33 rebellions per minute
© 1997 bokonin@hotmail.com
1988
Primitives, LOVELY
Fourteen pop songs in 31 minutes. Fast, chirpy girl lead vocals, harmonies, quick riffs, nice washes of guitar accompaniment, occasional piano or strings. Cliched and excellent.
A more exact description: like the Darling Buds sped up to Senseless Things tempo and energy levels, or like the Go-Go's being produced by Phil Spector and then having the master-tapes mistakenly soaked in erratic slabs of echo. "Carry Me Home" and "Through The Flowers" have the understated melodies and waves of noise of early Jesus and Mary Chain, though even "Carry...", the one chance for a rather William-Reid-sounding guy to sing, has none of the lethargy and chain-smoking that makes Reid's JMC vocals such a drag. In mid side 2, "Ocean Blue" and the two songs after it are slow and try for an Echo-and-the-Bunnymen feel, with "Buzz Buzz Buzz" (grimy quadruple-speed rockabilly) compensating afterwords. The atypically droney "Shadow" is a ridiculous tabla- sitar- cellodrama - ultramega phasing/flangeing show, and probably my favorite thing here. The lyrics have lots of "Sha na na na na"s and "Bop, bop, ba da"s and don't seem much more enlighening otherwise, but who cares? Actually, given how poor Tracey's enunciation sometimes is, the 2nd verse of each song may in fact add up to a coherent 14-paragraph analysis of the false discovery of cold-fusion power at Utah State University and how that failed experiment actually contains heretofore overlooked clues that could guarantee humankind free, eco-friendly electricity forever, saving trillions of dollars and billions of acres and lives. Again, who cares? That's not what I listen to this for.
1989
Primitives, PURE
Unapologetically mindless, happy, rushing pop music in 2-to-3-minute doses, with a perky female singer, lots of guitar, heavy on the reverb but still punchy. The solid primitive (yep) drumming is by an obvious Moe Tucker fan, part of a Velvet Underground fixation strong enough to inspire both a cover of "I'll Be Your Mirror" ("and inside you're twisted and unkind" has never sounded more like a love song) and some VU-ish melodies and brittle Sterling-Morrison-styled guitar playing for three or four tracks before they forget.
For my money, PURE is the finest pure-pop album ever made by anyone. Although the Primitives are not well-known, they aren't anything like as deeply obscure as, say, Squonk Opera (whom even I've never heard of, though I like their CD). So I can faithfully report that my wild endorsement is only a modest exaggeration on what Trouser Press, the best-known "alternative" music guide, says. My e-friend Stewart, who is very bright, informed, likeable, and enough of a Pop Geek (TM) to list and rank his favorite albums year-by-year, has PURE as the 5th-best album of 1989 (he rates their shorter, simpler debut LOVELY #1 in '88). Now, I've come to a point where I think ranking albums is a dumb thing to do--- I found Stewart's page by _accident_, okay?, and I only scanned through quickly, seeking familiar names ("Aha! I'm not the only person who liked the Wendy James album! Aha! I'm not the only person who owns a Meringue album! Whoa! Somebody let Lothar and the Hand People make a second album?!?!? Cool!"). I've thought these lists were dumb since I was 7, when looking through my old papers I found proof that as a 4-year-old, I ranked my favorite friends. This awareness did not, however, stop me from making lists: of favorite sci-fi novels, best baseball players... there may be many more examples I've forgotten, or I may have been saved by the decade-plus I spent distracted by doing normal, healthy growing-boy things like designing entire leagues of football and baseball teams with fictional players who had fictional traits and quirks, and running them time-consumingly through their seasons. Still, list-making seems to be a genetic trait some people have and some, healthier, don't. As recently as a year ago you could have asked me to list the best 10 albums of 1989 (although not, like Stewart, the best 46), and I could have obliged at once because I'd already prepared for this eventuality. Heck, it's written down somewhere, hang on... yep. By artist, 1)New Model Army. 2)Cure. 3)Rush. 4)Nine Inch Nails. 5)Thinking Plague. 6)Don Henley. 7)Elvis Costello. 8)Tim Finn. 9)XTC. 10)Joe Satriani.
