33 rebellions per minute
"This is just a perpendicular line to the grain"
1989
No Man Is Roger Miller, WIN! INSTANTLY!
Back in the 1970's, the band Queen was in the habit of labeling every album "No Synthesizers!". It's hard to say if anything was consequentially wrong with this-- certainly when they started using synthesizers, they stopped making music I care about-- but the claim strikes me as pretentious and silly. Are we the listeners supposed to assume, then, that "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Bicycle Race" were the product of straightforward non-synthetic all-natural jam sessions? Preferably on acoustic instruments, and hopefully recorded on unplugged microphones, straight to reel-to-reel reuasable cloth? The sympathetic interpretation of the "No Synthesizers" rule would be to read it as a protest against, I dunno, sounds that didn't _come_ from anywhere, a protest that direct human hands on strings, and mouths on mouthpieces, should be the source of noise, because those noises are somehow less distancing, never mind the digital delay pedals and artificial reverb and... okay, see, I don't _have_ a sympathetic interpretation. I'm not into purism. If the first 15 songs you record work wonderfully without synthesizers, with indeed some rustic down-home ensemble, great; but if for the 16th there's this great little siren-like hook that would fit just right, or an overlay of ghostly noise is useful to fit the atmosphere, _use it_. If you can't record it yourself, hire someone who can help. Make the song work, not the formula.
That said, the other project I can think of that used a proud, explicit "No Synthesizers" rule involved former Mission Of Burma guitarist/ songwriter Roger Miller over the course of two albums: the formative THE BIG INDUSTRY, credited to Roger Miller's Maximum Electric Piano; and WIN! INSTANTLY! And I approve. These albums explore the notion that pianos, effects pedals, and percussively sample-heavy keyboards are all that's really needed to make loud, aggressive rock'n'roll-- it's not all rare to find Miller layering three different piano parts over each other, only one of which sounds like you expect a piano to sound. It's possible to think of other heavy piano songs-- Paula Cole's "Throwing Stones" or Tori Amos's "Precious Things" are as rock as anything by, say, U2. But Roger Miller's two albums are remarkable in building a pianistic vision of rock that stands up proud against Faith No More or Metallica-- and if the earnest grace and dignity of WIN! INSTANTLY! is a long way those groups, it's not because Miller plays piano, but because he lets those traits infuse his songwriting.
THE BIG INDUSTRY was flawed, very simply, by the fact that Miller isn't much as a tunsemith and hadn't worked out many of the textural possibilities yet, leaving the proceedings distressingly monochrome; it's worth buying if you see that used instead of WIN!, but it's more fun as a display of possibilities than as a record. WIN! starts establishing its own case as a leap forward within seconds. "Run Water, Run Water"'s keyboard bass monotone is instantly reminiscent of the Cure' "Primary", but a piano enters playing a full-fledged original minute-long suite. As the piano slips to pounding two-chord oscillations, Miller's articulate, pleasantly unexpressive tenor sings two entire verses on one repeated note, but the final echoed yelp of "Oh!" (also very Cure-like) leads into a churningly melodic violin-and-voice chorus. The next verse is broken when Tanya Donnelly (then of Throwing Muses, later of Belly) helps Miller shout "Run run run into the water"-- she's not harmonizing, but she's additional texture, and the second chorus has a different melody from the first. A wildly distorted flourish across the piano's high notes serves as a decorative '80's-ish synth wash without, technically, being one, and Miller and Donnelly shout their way to the end.
"No Man's Landing" is weirder and less anthemic; the heavily echoed, non-chordal playing, accented by a manic variety of percussion clinks, sounds like a rheumatismic piano trying desperately to growl in rage, and a pleasantly melodic chorus of voice/ guitar/ piano emerges from the chaos but only replaces it entirely for 2 seconds. "Calling All Animals"'s echoey tribal drums are again Cure-like ("Splintered In The Head"), but while the Donnelly-aided chorus, which as per the title sounds just like a summons, is met with upbeat reed-organ fanfare, the lengthy coda is as fierce as anything Trent Reznor would later generate on his MacIntosh: a dense amelodic clamor of banging, drilling, guitar feedback, and what seems to be the piano's soprano end used as a hammer. "Scratch" settles down, serving its social commentary--
"Inside colored grey, walls make smoke again.-- with militantly precise rhythm (drum set on verse, pipe set on chorus) and an emphatic Ives-like fist pounding on the piano that, distorted and amplified, is harsher than most fuzzbox power chords. The melody goes from musical comedy, to rigid work song, to monk-like plainsong.
Blind numbers fall and scream: 'Please forgive our crimes, because on our own we are blameless'.
I work all day and I work all night
but how do I know it will turn out right?"
"This Is Not A Photograph" combines harcore-punk catchiness with a playfulness that stops after every cry of "photograph!" for an improvised noise, something like the old Sgt. Bilko scripts that, as written, would have lines of dialogue followed by "Bilko: says something funny". "Promised Land", a naggingly syncopated anthem on the premise "Now we've got to ride, to reach the promised land, and when we get there, when we get there, wake me wake me wake me wake me", achieves its fullest glory in a major key bridge that sounds like the incidental music at a Planetarium, as the galaxy is scrubbed and vacuumed. "The Quarry" is a soft piano lament, over a background loop like a small cartoon bomb unexploding and being sucked back up into the plane. "Renegades" re-establishes Miller's monk-chant potential ("Vos ipsos futuite, merdi, aliqui, leges edictus"-- roughly translating as "you fuck them; then, having announced this, you gather other people's shit", an atypically direct summary of an oblique song about enforcement of social and political norms even by those who are harmed by those norms, be it foremen busting unions, blacks attacking their studious friends for "acting white", or schoolgirls condemning any girl foresightful enough to buy condoms as a "slut"). Sonically "Renegades" benefits from mixing and matching elements: by the time the flowing piano, crashing percussion, and dry imitation-guitar hook are all arranged, a pedestrian melody is accented to look ambitious and winding. Which is, for a loud song on a loud album, a very artful and subtle touch. So is the way the punishing percussion on last track "Voluptuous Airplanes" lets itself be guided by the subtle, inconsistent pulse of castanets practising insect mating calls. The bridge could be a good class project turning the pseudo-Asian guitar licks of "Turning Japanese" into serious music; the verses are sung twice each, once from a mile away and once from by the microphone; and everything fades at last into the distance.
This would, I think, be a credible album entirely on the basis of its songs: literate, observant, subversive in non-obvious ways. As a piece of sonic architecture, though, I've never seen anything else like it. And I'd want to. Unlike THE BIG INDUSTRY, WIN! is, I think, a completely successful experiment: instead of just making a point about possibility, it fully answers the question "Why bother?". But I don't think it's a question with only one right answer; someone else should explore further. Yo, Tori! Do you really need that programmer dude? He's good at his job, I know, but think about it....
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