Health", racing through 14 then 15 then 14 then 16 beats--- and please understand when I bother to count something that precisely, it is my way of dealing with "Whoa! What the heck was that?? That was _coool_!".
Unfortunately, good idea after good idea is left stranded, undeveloped. The first line of the album, after a couple first-lesson strums and a jolt of electricity, is "and all of your life is spent in a little bit of summertime"; the album _feels_ like one that would start on an "and" and never clarify. The vocal harmonies add to the impression: on "One Dirty Bird" we find out by demonstation that one of their singers sounds pretty good in a tenor register, and the other plays a higher voice as a decent complement; but when _both_ singers sound, at their highest notes, like Wayne Coyne croaking "She Don't Use Jelly", the notion to harmonize their highest pitches is less a touching piece of faith, than a surrender to the notion that Harmonies are part of pop, and a bridge in which a frantic Speak'N'Spell tries to fake it by humming a few bars is not pop. When they cared, they knew better.
For my money, there's exactly three fully developed songs here. "Bad Vibrations", with the memorable opening line "She got two arms, two legs, didn't even know about the two faces", is the sort of indie-rock that merges into country, not by stealing C+W tropes, but simply through acoustic guitars and pleasant insouciance. So, between its intriguing start and finish, is "Ride It Right". "One Dirty Bird" goes from verse guitar like the violently unsettled stomach of a zombie that carelessly ate the brain of George Bush into a rousing major-key chorus and finale. If "for my money" had been a mere figure of speech... well, I'd still have minded the wasted potential for greatness in the other nine songs. Nice set of demos, though.
1998
Home, NETHERREGIONS
What brought me happily back into Home fandom was seeing three separate reviews of NETHERREGIONS, each written in the awed gushing style of someone who from now on will be working out her Top Other Nine list for the year. That was new, not the reception Home records are used to. Perhaps it was the discipline of working on the production of Meringue's precisely composed MUSIC FROM THE MINT GREEN NEST that did it, but NETHERREGIONS ranks with 1998's clearest demonstrations that beauty can be created as powerfully through the strange and artificial as through the finest power ballads. Polara's FORMLESS/ FUNCTIONAL is the year's most conventially pretty such example, the gleep-gleep noises fitting into uplifting melodies. Herb Heinz's FAILURE is the crustiest, the sort of attractiveness that, however real and crafted, probably depends on my level of willingness to stand on my head and squint if that's the best angle. Home's NETHERREGIONS, then, is the alien beauty, the derivative of Eno and Faust and Pavement and some off-planet transmissions, using detail to create a soundworld that, like the finest fractal-based screen-savers, can probably be enjoyed and marveled at even by people who, for the record, prefer representational art.
"Bogeyman" opens the disc softly, like an early-Eno cross between "No One Receiving" and "Rockaway Beach", melodic impulses struggling quietly for liftoff against a strong 1-note tide. "Industry 2000", dulcimer carrying the tunes, struggles harder still, racing up the scale and falling back, finally resolving into an ecstatic key change. Sounds of distorted electric shavers (over shower noise) and bells bleed into "Our Blue Navy", a triumphant driving dance instumental built from cymbal, syn-bass, and warped brass a la My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult's "Sex On Wheelz". "Turn Away" could pass for the most gorgeous work of Sparklehorse in both music and occasional drifting vocals, a soft, alt-country-ish breather before "Work", the relentlessly buidling-up pop epiphany I'd been hoping for, whose theme I'd guessed from the percussion even before I kew the title or listened to the words.
Three slow songs in a row seem a bit too much next, but "Another Season"'s mix of slow, resonant grand piano with the forward-thrusting reverberations of a distant non-award-winning high school orchestra is innovative, and works much better than you'd guess; "Christmas To The Easter" could be Sparklehorse again, this time with some eighth-note strut to the chorus; and "Rebel Base"'s drum loop and piano are intriguingly interrupted by what gospel music would sound like sung by two strained male altos and C3PO's last watts of battery. Then "Rebel Base" fades into just the abstract sci-fi clatter its title requires, and "PS A.P." does a similar pretty-to-noisy buildup in 1/3 the time, becoming a marching song for the Pac-Men monsters or (for a more realistic application) great background music for one of those lightless underground rollercoasters.
