33 rebellions per minute
"Braided wire sizzling, coiled on the snow; seemed random, widespread"
1988
Mecca Normal, CALICO KILLS THE CAT
Somewhere along the line, I must have become immune to the musical concept of "strident", because Mecca Normal, and especially vocalist Jean Smith, was supposed to scare me. Perhaps my mistake was in not buying CALICO back in 1988, back when I was un-jaded. Maybe I was ruined the day I bought Heavens To Betsy's CALCULATED ('94) and heard Corin Tucker's painful screaming (I do mean screaming) on "Stay Away", then played the album again anyway. Maybe it was reinforced the day I bought Thought Industry's MODS CARVED THE PIG and sat through an opening 30 seconds of vocals I _still_ can't believe a human being could produce and have a throat left, but had to accept it somehow because even that track has too much subtlety, and good sort of thuggery, to skip. Maybe my ability to enjoy Refused's 1998 THE SHAPE OF PUNK TO COME despite the bursts of screaming that appear at some point in 8 of the 13 songs sealed my doom. Whatever, Jean Smith's sung-spoken vocals on CALICO-- though keening here, semi-growling there, jumpy over there, clipped and measured and clipped again at most times-- remind me of nothing more deadly than the few grimly intense moments of Cindy Lee Berryhill's friendly Dylan-esque debut WHO'S GONNA SAVE THE WORLD? Just as well, since that's half the music. The other half is David Lester playing electric guitar. No drums, bass, flute, calliope, backup vocal, 2nd guitar. It's as elementally rock'n'roll an album as has thrilled me in quite a long time.
Lester's guitar, then, is a crucial part of making this work. His style is distinctive. It's more often minor key or vaguely dissonant than his forebears-- he often runs his fingers slightly along the strings before releasing them-- but it's basically an expert mix of scratchy repeated-note motifs, George Thorogood bash'n'crash riffs that aren't far from rock-mode Elvis Presley, and surf guitar in the flawlessly acrobatic fingers of Dick Dale. But the structure is where he shines: he writes extended, 3-to-6-measure patterns that are so circular that the most natural thing he can do upon finishing one pattern is to repeat it, then repeat it, varying slightly, til the song is done. So go the first eight songs of the album, from the aggressive jangle of "Don't Shoot" to the bounciness of "My First Love Song". For the last five, thankfully, he stretches out, writing two or three patterns per song and even mixing the patterns up a bit, tossing in some startling quick-fingered solos throughout "Richard" and "Will He Change?". But between Smith's storyteller intensity and Lester's self-incurred momentum, nothing more than this is needed or asked.
Jean Smith can be obliquely poetic in the best way, sketching just enough of a scene to make your own imagination (or mine, anyway) fill in the rest. "Joelle"'s complete text goes
- "Joelle is 18 in her parents' house.
Joelle, washing a frying pan.
Her boyfriend is around two corners watching TV.
The frying pan comes out of the water and flies through the air and hits the wall.
All the energy of the history of a situation.
Joelle.
Smith in her less subtle moments is political in the way that, since she's a woman, can be usefully dismissed as "shrill", but were she a man would instead be called "crackpot". That's not to say I always disagree, just that "Smile Baby" shows an unfashionable (and hostile) alliance with the "she-was-asking-for-it" forces of rape justificiation by asking "Well, sure you should wear what you want to wear, but why do you want to wear what _they_ want you to wear?" before admitting "a cold hard face and looking tough, and still they tell me, smile baby. And yes, I do what you do: I ignore the comments/ that I provoke/ by being not male. Smile, baby". "12 Murders" is perhaps less ambiguous, then, narrating with overtones of support the day of a woman on the beach who kills with a knife each man with his "deep shallow voice" who dares to hit on her. "Will He Change?", then, protesting the use of prisons and drug therapy and execution, shows her revealing her empathy for men, and only those men, who commit crimes. And when she accosts "Richard" for his contempt for the lazy and the poor-- "Things are going Richard's way. It's Richard's day. Richard smiles. Some things don't interest Richard, that's all"-- she'd be in a stronger position if she hadn't already, in "Ancient Fire", made a virtue of her unwillingness to listen to opponents. But you see, I'm happy to listen to her. I don't mind being made to think. And if two of the things I'm thinking about are "why didn't I ever take guitar lessons when I could afford to? Why did I assume I'd need a real band?", then I guess I learned something.
