33 rebellions per minute
1994
Squonk Opera, HOWANDEVER
I've bought plenty of cheap albums knowing nothing about the band except what I could discern from the album package, and several times I've gotten spectacularly lucky in the process: Rise Robots Rise, Thought Industry, Cindy Lee Berryhill, Maestro Subgum, Gruppo Sportivo, and even one of my two favorite active bands, the Rheostatics. That said, I have a strong impulse to research, and by now I can give you extra facts about any of those artists, usually including full discographies. I can probably give you a full discography of Squonk Opera too: HOWANDEVER, 1994. But that's a guess. These folks are a mystery.
Luckily, the info I have is as informative as it looked in the store. Instrumental lineup: vocals; piano/ keyboards; wind synthesizer/ celtic flute/ whistles/ sax; contraption kit/ rototoms; electric bass; tabla/ electric tabla. Further titles accompanying the names (female singer, 3 or 4 males of the 5 instrumentalists): "prima donna", "kapellmeister", "impresario", "glocksonic", "basso buffo", "percussionisto". First six song titles: "Inside Height", "Jole Du Frommage", "hT cT", "Drop The Words", "the Unusual Mrs. Spitz", "Dance Of The 7 Vowels". And there's the band name, Squonk Opera, which caught my attention in the first place. What the package suggests, aside from a mildly prog-rock lineup with a strong rhyhtm section, is a bunch of talented, imaginative people who haven't fully decided whether they're _really_ this godawfully pretentious, or just playing. Right exactly. Yay!
"Inside..." and "Jole..." set an immediate style, one mixing baroque flute-work and delicate singing (by Kate Aronson, who has an extraordinarily good voice) into propulsive odd-metered rhythms and synthetic overtones suggesting that they really get a kick out of the Mission: Impossible theme music. Well, so do I, and they learned its lessons well. "hT cT" keeps that formula, but moves funk bass and playground chant vocals to the foreground. "Drop The Words" emphasizes soft acoustic piano, and the vocals indeed are wordless. "Unusual..." uses their prog/ M.:I. leanings as punctuation to Kate's nasal Noo Yawk accented storyteller mode (a bit too much; the storytelling would be much more charming left alone, imho). "Whistle + Spit" brings the funk even clearer than before as Kate tells, in bored/ cynical rap, the sort of tale of male pickup artists that normally might be sung angelically in a Lush song. The somewhat New Age "Parts" is built from quiet piano and subtly dynamic percussion.
Tracks nine through twelve don't really expand the trick set, but don't have to. They solidify the impression of a soft-rock prog band (I'm thinking Renaissance) with a theatical bent and a bizarre but welcome delusion that Renaissance was the band that did that neato hit MTV cover of Stevie Wonder's "Higher Ground" a few years back. The woodwind guy is remarkably talented, the percussionist makes the oddest structural leaps seem like even flow, and everything coheres to the point where there's no song, not even "Whistle + Spit", that doesn't leave a Squonk Opera melodic and rhythmic marker somewhere. Which, given that they apparently ran out of chances to leave those markers later, is a blessed thing.
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