33 rebellions per minute
"Slit my education. Boil."
1992
Thought Industry, SONGS FOR INSECTS
My initial reaction to hearing SONGS was that this debut might be the greatest
heavy metal album I'd ever heard; that it was the record Metallica
might've made had they looked at their masterpiece/ monstrosity AND
JUSTICE FOR ALL and said "what we need to do is supplement our ambition
with creativity", instead of "what the world needs now is some louder
Foghat records". T.I. shared Metallica's forcefully chugging bass
sounds, fondness for riding the cymbals, willingness to switch time
signatures and to extend a song for seven minutes, and anti-authority/
pro-neurosis lyrics. In that context, what was different about T.I.'s
vision--- the inventive percussion textures occasionally mixed to the
front as hooks, or the fact that Brent Oberlin often sung in a clear
voice or achieved his Hetfield-y diabolicness though twisted processing,
or how Oberlin attempted to make his lyrics stand up as poetry, or the
occasional piano and weird synth--- seemed to me like inspired
Jackson-Pollocky remixes of an exciting but increasingly monochrome
style.
Since then, I've made my peace with METALLICA and LOAD after all;
sell-outs they may be, but it's hard for me to hold onto an intellectual
objection against music that makes me jump around happily. In the
meantime, probably influenced by seeing which influences Thought
Industry chose to lay off, it's exactly the Metallica-like aspects of
SONGS that have come to bore me. Oh, the extremely staccato march of "The
Flesh Is Weak" (which, going by music instead of words, one would take
as a contemptuous victory slogan from the killer robots), by managing to
actually exaggerate Metallica's style, amuses me, and "Third Eye" is
oddly mixed in a way that inspiredly redistributes the musical roles
among normally cliched sounds, but otherwise T.I.'s
lumbering thuds keep overwhelming their actual strengths (or else there's only so much space in my brain reserved for the style, and Metallica claimed it all before T.I. had a chance). On the other hand, the thrilling
"Daughter Mobius", flourishing multisegmented prog-rock roots, invents
thrash klezmer, with a hook not all that far removed from "Hava Nagila"
and the occasional peasant shouts "(clap) Hey! (clap) Hey!". "Alexander
Vs The Puzzle" is functionally equivalent to the classical guitar on
"Battery" or "One" but instead uses folk motifs, and maintains them
throughout a genuinely attractive song. "Ballerina" could be Metallica
covering the Dead Kennedys at maximum rave-up. "The Chalice Vermillion"
shows guitar-solo traces of Yngwie "thanks go to: Jimi Hendrix, Eddie
Van Halen, Bach, and Vivaldi" Malmstein. "Blistered Text and Bleeding
Pens" seems like a partial attempt to play midtempo metal rhythms on
acoustic guitars with folky, even somewhat jazzy chordings. And "Bearing
An Hourglass", which except for the closing piano is played entirely on
regular rock instruments, nonetheless sounds like a cover of one of
Mussorgsky's or Tschaikovsky's louder, more magesterial compositions.
Their lyrics employ typical metal themes--- by which I don't mean
Kiss/ Def Leppard/ Bon Jovi music-for-13-year-old-girls
-to-buy-posters-for themes, I mean Fates Warning/ Anthrax/ Sabbath
music-guys-hide-in-their-rooms-with themes ("my words mean what I want
them to to mean. The question is who is to be master, them, or me?")---
but with an ambitious flair. I'll take "Third Eye" as representative:
"Children on a playground, one kid's bigger than the rest. The blind
stand beside them. The weak wither and die. The big kid stands defiant,
arrogant in his bliss. Thinks that knuckles and sinew can make him
always right. I'll run from him. I'd rather hide than be dead". Real
heavy metal, though defined by specific ways of making noise with guitar
and bass, has developed a strong identity as peacefully aggressive
expression for the outcasts and the overwhelmed. Real metal also, when
not celebrating random dismemberment, often goes for social
conscience--- "Third Eye" makes a metaphorical connection between school
bullies and the American military, while "...Mobius" mocks "He calls the
world 'Arena Grand'. Bone gameshow: a small joke Christ plays on the
devil. Nielsen rates it well". "Ballerina" is vaguely a love song, and I
suspect more couples could relate to "We are lonely. We are scared. We
are forever!" than would ever so unwise as to admit such motives.
