33 rebellions per minute
"Is it brave or will it curl up when you poke it with a stick?"
1997
Mia Sheard, WITH LOVE AND SQUALOR
Maybe it¹s just as well that few musicians are so self aware as Mia Sheard, given how hard it would be to justify writing music reviews then. Sheard claims her influences on this album, a debut avaiable at A + B Sound, were Joni Mitchell and Rheostatics, and that¹s exactly what she sounds like. Specifically, this means the FOR THE ROSES/ COURT AND SPARK Joni, where she was a folk singer just growing into elegantly jazz chordings and cadences; Mia even has a highly Joni-ish voice. She also seems to be aiming to observe relationships and people in Joni¹s pre incomprehensibility lyrical style. She¹s not as good as Joni, but then, what an unfair standard to use.
From the Rheos, mainly the cautious early MELVILLE experiments, her influences are as clear as the personnel she borrows. Producer Michael Philip Wojewoda keeps the percussion textures (on the half the songs where there are any) open and individualized, the credits full of tambourines and ³shortwave manipulations² and ³oral spoons², the occasional feedback lines as focused and sharpened as the instruments. Guitarist Martin Tielli provides ringing Edge-like tones, hesitant choppy rhythms, ambient openings, and the unique Rheostatic form of grunge soft-loudness, where unlike the Nirvana/Radiohead/Live standard (the quiet bits are like a man juggling 20 sharp knives, and the loud parts are where he throws them all at your neck), the quiet parts are valid and singular and perfectly capable of lasting the entire song, but if a loud part _does_ come it¹s more like Black Sabbath (take a full overhead wind-up with a club, whomp your forehead, full windup repeat), only Tielli¹s clubs are thinner, made from dense metals, and engineered to give off remote-controlled shards of shrapnel at each whomp. The nice thing is how naturally their deliberate use fits into the controlled folk stylings of Sheard¹s songs. The songs themselves are also nice.
2000
Mia Sheard, REPTILIAN
As much as I liked Mia's WITH LOVE AND SQUALOR debut - as important, indeed, as the two weeks I spent rotating it, Veda Hille's SPINE, and Emma Townshend's WINTERLAND, learning to not impatiently wait for the cathartic chorus, were to my understanding of music's possibilities - I've never quite gotten a grip on it. My above review spent 300 words trying to explain "like early Joni Mitchell fronting the Rheostatics on a good-but-not-great day, although not really", and I can't think how to write it better. "Marjorie" is the sort of great song that justifies an entire purchase, for me, and the Moody Blues cover is very pretty, and there isn't any track I need to skip, and, well, um. "Potential", I thought helplessly, "big potential". REPTILIAN sounds far more like its predecessor than it does like anything else, and although I had the word of Eye Magazine's Michael Barclay, a perceptive man, that Sheard had made a great leap forward, I spent my first few listens unsure that I could justify recommending it over all the other nice albums I could write about. It was certainly a calmer album - no more unpredictability for-the-sake-of unpredictability. And the hesitant pace and rhythms, and her vocal timbre, reminded me of Veda Hille; but I knew that was a dead end, since anyone I try to make into another Veda will lose the comparison.
There's a very simple reason why REPTILIAN makes, in the end, more of a connection for me. On SQUALOR, her producer (the excellent Michael Philip Wojewoda) was burying her beneath the arrangements. The songs, to me, kept seeming like frail connective tissue linking this frayed burst of echoplexed guitar to that tinkling percussion effect. Not this time. REPTILIAN's arrangements are probably a step up in imagination, if anything: the way the blocky drumwork rattles around quietly from one speaker to the next on "Viaduct" like the ghost of a Super Soundz Of Stereo equipment demo; the way the piano notes on "Cover Girl" ripple outward as from a splashed stone; how the guitar and cymbal work on "Stubborn Bastard" pace and guide themselves in continuous flow, like somewhat hungry predators that need to be anesthetized for the chorus; the way the bass piano, omnichord, and swirling echoes of blues-guitar feedback on "I Want" trade off like separate extensions of the same instrument. Instruments throughout seem to crescendo in and decrescendo out dreamily, in a polite, co-operative logic that preempts the necessity of pounding out actual notes. But see, Mia Sheard seems to approach singing and songwriting in the "singer/songwriter" manner: deliberative, melody-focused, expressive. It should be possible, in such a record, to focus on the actual song. On REPTILIAN, it's easy; whatever subtle alteration of singing style, or twirl of knob, that was wrong last time, is this time right.
What, then, do we get from her singing? Her forceful, clear but slightly pinched (except when intentionally mumbled) alto voice often inhabits David Bowie's early stylings. And perhaps his compositional style: an "All The Madmen" or "Man Who Sold The World" cover, done just a bit slower through just a few more phase and tremolo pedals, could easily pass, for one who didn't know better, as a song of her own. Instead she starts the album with a song from the perspective of a caged turtle: "the Tortoise and the Heiress", a joke she does us (or the reptile) the compliment of taking thoughtfully. "Comic", which is equally cool whether or not it's a metaphor for some person, tells its object "The straight and crooked lines which made up you/ From above the page you could hear them say/ 'The mouth's beside where it's supposed to be and one eye there has no color at all'/ What a state they've got you into/ what Picasso made this mess of you?". It's a small thing, this whimsical empathy, and maybe you never read a Garfield cartoon identifying with the unfortunate dog Odie, but I did, and I appreciate a fellow traveler.
"Girlyman", next, the only soft-verse/ loud-chorus cliché on the record (and one done fully well enough to remind me why the cliché exists), transfers this spirit to a human: describing the hitting-ons of a bar scene with the detail of too much experience, she looks for "the girlyman…where all the losers linger, he'll be there, oblivious". "Cover Girl", where her rat-a-tat verse vocals set up a refrain which delicately floats, samples the male race in apparently similar fashion, and would bother me with its "all men" assertions: if, that is, she wasn't happily married to Wojewoda, and making her records with a large cast of men. Instead, I enjoy the busy internal rhymes and recognize the chorus as the narrator's tender protectiveness for a friend - I know such women myself - whose luck with men justifies worse stereotypes.
"Viaduct", a breakup song and a love song at once, redeems my lingering doubts about unsubtlety: "I couldn't be your blood. I'd pump into your brain and nose around; I couldn't get back down. I couldn't be your crazy mind: I'd fix your run-on sentences, and keep you second-guessing all the time". I appreciate that; I don't want anyone fixing _my_ run-on sentences either. Since Ms Sheard and I are clear on that, I'm happy to say that she's made an excellent record. Patient Americans can await its February release here; everyone else is referred to HMV, where the Canadian dollar is always blessedly weak. Have a lovely night, ok?
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