1995
Mecca Normal, SITTING ON SNAPS
Long before neurologists learned to poke electrodes carefully into people's brains and elicit specific memories and sensations, philosophers were known to wonder "How do we know if anything is real?". That is to say, you could be a disembodied brain in a vats, or you could be a butterfly dreaming vividly of being human, or you could be the imaginary friend of a lonely young forest elf. Real life tends, in our experience, to be more vivid than dreams -- I particularly like William Poundstone's suggestion that you keep an unread book of limericks by your bed so that, next time you can't tell whether you're awake or dreaming, you can read a fresh limerick and be assured that you must be awake. But what if, unbeknownst to you, you're a brilliant composer of original limericks while dreaming? What if your dreamy, hazy dreams are planted by a mad scientist to fool you into thinking that your detailed, sequential daytime dreams aren't dreams? All of your knowledge, your friends, your laws of physics, could be hallucinations, or worse, be designed to trick you and win your trust. (If the laws of physics _are_ designed to trick me, that would certainly explain how the three library books I deposited into Boston Public's book return slot a week ago Saturday apparently vanished into thin air, although I suppose an alternate explanation would get very angry at the library's checkin/shelving department).
Rene Descartes, a long-dead French philosopher mainly now known for being put before des horse, had tried to define the universe's laws based on obviously true axioms, and it was precisely this problem which stumped him. He decided, therefore, to start with the premise that, regardless of what was out there in the world, his _sensations_ are real. Or from my perspective, my sensations are real; or from yours, your sensations would be real if you weren't, in fact, a clever automaton put on earth to get my stats counter up (which goodness knows is awfully nice of your programmer; tell him thanks!). The defective frame of my glasses may be an illusion, but the odd sensations of weight it leaves on my left ear and the left side of my nose, and the vague visual distortion on my right as the lens angles gently into the surrounding atmosphere, those I may take as real.
Maybe. Then again, I think of the story behind the Loud Family album title DAYS FOR DAYS. As Scott Miller explains it, it's an analogy from a compliment I've never heard given, in which a women with long, slender, attractive legs has "legs for days". Days for days, by extension, would be pleasant and welcome days, but that's not all: Miller's point is the notion that attractive legs would be something people talk about. The stirrings of lust, in Descartes's view, should be axiomatically a fact, yet people speak about it, in practice, as a way of gauging standards: do you think she's got legs for days, or are you going to stare at me puzzledly for a second and then shrug and say a quarter-hearted "sure". Personally, I don't feel the need to discuss female beauty -- apparently I have more-than-average faith in my eyes' and/or loins' judgment. But as you may have noticed, I discuss music, which is an even greater source of pleasure to me than girl-watching, a lot. And it becomes a fact that if none of my friends care about the band Live (which is true), while many of them are loudly excited about the new Radiohead album (also a fact), then my own experiences somehow shift. As far as I knew then, I liked THROWING COPPER more than OK COMPUTER, but I pre-ordered Radiohead's KID A, and I still don't even own the Live albums from 1997 and 1999. Somewhere, my knowledge of my own physical, audio sensations, at least in this case, became 3rd-hand. And it's real hard to follow the fortunes of pop bands even slightly without thinking I'm not alone in this.
Thus it was, in an even clearer case, that I kept my mouth shut about SITTING ON SNAPS, my first Mecca Normal purchase, until I'd acquired several portions of their back catalog. Everything I'd heard about the band, in advance, made it clear they were strident, provocative, and even to a fan, interestingly unpleasant. Thus, as quickly as SNAPS attained the rank of something warm I'd put on at night to lull me to sleep, I literally did not know, for at least a year, whether I was hearing what I was hearing. "Vacant Night Sky" was a gentle acoustic-guitar waltz with likeable amateur piano: like a female Billy Bragg in ballad mood, maybe. "Crimson Dragnet" was a rocker: David Lester using his guitar like a bass, here revising the Offspring's "Self-Esteem" for a low opinion of everyone in his path, there winkingly stealing a Led Zep riff ("Heartbreaker", I think?), and Jean Smith being politely domineering in her speech. But a catchy rocker, and the ending seemed as uplifting as Yes covering the sunny denoument of Fishbone's "Sunless Saturday". "Frozen Rain", applying a bit of phasing to Lester's usual hollow-bodied scraping style, came out applying comfortable early-R.E.M. dreaminess to a more early-Cure wrist-slash sonic low end.