"...Mobius", keeping that cynicism and ditching the love, thoughtfully
advises "The men are always boring you. Take their cash before the sun,
run their Visa to maximum. Instant dinner, the pinnacle of romance that
burns you again". It's odd advice from a band whose songs, going beyond
AABB form into sections G and H, do not indicate enough attention span
to last a dinner, let alone a vicious aftermath. Then again, that's why
they're hiding in their Kalamazoo studio, assaulting the ears of
impassive multitracks, and we can listen to them at a safe distance.
1993
Thought Industry, MODS CARVE THE PIG (ASSASSINS, TOADS, AND GOD'S FLESH)
When I'm writing a review of an album, I play the album as I write. Now, yesterday I was discussing music with someone who's almost as fond of magrigals and opera and Thelonius Monk's jazz as of Paul Simon and Tori Amos, and was feeling acutely conscious of the narrowness of my own tastes. Tonight, however, I have just removed my Michelle Tumes CD (shiny, lush, optimistic, Enya-like evangelist-pop, quite excellent) from my player post-review and inserted MODS CARVE THE PIG. Within one second, I was feeling open-minded again.
MODS is, I believe, the single most insanely convoluted, or perhaps merely insane, piece of music ever committed to disc. It is, at center, an exceptionally harsh version of thrash-metal, which itself is not so uncommon--- although I'm not convinced anyone else in world history has _ever_ screamed like Brent Oberlin during the opening lines of first track "Horsepowered" and kept his voice afterwards. What is remarkable, however, is that in between all the helter-skelter jerks between different obnoxious tempos and different unsettling rhythms and different levels of ear-smash, there is a pop record squirming to get out. The overall effect of the album is something like listening to XTC's dreamy psychedeli-pop song cycle SKYLARKING while fighting the record-setting 1918 tank-and-machine-gun bloodbath that was the 3rd battle of Ypres; but MODS, on balance, would be harder to explain to your friends.
"Horsepowered", for example, maintains its impossible intensity except when it pauses for a 3-note, 1-measure synth-pop hook, after which it resumes. It also breaks into some funky but off-kilter jazz bass; so, later on and more abstractedly, does "Jane Whitfield Is Dead", which interrupts its heavy fire for both a grunge-worthy chorus and some melody bits that literally could be XTC's Steely-Dan-inflected "King For A Day" at twice the speed and volume. "Daterape Cookbook" and "Boil" have slow-burning verse sections in which the drummer (the amazing Dustin Donaldson) gets to play around with a really versatile drum kit at the front of the mix; "Boil" has one chorus like a drill instructor and another like Everclear's most desperate moments only in 7/4 time, plus a bridge in which grumpy underwater gnomes complain through an air vent but Brent and the guitarist forgo rational response in favor of boosting the decibel and BPM counts to around 200 and hoping to carry the point that way. "Michigan Jesus" on the other hand, at 1:46 one of only two tracks under the 4:30 mark, is a racing rock opera featuring a sing-along chorus rendered once as "Citizens, the proletariat will rise, Marx was right to believe in something new" and once as "Tra la la, la la la la la la, la la la la la la, la la la la".
"Smirk The Godblender", with piano and tympani, has a minor-key symphonic majesty when it isn't tearing lungs and blowing amps. "Republican In Love", driven by some especially agile rhythm-section interplay, opens at a whisper and keeps the volume moderate almost throughout, even in a blatantly Metallica-like bridge. Perhaps that's a setup (after "Worms Listen", with an illbient opening and using every time signature from 2 to 7 beats per measure, which has to be on purpose) for "Patiently Waiting For Summer", which proves that Thought Industry can play acoustic guitars, steal ideas from Fairport Convention, and do an _entire pretty song_; a love song! While still toying with time sigs, of course. Followed by a 3-part jazz-thrash instrumental.
