33 rebellions per minute
"I can tell by your preference of smart things to dumb things"
2000
Loud Family, ATTRACTIVE NUISANCE
Scott Miller (see my previous reviews) has never been one to make the same album twice. BIG SHOT CHRONICLES (as Game Theory) was fayer and more orchestrated than anything the band had done earlier; TWO STEPS FROM THE MIDDLE AGES was their most professionally sleek and hooky production. PLANTS AND BIRDS, the first as Loud Family, remains their most tumblingly tuneful and heart-on-sleeve romantic; TAPE OF ONLY LINDA their densest and most abstract; INTERBABE CONCERN their knottiest, angriest, and funniest; DAYS FOR DAYS their calmest, happiest, and most philosophically grown-up. NUISANCE makes its bid for Prettiest Album. "One Will Be The Highway", for example, is built on sampled cello and picked guitar, plus a gently echoing rumble of drums that patrols the mix's sonic locations with the comforting omnipresence of a thunderstorm that you have full weekend freedom to nap through. "Blackness, Blackness" is crooned over soft piano and trap drums and just the occasional howl of distorted metal-heroics guitar. "Soul D.C."'s synthesizer waxes and wanes prettily, sweetly embracing a repetitive four-note bass riff that, if I listen objectively, seems like it would be more comfortable hanging out around Steve Albini under lyrics about "There's kerosene around/ something to do". But it's not, and the result is a texture-fest as commercially plausible as Smashing Pumpkins's "1979". "No One's Watching My Limo Ride" buzzes merrily along in what seems to be a conception of classic rock, with attractive riffs halfway between the Who and the Gin Blossoms, sprightly vocals, and a calliope hook bouncing in the background like a carnival advertising subliminally. Scott even does his best rock-star yawp of "Owwww!" at an apt-seeming moment.
Even the odder moments secure its nomination for Prettiest Album. "Controlled Burn" is the requisite experimental track: part one is Smashing Pumpkins in amiable drunk mode. Part two has Gil Ray whapping the cymbals at a tempo disprespectful of the bass's blaring march, while the synthesizer tweedles loudly like a flute in heat, the bass picks its way through a minefield, the marimba marches solemnly over it until it hits a mine and dies. Scott's vocals are chopped up by syllables and pop out at the listener like Jacks out of boxes. But even "Controlled..." is pretty: stately and dignified and melodically consonant. "Years Of Wrong Impressions", written by Scott but sung by Alison Levy and Kenny Kessel, is jangle-rock for a universe where the Carpenters found it profitable to mistake themselves for Game Theory. On "the Apprentice", written as well as sung by Alison, she replaces her usual Carpenter-via-Kim-Deal twinkle with a voice like a soul singer who rounds her words like Tori Amos. "Motion Of Ariel", because it ends the album, is and must be pretty, by Scott's rules of pacing. Novelties in this case include the triplet runs in the rhythm that pace the rapid key changes, and the vocal harmonies chasing each other in incomplete vocal rounds.
In terms of my actual fondness, NUISANCE is probably my 3rd-favorite Scott album. I like it somewhat less than the two immediately preceding, but there is no question that it secures the Loud Family's place as my single favorite band in the known-to-me history of the world. That this _is_ my feeling reveals itself in any number of obvious ways. There's the naturalness with which I titled four consecutive bits of a (bad) story I'm writing after Loud Family songs ("the second grade applauds", "asleep and awake on The Man's freeway", "good, there are no lions in the street", "don't respond, she can tell") even knowing no reader would catch the reference. Or the way I titled last week's greeting e-mail to a long-lost friend "the early versions of things in redesign", from the new song "Backward Century". My review here uses NUISANCE to explain _why_ the L.F. deserve this honor.
One: the phrasemaking. Scott has an extraordinary gift for phrasing compicated ideas in fun ways. "Spending nights on carpets/ like the new La Brea tar pits/ fell from grace with those who say who gets into bed" is, for example, a great goofy excuse for a rhyme. But La Brea's claim to fame -- the preserved fossils of impressive creatures 100 million years dead -- also summarizes, rapidly, both the current condition of the relationship (dying) and the density of remembered events that are losing their sway. Which makes the same song's "this is home/ this is where we spend weekends" that much sadder in its habituated stocism. Elsewhere, the rhyming examples of "What to do with two heroes in one plot? What to do with two Johnnies who showed up on one spot?" are a mnemonic to justify "something old better fall and die/ when you ride in on something new" -- which itself explains (and is complexified by) instructions to "dream the heaven where women fight hand-to-hand/ help the galley slave be all he can". Scott doesn't have to specify a similar motive between street crimes and the white-collar violence where lobbyists justify excusable-death figures; he just sings "I don't want capital whispering in my ear/ I don't wany anything done because, in your rough neighborhood, that was the only language they'd understand". The phrasing skills also work for one-dimensional notions, of course. Wired spends repeated 4000-word rhapsodies trying to say nothing more than "machines will feed me nice thoughts/ and I won't care/ what goes on outside my ten-foot biocube. They'll strap me up all day in/ a dentist's chair/ machines will suck out the drool with vacuum tubes".