"Trapped Inside Your Heart", folky with a hint of jangle, seemed a lovely array of intricately circling guitar lines, something like R.E.M.'s "You Are The Everything" reassigning the vocal harmonies to guitar and letting Smith's voice be the simple bass anchor. The hesitant "Alibi", though certainly odd, for me got its soft power from the sensual way Smith's mouth toyed with, extended, shaped all of her syllables. "Pamela Makes Waves" made an instant hit-single impression with its peppy, infinitely cycling surf-guitar riff. "Bepo's Room" seemed a more 1995-ish hit in the way its obsessive English-folk delicacy and Ida-ish extended-syllable harmonies formed into a chorus by simply intesifying and adding feedback. This simply _was not_ the band I'd read about, and I'd been reading intelligent listeners. Who was I gonna believe, them or my own ears? Descartes might suggest that I'd been slipped a copy from an alternate universe where Mecca Normal were softies, but that seemed too easy.
CALICO KILLS THE CAT was part of the answer, and I bet 2 Foot Flame was much of the rest. I haven't backfilled the Mecca Normal catalog for JARRED UP and FLOOD PLAIN and DOVETAIL yet, but I'm gonna guess they sound basically like CALICO: strident, obsessive, minimalist. It is a rule that bands can only make a limited number of records before they are all heard as clones of their predecessors. The market didn't disagree with me that Jethro Tull's ROOTS TO BRANCHES, Rush's COUNTERPARTS, and Yes's THE LADDER were among those band's most vital and reinventive works, although it might have disagreed given a chance; in practice the market simply didn't conceive, by 1995 or 1993 or 1999, that new tricks from old names were even possible. I've decided that I was and am hearing SNAPS correctly. It is possible that few longtime collectors of Mecca Normal albums, no matter how thoughtful, were even _able_ to notice how pretty so much of SNAPS is, or how fluently and elegantly Smith has learned to use her rolling, husky voice.
To be sure, if you want confrontation, guitarist Lester provides it here and there: more than ever, really, as if Michael Morley's work with Smith on 2 Foot Flame has pressured him to prove his mettle. "Cyclone" is flailing and dissonant. "Pamela..."'s structure, as monomaniacal as the CALICO song of your choice, comes largely from how sparks of distortion lap blisteringly at the song's skin. "Something To Be Said" is gruff and explosive. The abstract howls of "Only Heat", needing only a "Cordoned Off" level narrative to explain their anguished plot, are well worthy of Morley himself. But that's four songs; a trend is a trend. It is my personal guess that, if we could only print enough copies to test, there would be a positive correlation between fondness for SITTING ON SNAPS and fondness for R.E.M.'s LIFE'S RICH PAGEANT. But not an absolute one. I think both are fine, hypnotic albums -- but as a textural singer, I'll take 1995 Jean Smith over 1986 Michael Stipe any day.
1997
Mecca Normal, WHO SHOT ELVIS?
