33 rebellions per minute
"It's your remedy, like Jesus and Spam"
1998
People From Earth, LUVSKULL
There are many different ways for an album's production to awe me. Jane
Siberry's THE SPECKLESS SKY, for example, sounds like a pantheistic
study for zeroes and ones; the spontaneous rapturous celebration, by
gleaming non-humanoid fractally multi-limbed robots, of nature's bounty
of dustless corridors and crystalline silicon forests, in which the
robots perhaps stop to proudly laser their barcode numbers into the
symmetrical plastic trees in precise 16-point sans-serif fonts. Nine
Inch Nails's THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL sounds like the exact same robots as
they time-travel into 1958 Earth to gobble all the men and rape all the
women, using the nutritional and reproductive logic of those grand awful
movies that were "science fiction" in the same way that a 6-page Spide
rman adaptation of West Side Story is "Shakespearean literature". Lisa
Germano's EXCERPTS FROM A LOVE CIRCUS, on the other hand, sounds like
music played by humans, only using comfy, hand-held, perhaps even
woodbacked instruments that have carelessly never been invented except
on some much odder planet Lisa has importer connections to. Guided By
Voices's BEE THOUSAND sounds like real, familiar instruments played in
real, familiar ways, only Robert Pollard seems to have scoured the
Goodwills of America collecting enough different worn-out mikes and amps
to run every instrument part of every song through a different set of
defective equipment. All of these feats are amazing, to me, and the fact
that each is put to the benefit of an excellent set of songs is almost
too much richness to comprehend.
LUVSKULL awes me in a seemingly simpler, easy-to-duplicate fashion: all
the instruments sound so much like themselves. With such clarity, that
is, yet such variety. The most common instrument here is the guitar, and
from the gliassando intro to "Fallen" through the jittery opening of
"Shirts + Skins" and the different warped electric styles later that
same song, to... all sorts of darn sounds, the consistent linking factor
is how clear every single string is. We hear notes played with every
manner of attack and decay, and can easily follow each--- even when he
drags his finger along the string you can hear the pitch-change as
clearly as seeing a mark on a graph. Sometimes the song is quiet enough
that you can do this with no distraction, and such tracks as "Luvskull"
and "A Baby Again" even leave entire seconds of perfect silence. But
when "Fallen" throws simultaneous trombone, kick-drum, cymbals, hi-hats,
wordless vocals, and a somewhat Hawaiian, swingingly pitch-bending bass
at you, it's barely an extra effort to hear each to the last detail, and
how unusual is _that_? Very! Part of "Paw Prints" is outright frantic,
yet the sung line, both shriek parts, the floorboard stamping, the
piano, the trombone, and the tenor sax are still somehow awarded their
separate space in the mix, which will start seeming incredible to you
too once you've played it enough that you're no longer too busy jumping
in fright and bouncing your head into the ceiling as it begins. The
brass is a regular feature, so are congas, as well as guitar/bass/drums,
and there's also a tuned water bottle quartet (on "Water"), plus the
occasional whomped cookie sheet or ashtray. And no synthesizers!!!!
Usually I think of that claim as pompous self-deprivation, but here it
seems integral to the spirit of the record, and does absolutely nothing
to rein in People From Earth's imagination.
Other noteworthy traits: the way the multisegmented songs linger in turn
over each piece, such as how "Shirts..." repeats most of the verses
before proceeding, and ends up processing three words from the chorus
into an extended mantra. The only reason the eerie worries about
"There's paw prints all over the floor. The cat's brought something in
from outside again" is part of the same song as the simple longing
"Seems so far away - I'm never going to find a way to visit you", is
that PFE call it the same song, which of course forces the listener to
reinterpret each half in light of each other. Most songs do return to
the start, sort of, but at least half of them take truly strange
journeys on the way--- planned and pondered and painstakingly packed for
in every case, even the occasional pole-ax power chord (I apologize for
the accidental alliteration overdose. Uh, and again). The lyrics are as
obsessed and downcast as the title track would suggest: "Shallow me,
lovesick me, all I can think about is her and me". Lead guitarist Carey
McGlynn offers my favorite one here, certainly the most unique, reacting
to a first chance to have sex with as much stark terror as eagerness: "I
used to look at myself in bed 30 times a night.. I couldn't sleep until
I thought I was beautiful. You take your shirt off. I'll leave mine on".
But main writer John Tielli--- however pleasantly he can frame "But you
don't need to hug and kiss me like I fantasize/ you are much too
beautiful to look me in the eyes/ and me, I will get over this, I hope b
efore I die" as a bright dixieland jazz outing--- seems to have been
really in a bad way. The occasional silly streak is nice, like when
"Water" turns self-referential: "All that time the evil, bad guy water
streamed through the spaces within his skull, spiced with typical but
accurate metaphor". But when the album ends with a plea to the listener
to improve the world by feeling love, the tone is not that of the
Beatles at their dippiest, but that of the desperate plea from a man
whose revelations about the workings of the solar system have been
challenged a few many times by a few too many patrons of the thumbscrew
industry.
Wow--- two long paragraphs of ways that PFE do not resemble the
Rheostatics. Okay, now I get real: John Tielli and Doug Tielli,
co-leaders here, are the younger brothers of Rheostatic Martin Tielli.
And they listened to their bro real, real closely. This could easily
have been the next-model Rheostatic album: from the Tielli voices in
their endless inventive harmonies, to the ambitious but folky melodies,
to the belief that writing one song is lazy when you could write five
and intermingle the best pieces til they spontaneously generate their
own logic. Imitating the Rheostatics is not like imitating Green Day;
there's no formula, just a very demanding approach in which you never
steal a lick, just a method. For me, this band is what, for an ELECTRIC
LADYLAND loyalist, finding perfectly recorded old tapes of the
mesmerizing songs and solos of young brother Berthold Hendrix would
be--- only the Rheostatics are still making music themselves! (knock on
wood) There's one interesting catch: the Rheos do, in fact, sing lo
vesick songs on rare occasion ("An Offer", "Lying's Wrong", "Never
Forget"), and those are the simplest of their songs--- learning the
lessons of pop music generally, they apparently think that the best way
to communicate hurt is simply and directly. PFE are the band raised on
the Rheos themselves, however, and for them, it seems to be only natural
that frustration be worked through by hiding in the studio and finding
the exact right sound for the exact right toy for the exact right
moment, before going on to something else. I can't wait to see how this
turns out in their kids' hands, y'know?
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