Two: the intellectual intensity behind the phrasemaking; the way all Loud Family albums are, in part, Scott earnestly explaining to us what he's learned about the human race in the last two years, as if all of us are naturally embarked on the same project (not of course always the case; "I fill my days with work because I am lazy/ the way a coward is hungry to get into any fight he can win", he offers, as our motto for the lies we agree to live by). "...Highway" ponders how fear of death can sometimes be the only thing to remind us to co-operate in life. "720 Times Happier Than The Unjust Man" tries to find the line between heroism and disruptive troublemaking, and admits the former always doubles as the latter; "Controlled..." pines to run away, as the cleanest way to slice the issue. "Backward Century", behind its snotnose schoolboy taunting voice, is a perfectly serious look at our technophile worldmakers, who can't seem to decide between the lockstep bioengineered functional bliss of Brave New World, and the urge to destroy _all_ function in order to make newer, cooler functions that in turn will be quickly destroyed. "Blackness..." and "Motion..." even turn his intellect on the question of whether it's worth turning the intellect on questions, and have the honesty to shrug; although this, alas, gives NUISANCE a hint of sour aftertaste that DAYS FOR DAYS, to me a perfect record, did not have.
Three, back to music: Scott writes great melodies, ones I can't help memorizing and singing even though his voice and mine do not overlap ranges in any convenient way. He fits the power-pop tradition of the dB's and early Joe Jackson, of Let's Active and the Knack and the early Beatles, but combines exuberance with unusual willingness to take odd reaches -- the "always try at least one wrong note" theory of writing.
Four: the Loud Family are terrific players. Scott is cool enough as a rhythm guitarist -- e.g., the jagged pacing of "720..." -- but also pushes his ultra-compressed guitar sound into several sorts of rock-star daring. "Nice...", in particular, has some explosive soloing even before the solo donated by Frank Zappa's old stunt-guitarist Mike Keneally, whose 1998 album SLUGGO I endorsed happily. Alison Levy's piano skills are solid enough for her to have crafted a skilled piano-based solo album, THE FOG SHOW. Gil Ray, meanwhile has clearly learned to drum the prettiest percussion lines going. When he wants to, anyway; his "start really really slow, then end up really really fast" drum breaks on "Nice..." are showstopping. Kenny Kessel, as a bassist, seems far more tuneful than most, often making an extra layer of instrumental counterpoint.
Five: vocals. Scott was not born to be a singer, but his high-pitched yelp has gotten more versatile and expressive with every album, giving "Blackness..." a delicate yearning, "...Highway" a low weariness, "Save..."'s verses the flow of a joined-in-progress narrative, and reserving his childish tinge for verses that are served by it. Kessel, as a lead singer, would be hard to imagine -- perhaps the zombie of young Michael Stipe? -- but when he sings backup, he adds an oddly-tuned element of ghostliness, or support, or decay, or just extra volume. Levy, solid as female lead singer, usually adds warmth as a harmonist, and thus is saved for where warmth is appropriate. She also lends the romantic arguing of "Blackness..." some elements of duet -- but with Scott harmonizing on her lines, to seal, perhaps, the fatalism of the singer's pro forma questioning.
Six: album pacing. NUISANCE is, by L.F. standards, a relatively slow and evasive and luxurious album, but the first song is explosive and jumpy; the third is propelled by clownishly rigid piano eighth-notes and fun whizzy keyboard noises; the fifth song is rapid jangle-pop; the seventh is syncopated and twerpy and cute; and the tenth song is rapid and even. No risk that excess balladeering will lose a well-meaning listener's interest. No waste of energy peaks by letting them run into exhaustion and heart failure. The CD's first moments, building electronic tension through drones and pulses like a Night Stalker video game, grab attention; the CD's last moments, resolving a chase through the chord changes by three voices and two instrument lines, relinquish attention gently.
Seven: cool sounds. Every Loud Family song will have a keyboard noise or a guitar tone or some weird halfway-through-the-bridge filigree that makes me think "I never heard that before. Cool!". The sonic experimentation seems to be conducted in the belief that it's just really, really neat to find out what happens when these dials and pedals go with this method of playing and that amp setting. Play is contagious.
It does bother me, mildly, that NUISANCE is such a lyrical downer. Any knowledge I have of Scott Miller's personal life is a second-, maybe third-, hand relay of what occurred, but he seems to be happily married, financially comfortable, and blessed by an eager array of fans at least 2/3 as brainiac and silly as he is. Writing great work about happiness is much, much harder than writing niggling complaints, I know; the year 2000, so far, has been clearly the happiest of my life, and its only clear effect on my review column has been that I write less often. But Scott Miller, of all people, should be up to the task. "Save..." and "...Limo Ride" are very nice songs about the shallowness of wealth, "Blackness..." is a very smart breakup ballad, "Nice..." is a very incisive portrait of the behaviors that help a relationship lapse, but those are not the most useful things he could be contributing. NUISANCE is a great, great album, sure. That I'm faulting it on absurd criteria like "it doesn't consistently teach me new things about how to live" is an extreme case of praising by faint damns. But it doesn't. And until Scott lives up to that challenge, I think his resigned talk about not making any more albums takes an unworthy lot of nerve.
Get your own Free Home Page