"The Pearls Hang Loosely", a lazy guitar-strum fadeout, is a disappointing end with no function other than to mysteriously evoke in me, by its title, memories of Philip Dick's The Man In The High Castle and that world's alternate-universe novel "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy", in which Germany and Japan actually lost World War II. But hey, if music can't away with just evoking things once in a while, then we'd have to force Home to write sensible lyrics with plot outlines, and just do away with Bach and Coltrane and Tortoise altogether. I'd rather sit on the alternate-universe beach, relax, and save my energy for chasing smug yellow circles with these guys.
2000
Home, XIV
"Producer, Dave Fridmann", reads a line on the front cover of XIV's CD case. Dave Fridmann is not famous, so this unusually prominent plug is obviously aimed at a select audience: the audience that's heard Mercury Rev's DESERTER'S SONGS and the Flaming Lips' SOFT BULLETIN, both Fridmann productions, and is in the mood for more such leaps into classically inflected beauty. XIV still sounds more like a Home record than like those albums, mind you; they have neither the overriding goofball sweetness of the Lips nor the willingness to mutate beyond recognition that Rev showed. My best quick in-the-know comparison is that XIV sounds like Neutral Milk Hotel's IN THE AEROPLANE OVER THE SEA might've, had N.M.H. benefitted from five more years practice singing and playing together. But one way or another, only distribution will keep Home away from the top of the critics' polls this year. And only the general pop-audience division, where fans of grandiosity aren't usually the same people as the fans of low-key melodic shambling, would keep that critical endorsement from being a pop hit. That I can see.
Neither of Home's singers has stopped sounding frail and vague like Pavement's Stephen Malkmus, exactly, but they've learned to harmonize and stay on pitch and sound nice. The album still opens with the sound of footsteps over gravel, which becomes a loping song ("Burden") that resembles a lo-fi "One Headlight" in which eager footstomps and clapping take the place of a rock rhythm section. But "So Much Love" resolves verse tension into swooping harmonies like the Lips' "Buggin'" filtered through the Beach Boys' PET SOUNDS. "Trudy Judy" is syncopated and melodically odd, giving off carefully-aimed shards from its guitar riff as its peculiar pop hook, and "Contract" is intoned menacingly over a creepy walking-bass jazz line, but "Displaying Prisms" juggles piano, bowed strings, pizzicato, oboe, synthesizer, and washboard into an uplifting showpiece that incorporates original lessons from a heritage of Muppet Movie and Chariots of Fire. "Aguirre (Exterior)" hypothesizes what experimental SLANTED AND ENCHANTED Pavement might've been had beauty been a goal (the flute part does help).
"Chicago" shuffles along as drowsily as it takes to make the "I want you to say goodnight to your dreams of a better life" refrain sell the "goodnight" as the sentence's focus, but can't resist the temptation to then build into crashing piano and cymbal and slide-guitar. "Coming Up Empty Again" could be quiet-mode Guided By Voices in its weird mic settings, but turns into a piano ballad with suppressed kick-out rock impulses. "Memories" futzes with tunings, but "the Fable Of Salty Water" builds a quiet drama (aided by very soulful singing from Jenny Juristo Morrison) that intermingles with an extremely catchy chorus of lurching organ and fuzz guitar, and "Thunder & Lightning" slowly accumulates serious rock-drama momentum and power, combining the best traits of Stone Roses, Guided By Voices (rock mode), and some random guy panicking. The closing track, "Let It Overcome You", is quiet and unhesistantly nice.
NETHERREGIONS was and is a terrific record, say I, a sign of what Home could accomplish if they set their minds to it, but I still was hoping eventually for a pop album, and XIV, to my surprised satisfaction, is it. "Reprint Day" and "Freedohm Rd." are still my favorite of their individual songs; it is possible that they've edited themselves beyond their best moments of unhingedness, and equally possible that two songs that great are all I'd have any right to ask of _any_ band. Whatever, I can't find it in me to be disappointed. I like the pop-with-big-bad-classical-instruments mini-movement we've had lately, a lot, and I'll take XIV over any other such album I've yet run into.
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