A strong selection. Also highly biased towards the complex, the fussily produced, and the wordy (and in that particular list, the somewhat depressing). I'm still biased those ways; I was raised on folk and Broadway (wordy), and I got half my chromosomes from a man who listens to classical music stations, collects the most avant experiments (as well as the prettiest ones) from 20th-century orchestra music, and who himself has composed a "Music for Orchestra and Timpani" and a "Suite For the Harpsichord" that I like very much (complex, fussy). And there are things PURE does not do for me that other musics do. The Primitives don't write the memorable sort of phrases that I start to insert into conversation and then realize wait, my listener doesn't have my mental associations for "prosthetic foreheads" or "monstrous hummingbirds", or can't complete the sentence "Don't know your limitations:". The Primitives have never written a song like "Dismantling The Berlin Waltz" (Cheer-Accident) or "A Day In The Life" (Beatles) where the first notes instantly grab my attention from whatever I was saying or eating or reading or defusing or having removed from my under-anesthetized body, to rearrange my world, for the next 5 to 7 minutes, entirely around the sounds coming from my speakers. Even if the Primitives wrote songs that _lasted_ 5 to 7 minutes, they wouldn't have that effect; PURE can be used as background music, ambient uppers, Tracy's nice voice and the fast drumbeats and the usually predictable chord changes serving as modest encouragement that nothing crucial is falling apart at this exact moment, and that sitting down is a stupid waste of a good existence.
So there, I've just accidentally explained why they're _not_ special. But I know better. "Sick Of It", chanting angry vocals and a guitar processed to where the string is inaudible and the feedback sounds like a well-tuned divebombing plane with a queasy pilot; the jangly "Shine", with a bit too much sonic depth to justify my otherwise-analogy that this could be an early R.E.M. influenced more strongly by "Michael Row Your Boat Ashore"s songwriting values; "Dizzy Heights"'s soaring/ swooping melodies and a guitarist attempting to fill the musical role VU put John Cale's viola in; the haunting "All The Way Down"; the heavenly "Ba, ba ba, ba ba ba"s and the chuka-chuka-chuka guitar and the simple piano hook of "Secrets"; the bluesy stomp and soft woodblock and satisfied lyrical scorn of "Can't Bring Me Down" (not to mention a little guitar solo perfect for a George Thorogood and the Destroyers hit, or the real if inexplicable pleasure from where the instruments drop out and Tracey sneers "you gotta crawl before you walk" to just the snare drum); the early-U2-ish guitar openings of "Outside" or "Keep Me In Mind" and the breathlessly harmonized scale-climbing pre-chorus on the latter; the growling rockabilly bass and soaring "Ooo-ohs" at once on "Lonely Streets" and the little blocky part where the first three beats are rushed but the 4th patiently awaits its cue; the chorus of the pounding "Never Tell" where they suddenly prove they _can_, if they choose, make up bizarre chord progressions; "Noose"'s High Noon soundtrack leanings; "I Almost Touched You"'s minor-key barrage of overdubs previewing the Heartthrobs or Curve without previewing their problem of all their songs sounding exactly alike--- each of these, taken individually, would (should!) be the sort of thing that flashes by on the radio and makes me gasp in wonder. Taken all together on the same album, they can ironically fade into a passively non-hostile environment of nice undistinguished singing, but that's still a good thing. And at least half the time, I can play them (and their also-good lesser compatriots) in a row, and every single one is undiluted in its glory. This album makes me _happy_. It makes many other people happy. And by what criteria I was ranking this "worse" (or, had I done so, "better") than the Cure's DISINTEGRATION, which exists to ennoble self-pity, is beyond me.
Postscript: somewhere in the four days between the review and this, my best-of-'89 list has been modified so that PURE appears at #4 and the Chrysanthemums come in at #6. I don't recall making this change, but I recognize my handwriting. Chromosomes 34, Intellect 0.
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