33 rebellions per minute
"No one cares until they tamper with our cows"
1995
Eggs, HOW DO YOU LIKE YOUR LOBSTER?
I bought LOBSTER, the Eggs' single-and-B-side collection, as archival background on Rob Christiansen, lead husband in Sisterhood of Convoluted Thinkers. Not sure how much I actually learned about Rob: the Eggs were, as it happens, basically led by one Andrew Beaujon. It is either by coincidence, or evil influence, however, that he arrived at the start of an inspiring story. For one single (three songs) before Rob's arrival, the Eggs were fully formed: a barely talented band that had created a useful niche for themselves with a unique, interesting sound. After he arrived, they spent the rest of their career unhatching: a barely talented band exploring, with increasing randomness and joy, how many other things they could sort of do instead. And you know what? Talent is overrated.
"Skyscraper" introduced the Eggs to the world. Introverted, closely articulated guitar and bass lines, a stylistic match for the Church or Carcrash International, pick their way through a moody 2-chord melody that morphs, for structural purposes, into a different 2-chord melody. Beaujon sings the words with impedimented caution, like Joe Strummer awkwardly attempting to perform THE CLASH as a lullaby collection. The chorus is instrumental and signified by a doubling of the speed and an intensifying of the drums (snare, muted kick drum, and castanets). And above it all, a French horn rallies the energy. "Ocelot", darker and more percussively strummed, like the Cakekitchen covering the Cure's "the Blood", featured echoey vocals but is otherwise similar. The French horn is an excellent gimmick; so is the fact that Dave Park can sing along like the B-52's Fred Scheider through an abrupt downward pitch-shifter. "It's Hard To Be An Egg", dreamy again, sounds basically like "Skyscraper". I like it. The French horn is an excellent gimmick. Did I say that already?
"Come on, Rob, play guitar now, brother!" So announces one of the easiest electric guitar solos in rock history, a verse into song four, "Government Administrator". Christiansen, new, was hired on trombone, not French horn, but what's really different is the ambience. Beaujon stage-whispers what could be a Dylan protest song, gently strummed over tambourine and muted drum thumps and an occasional bass guitar whole note. It's about applying for a straight-world job ("despite a lack of technical acumen on my part") and being afraid of success: "had a vision of myself in ten years/ a badge around my neck and no pain in my heart". It's about somethinng identifiable because you could hear the words. An Eggs landmark!
"Sugar Babe", terrified, backs the singer into the room next to the room with the mike again, but the gentle Morse-code guitar lead survives half the song alone before the trombone rescues it. "The Obliviist" sounds basically like "...Egg" (I like it), but "the Obliviist part two" drops the trombone to the uncomfortable bottom of its range, while the rest of the band speeds up and slows down like they can't quite remember the words and chords to the Velvet Underground's "Heroin" but do remember the vibe.
Then things get weird. "Erin Go Braagh!" stages a degenerate Tall Dwarfs chant/buzz: tambourine, a subway monster with indigestion, boyish singers announcing "ooh hep yadda", and a lovely lilting piccolo. Then "Sexual Tension" is what "Satisfaction" might've been in the hands of a singer and band who weren't, in point of fact, getting laid by several dozen women any time they happened to ask. A pretty-when-on-key wordless choir, still recording in the same subway as "Braagh!"'s monster, frames Beaujon's most theatrical voice, a disturbed halfway between Frank Zappa and Les Claypool if you could be genuinely afriad of either of them, stammering through lines like "take all of the girls that I cannot get to/ roll them all up in a really big stew/ it tastes like sexual tension". "In State" jumps immediately to the decay of a relationship that does exist: wavery singing ("I don't know that I would not be fine/ if you weren't mine") over a folk-pop song, with ocarina, like Chad + Jeremy circa THE ARK covering Simon + Garfunkel's "Leaves That Are Green". Those three were on one single together.
On the other hand, the jazzbo vocals, like scat-singing filtered through Uileann pipes, and the trombone stomp, and the segmented game involving guitar effects pedals, and the muttering about "filling contractual obligations gets me down", and the Earth, Wind, And Fire falsetto, and the nursery rhyme over wah-wah guitar, are all part of the next one _song_, "Roll Away The Stone", so let's not define "adventurous" too quickly. "Baked Alaska" is brief, rasping "Tea. Tea with milk. Tea with milk and sugar. Coffee. Coffee with milk" with unnatural urgency. "A Pit With Spikes" is pretty again, a frightened lounge singer crooning a melody halfway between Buddy Holly and "Untouchable Face" over a trebly drum loop. "A Sparkling Mix" could be a classical bass-guitar exercise for a second-week student not yet ready for the complexity of Black Sabbath's "Fluff", over Omnichord, triangle, and an irregular whacking like a shower being turned on/off in unrealistically abrupt movements.
"Genetic Engineering" mixes fragile folk protest with the goofy stomp of Gestapo officers square-dancing in their jackboots. "Words" is a simple minor-key ditty like one of the Eels' acoustic songs. And "Genetic Engineers" is the song I was awaiting, Rob's lead singing and songwriting debut. A model of Noel Chomsky devotion, it earnestly explains genetic engineering nightmares over what could be Pavement's "Range Life" redone as a march in 5/4 with no resolved chord changes.
It fades inconclusively. So did the Eggs' career. Which is excellent. They started with something finished, and they ended up going elsewhere and telling their stories elsewhere. The only way that could've made sense was the way they chose.
