33 rebellions per minute
"What you get is what you see"
1998
Panoply Academy Glee Club, RAH!
There will certainly be some people in the world who should buy RAH! based simply on the elements that can be traced to better-known bands. The guitar textures, the tendency to obsess over a riff, the occasional vocal tendency to narrate: Slint's SPIDERLAND is easy to trace, there. The guitar tunings, the end of "a Justifiable Trajectory" that seem mistakenly cut from "the Diamond Sea", and the solos that flutter rapidly through a series of notes to see how each reacts to these three effects pedals: Sonic Youth, definitely. The rhythmic implacability could remind one of the Fall. When Darin Glenn is in full panicked yelp, meanwhile, he could be David Thomas on Pere Ubu's DUB HOUSING, and certainly "Allies In Insects" is coated with the atonal synth interjections that I always assumed Allen Ravenstine's would be as scary as, before I actually tried Ubu.
As for me, though, I like Slint and Sonic Youth and the Fall and Pere Ubu, and I play the records I own by them... but it's never occured to me that I might want a _second_ record by any of them (or actually I do mean to buy more Sonic Youth, but I've meant to buy more Sonic Youth for six years now, with no harmful budgetary impacts yet). One could guess that the thrill Panoply Academy Glee Club inspire in me is a direct result of their silly name, and I wouldn't blame you. Especially after I admitted that I not only ordered this album in part for the band name (and song titles like "FlamingIntestinalTrack", "Pligthweaver", and "the Cagey Can Speak"), but that I knew of the album -- and, to be fair, its description -- because it was in the Secretly Canadian Records catalog insert (a wonderful and dumb name for an Indiana label), and I saw the insert because I couldn't resist spending $1.99 to find out what a band called Swearing At Motorists sounded like. (Answer: like a band worth fully $2.99, maybe $3.99) Thing is, I know I'm reacting to the music. I was there when I first heard it; I had no defensive armor, just my ears. And I loved it. If compare-and-contrast was a reliable way to decide how much I liked a band, I'd've learned to chop off my reviews at a sensible length. Really.
First reason why Panoply are exceptional: they have an amazing sense of rhythm, of groove. At any given time, there is a clear moving center to the music. Maybe it's "Entrance of the Candidate", the glossiest (to say not much) of the tracks, where the drummer swings like he's absolutely certain he's playing "You Shook Me All Night Long", and it's _your_ fault you never noticed AC/DC were using 7/4 time. Maybe it's the fractured bliss-out guitar drones that open "Hustle", refracting in perfect quantized eight-notes; or the almost horn-like syncopated blatting of the drumbeat when the rock song blazes in; or the assured way the early-Sabbath-via-Slint bass swaggers in on a 5/4 rhythm to take over the song and duet with bleating trombone. "Quintet" shows an understanding of how Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" created a fierce rhythm out of one part attack to fifteen parts theatrical windup. "Our Co-ordinates From Orbit" doubles the interlocked rhythm on bass and a vocal part screeching something like "drucideratic!" over and over; when the bass drops out, the vocalist starts singing actual lyrics, but never drops the "drucideratic!" rhythm until the next relay percussionist has seized the baton and taken off. The thirteen small experimental tracks scattered among the ten songs are just as propulsive: they evolve solid tape-loop grooves out of, apparently, copy-machine and stapler and rifle-assembly, spliced kiddie vocals and xylophones and barnyard animal impressions and falling cartoon bombs. Of course these songs couldn't play in dance clubs, but that's prejudice, not merit; Panoply make some of the best music to move to that i've ever heard.
Second, and related, is a clear division of tasks, at all times, between Center Of Attention, which is mixed to the foreground and chugs along steadily, and Miscellania, which flutter by making their disorganized points and going home. From guitar solos to helpful spoken counterpoints of the story, from clarinet to the African thumb pianos of 60-foot-high Africans, there's almost always something new to listen to, analytically, if you've been roped helplessly onto a steel bed while the album plays and have nothing better to do with the music. But it's always obviously something extra; the center always holds.
Well, actually, it usually snaps to the quarterback within the alloted time, but no-one fumbles. Panoply's third virtue is the interaction. They have the virtues of a jazz band: a very careful, intentionally ponderous jazz band. At an extreme, "Somsuey", which I think is kind of catchy really, sounds like a minute-plus of a band watching the chimes and marimba players, tensed for the right moment to break in, and deciding they don't hear one. More often, you hear what seem like feints toward motion, and suddenly an instrumentalist dives in, simpatico to the groove but fully-prepared to swing the song around in his direction, which the rest of the band adjusts to in an attunement that seems psychic (although _in reality_, of course, someone did compose this, which rather aided their intuition).
Which results in a rock album built out of long stretches of dance bliss, periodically interrupted by moments of what strike me as literally breathtaking perfection. Yes, yes, it's tuned weird, and badly sung. No, I can't tell you if any of the lyrics are any good. No, you won't like this if you actively dislike Sonic Youth, I suspect. RAH! is Indie Rock, the defined style that no one can hum, as much as it is indie rock the fertile ground of low-budget independence. But even pale geeks who engage in long arguments about whether Bastro, June of 44, or the For Carnation is the purest inheritor of the Louisville Sound (did I get that right? yes? no?) deserve a chance to shimmy sometime.
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