By 1996, Mecca Normal had traded in their status as a duo by hiring drummer Charlie Quintana for THE EAGLE AND THE POODLE, an album I'm sure I'll come to like once I give it more of a chance. The drummer, however, is not what makes WHO SHOT ELVIS? remarkable in their canon. Musically, ELVIS is simply a futher modest evolution in the essential Mecca Normal sound. "Medieval Man"'s dark chant-sing over Lester's replacement of rock's classic 4-chord riff by four mere individual notes, that they could've done a decade back. "Who Shot Elvis?" is, of all things, pure urgent 1960's folk song, Quintana's simple drumming adding emphasis to the last appearance of the chorus. "Excalibur" is transformed by drums, a rapid kick/snare rushing along a Linoleum-like monotone guitar chug, and the pounding instrumental "OK Here We Go" draws their dissonant wailing far closer to party-rock than I ever expected, but "the Orbit", apparently made from just voice and keyboard, sounds for all the world like a slow sequence of prettily hollow synthesizer sounds, a relationship song equivalent in metaphor and atypical empty tone to XTC's "Another Satellite" and Flop's "Need Retrograde Orbit". "Step Into My Sphere" and "Don't Heal Me Like A Dog Just To Break Me Like A Horse" are typically isolated, grinding, minimal versions of the Mecca Normal rock song, while "the Way Of Love" and "All About The Same Thing" show far more drama and guitar-part complexity to somewhat similar effect. "In Canada" closes the album in a novel way, but novel not for drums but for its jaunty folk-guitar waltz.
What does strike me about ELVIS, aside from how much I like it (the first four songs in particular are among their best), is how non-confrontational it is in every way. Smith's poetry still gets off aggressive shots of wordplay ("You know that the knee can produce a reaction in a jerk who won't shut up"), but her style has become more involuted and less obvious, filtering images in original, challenging ways. Gas-fume addiction and violence slip among the anachronisms of
"Medieval man tucks the gun of a caliber I'm not familiar withI was going to explain those lyrics, then decided I'm not quite ready. That's okay; they make sense. I _like_ that they don't make a sense I'm comfortably familiar with. I like that I can't file them under Angry Feminism or Stylish Anarchism; I like that the thoughts are ones that probably weren't assembled before.
Tucks the gun into the waistband of his tights
and pulls his tunic down to stroll the room
... Medieval man knows when the bricks end
in a tourist town
You're on the outs, and the pace just picked down
I like to stay outside myself."
The assembled thoughts, though, are more surprising. Jean Smith realizes this enough to explain why: the album is dedicated to one Duane Crone, for being there from beginning to end, and a big inner photo shows Jean and Duane smiling goofily at each other. Don't get me wrong, she's not quite writing love songs. "Excalibur" is fierce and betrayed: "Going to tell me that?!? After I told you that? You're going to write a letter? I thought you were brave. I thought you'd ride in on a white horse as big as two kingdoms, coming with a blade that upright would tower above us all, blocking out the sun. You handed me over". But for all her strong voice and opaque intellect, she's suddenly considering vulnerability aloud. "Way..." apologizes to an ex: "I know I said 'I love you'/ I never thought you thought it was true". "The Orbit" openly calculates the power dynamics of a relationship in an effort to see that both partners get a fair half. "All..." ponders her art and the purposes she's trying to achieve with it.
And then "OK Here We Go" is liberated, joyful; and "...Canada", a writerly assemblage of inventively detailed nightmares about infidelity, pigeon-shit, and the extreme fragility of social order, is played for fun. Smith is too wrapped up in the world to suddenly assume it's repaired itself. But sometimes, with help, even the hardest cases learn to have fun dancing among the ruins.
1997
2 Foot Flame, ULTRA DROWNING
I guess this won't qualify me for adulthood, in a culture saturated with Beverly Hills 90210 and Dawson's Creek, but I appear to have at least come to belated cordial terms with late adolescence: my closest friendships, these days, seem to be occasionally marked (pockmarked?) with Serious Relationship Discussions. Last Tuesday (3/23/99), after rushing distractedly through Depeche Mode and Travis reviews that weren't nearly as badly written as they could have been, I had one of those S.R.D.s with my friend Willow, a lovely young woman whose playfulness and creativity meshes better with mine than does anyone's I've ever known, and whose tolerance of (and partial emulation of) my dadaist conversation tendencies is immensely flattering. My chief worry was that, while I've been delighted to take her passions in life seriously, I'd rarely felt welcomed when I tried to share things _I_ care deeply about (teaching, urban planning, M.C. Escher artwork, Jane Siberry records); not that those are important in their own right, but that it comes less and less fun to bubble over with creativity for an audience who doesn't think your mind is good for anything else.