1999
Sisterhood Of Convoluted Thinkers, S/T
I can't prove, despite my prejudices, that music needs to have an avant-garde. At least any more. Quite a few styles of music have already been created, defined, given their rules and structures, and the evidence is clear that it's possible to make a happy, music-filled life choosing among them. Three-minute power-pop ditties recreated with care from early Beatles recordings, to make you happy. Eleventy-seven subgenres of heavy metal to inspire and calibrate aggression. Lilith Fair compilations to be mild, undistracting, and sometimes thought-provoking if you choose to hear the lyrics. Symphonies to mold your emotions over broad dynamic sweeps. 12-tone to do whatever 12-tone is supposed to do (something to do with accounting, or sex, or fabric softeners, I think). Whether or not it's _all_ been done, quite a lot has, and those few of us who insist on novelty are probably best dismissed as a bunch of whiners.
In practice, though, I like to share music when I enjoy it, and I like to heard occasional lunacy. What I really like about Sisterhood Of Convoluted Thinkers, therefore - and why I'm probably going to go back and research their earlier works as the Eggs and as Grenadine - is that as avant-garde music goes, this is amazingly friendly. Easy to like. Tunes to sing along with, sometimes sounding like refugees from a Best of Sesame Street compilation. Low-key normal-person singing voices (by the husband & wife team of Rob Christiansen and Jeannine Durfee) that pick their way carefully among the notes, so you needn't feel dumb if you must also. Enough instruments to make me wish I still had my Young Person's Guide To The Orchestra LP - tuba, flute, clarinet, trombone, I don't think the Guide was multiculti enough for tabla or canalopie -- but not played in such a way that you can't imagine having learned those parts in 8th grade if you'd practiced harder. Hardly any distortion or aggression - in fact, if you _will_ hate the album, you'll know within 15 seconds, when "Action 98"'s simmering minor-key xylophone/ castanets/ timpani groove is suddenly interrupted by atonal, arrhythmic trumpet bleats. Get through that happy, and everything's a cinch from there.
The breezy cheerfulness and quiet of the presentation, then, leaves you with full mental resources for dealing with the Sisterhood's rhythms and, above all, structures. This is a band whose liner notes only confirm and clarify what I'd already sensed when "Sable" is explained as "Used to be too long. Mixed in little bits and edited back together with parts left out". "Pablo, Deepsea Aquanautics Mausoleum"'s drums were "played in bits and edited to fit the story". "A Goof Plays on the Roof" was constructed with "scraps of paper dropped to determine order and duration of parts. Space left in the middle for true story of Jeannine's childhood exposure to mosquito larvae which was added later" (and which is chanted in ragged unison, unaccompanied). "Investor Relations" may have been recorded live in real time, for all I know, but it wanders between ¾ and 4/4 time, between brief Jimi Hendrix feedback heroics and lilting melody and built-up rock grandeur (with piano) with sing-along "Now I can't breathe, la la la la la" chorus. "Raaaahhh!" has a simple rhythmic bed of marching-band drums played by a somewhat showoff drummer, with strings and bells and syn-drums entering the mix and playing off each other in non-weird ways, but there's two brief bits that sound like Dr. Bunsen Honeydew's faithful assistant Beaker singing through that computerized voice-supplement box Stephen Hawking uses. "Time Piece " is a midtempo acoustic guitar song, but the second guitar adds sickly echoes at the edge of hearing. "Ramanhat Nbaddah" takes on a single-handed quest to compensate for the droning repetition of normal Indian music. "Klaus McGurdy's Mechanincal Clock" and "Timing Is Correct" both operate in simple sequence and in 4/4 time; but they're each barely a minute long, and the former sounds like a slightly confused Boy Scout rubbing two matchboxes together in an effort to make fire while metronomes drain the last of their batteries watching him, and the latter sounds like the Cure's PORNOGRAHY at 12 times the proper speed with all frequencies above 70 Hz eliminated. "Doors And Humming", closing the album, is actually doors, humming, and footsteps.
Which means I've said everything except to warn you: this might end up as my favorite Pop album of the year. "Pablo…", "Goof…", and "Investor…" between them have about eight classic pop choruses, all in major key. "Just Look At The Building -- It Stands" is indeed constructed from "table, shaker, pennywhistle, General Chaos", and the words are mumbled as if guest Steve Silverstein is sure you'll laugh at him, but in its own Soundtrack To A Weird Observation way it's beautiful; even my Mom understood why I think so (without, technically, agreeing). "Sable" sounds suspiciously like rehearsals for a recital, but the hesitant and key-uncertain melody is still pleasant, and the "I got a car, so I could go to work, so I could get more money, to pay for my car" chorus is as memorable as it is perceptive. Other topics -- besides cars, mosquito larvae, and will you marry me -- include the important work done by building surveyors; the way huge ugly places like WalMart are able to crowd out and destroy local businesses and communities because almost all of us, at least sometimes, are eager to undermine our long-term interests to save 15%; and the story of Pablo the delivery boy's attempt to navigate a building whose halls are in the shape of the human circulatory system. None of these topics were, prior to this album's existence, overused. None of these tunes existed, which was sad. That there is innovation going on… well, that may be an obstacle at first. Or maybe it's something one grows to like. If everyone who buys this album forms a band, we can have a new genre. And junior high orchestra teachers will be jumping from tall buildings.
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