She thought over my complaints and decided that yeah, we'd probably both be happier if I was officially allowed to be earnest. Then we spent the next 100 minutes together brainstorming a Zork-style text-adventure computer game in which the player, an advocate for the homeless, tries to get legal clearance to store the city's 25,000 street people in the alternate dimensions accessible through a mansion owned by a crippled, deranged philanthropist. By the time we were done, getting his help required getting past the ten robot copies of his late wife; a polite butler; an insurance salesman; the drummer of an otherwise charred-to-death rock band; Barry Manilow records; labor conflict at an alien mine; teaching androids following reactionary instructional models in the exaggeratedly folksy persona of Abraham Lincoln; Escher-esque impossible staircases and floors that double as walls; Papa Smurf; and vicious omniverous thread. It needs huge amounts of work-- the key to making an adventure game fun isn't coming up with intriguing correct solutions, it's finding ways to make the thousand wrong solutions seem fun-- but I think it has potential. More importantly, for now, Willow and I enjoy each other's company again.
Careful readers may decide that nothing in this process actually helped establish my case as a Serious Person. That's beside the point; I can do that later. The point is that old roles needed the joy of being optional. Similarly, when 2 Foot Flame's second album, ULTRA DROWNING, sees Jean Smith sweetly singing a delicate melody ("Sample Song") over 4/4 ironsmithing and a rather melodically-shaped ring of guitar feedback, 2 Foot Flame do not suddenly become a pop band. When on "Resin Box" she attempts (and by any normal stadards fails) some tricky melodic autoharmonizing over more feedback, guitar simulations of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and a slow, calm church organ tune, 2 Foot Flame do not suddenly become hymnists. When the tuning-up on "Peacock Come" suddenly launches into an eighth-note bass rhythm and a kick-snare propulsion, 2 Foot Flame do not become paragons of rock'n'roll. When the quasi-Eastern guitar monotones and the painstaking note/wait/decide/note/wait/decide piano playing of "I Think You're The Weird One" are overlaid with samples from a movie-- around which Jean softly strains out erratic deliberations that are "melody" only on the grounds that okay, her voice moves up and down-- the use of samples doesn't make 2 Foot Flame into Jesus Jones or Public Enemy or Fatboy Slim. By song 5, "Everwilling", as Jean intones a story of drunken dad-to-daughter sexual molestation-- over almost-rhythmic rises + falls in the static, occasional sets of three rifle-shot drums, and spooky sung backup vocals echoing from the basement-- 2 Foot Flame is back to its first-album basics. And it's a great track; I probably like it better than the ones preceding it, and the next song "Passage To Vertigo", modulating through pounded bass piano chords over the indignant cheeping of the robot bees, is another welcome flashback.
But what all the brief, essentially unconvincing stabs in other directions (see also the tribal drums and distorted vocals cutting through "Ultra Drowning"'s typical Morley squall; the honest tunefulness of "Self Doubt"'s unstrafed piano; the sharp but uncluttered kick-drum beat and start-stop transmission bursts of "Lunar Intuition") are worth is that ULTRA DROWNING is a clearly new and distinct record. It's hard to explain why this is good-- 2 FOOT FLAME was wonderful, I thought, and if for some reason I want a record that doesn't sound like it, then 2 Foot Flame is probably the last band I should be buying records by. But we humans are often irrationally demanding folks. I loved 2 FOOT FLAME's innovations, proving that powerful music could be made without concessions to such straightjackets as rhythm and melody and structure. Yet my ability to tell different songs apart has been, in fact, heavily predicated on telling that this melody, rhythm, structure is different from that one. And I bet yours is too. It was likely that-- through my laziness, not Smith/ Morley/ Jeffries's-- another record in the same loose style would have seemed duplicate, needless.
Instead, ULTRA DROWNING is what happens when they find a meeting ground between their project and "music"; not a halfway ground, in fact very angled towards their own territory, but enough to leave room to sort of hum. I'm honestly disappointed by the fact that Smith is a much less articulate singer than speaker; on storytelling grounds alone-- or perhaps also from a purist streak that contradicts everything I just professed to believe-- I end up regarding the debut as a better record. But you see, that doesn't matter. What matters is, I get to own both.
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