The lyrics, or "poetry" as Brent reasonably insists, is no more comforting. I've owned this album long enough to decide that the lyrics are sensible and communicative, but if that is not your first-glance assumption about sentence structure like "Dennis Hurley, guns and coffee. Lucky strikes. Suede shoes. Polyester slacks cramped posture. Staleman, frail hands. Shake caffeine palsy. Lame veteran Korea grips breasts. Wife's breasts. Gorge bruised nipples. Welted glazed thighs. Half gallon bourbon. Slit my intentions! Boil!", I sympathize. Essentially, this album is to metal what the Chrysanthemums' LITTLE FLECKS OF FOAM AROUND BARKING was to pop, or what Monty Python was to television: an amazing overflow of constant imaginative effort and prouctivity, condensed into a whimpering space too impossibly small to fit it in its straining walls. And oh, how I wish it was possible for anyone to make albums (or shows) like that twice.
1996
Thought Industry, OUTER SPACE IS JUST A MARTINI AWAY
Relative to 1993's MODS CARVE THE PIG, OUTER SPACE is a noticeable step
towards the mainstream for Thought Industry. Relative to anything else,
it's a dizzyingly loud, convoluted, intimidating slab of noise, which
means it's still great. It might even be a step forward. Thought
Industry are still a thrash band, but this time they bother to include
Metallica-like power chords ("the Squid", "Fairy", "I'm Jack Frost
Junior", "Soot On The Radio" if you don't mind the lurching 5/4 time),
and the loosest hints of what, in a completely different context, could
be only a bit too adventurous for synth-pop ("Soot" again, "Watercolour
Gray", "Sharron Sours").
The lyrics, too, have taken a turn towards
complete sentences amd paragraphs, such as the reflection on being newly
dead: "Liquid floats and conspires. One chance to lose. The cherry
syrup provides a line. It's funny how you can't snore". Or "Miasma will
befriend like a well-oiled palm. The grass is so green. The grass is so
clean". Even the jokes, which aren't a new feature, can be understood
without a lyric sheet and close study for once, from "D.I.Y.
Tranquilizers"'s self explanatory yowl of "I DON'T FEEL TRANQUIL!!!!!"
to the passionate rant ingeniously entitled "Fruitcake and Cider": "I
decided to make a trip to Binder Park Zoo. I threw letters in the cages
saying 'I know who you are. Tell God to please leave me alone'. I can't
watch. I can't think. The cockroaches in my cupboard are always smiling
at me when I reach for the corned beef... everyone knows pets are just
camcorders for God (at least the NRA believes me)". It's still
frighteningly intelligent music, and for people who can't stand loud,
slashing guitars, the "ly intelligent" suffix wasn't necessary. It still
rewards many repeats, and many re-reads. But this time, it'll make 'em
smile if you sing along.
1997
Thought Industry, BLACK UMBRELLA
This album serves the interesting retroactive function of proving that
Thought Industry's MODS and OUTER SPACE were basically happy-mood albums. For all their screaming, and
their songs about drunkenness and the religious right and the
interesting sensations of death and the advisability of faking death,
those albums came with a spirit of deliberate difficulty and obtuseness
that was life-affiriming. No one would write songs that change time
signatures, dynamic levels, melodies, instrumentation every 5-20 seconds
if they didn't have the spirit to _want_ to. No one in a truly bad mood
would stage silly 2-minute rock operas. It takes a certain joie de vivre
to even bother naming your songs "Pinto Award In Literature" or "Love Is
America Spelled Backwards", let alone to make them faux-suites in order
to add subtitles like "Burning Kalamazoo To The Ground With Zippo Fluid"
and "Your Grandma's A Seal Killer". Or maybe this is just my perspective
as a loyal cultivator of e-mail friendships, wherein my friends learn to
just expect that my chattier messages will come with subject headings,
loosely explainable in context, like "Live, from the Orange Blob
Anti-Defamation League" or "Volcanic Molehills #12 & #35". And if I
suddenly settle for a subject heading like "hey", they know instantly to
worry. BLACK UMBRELLA is a simple enough title, and the music inside can
be usefully compared to well-known bands (as I'll demonstrate), and the
lyrics are bleak and straightforward. And if I feel such spiritual kin
to songwriter Brent Oberlin this far, maybe I should pause fearfully to
wonder if I'm going to start getting in touch with _my_ inner Mark David
Chapman, too.
Brent, I am deducing, was having unpleasant girlfriend experiences
during the writing of BLACK UMBRELLA, my specific evidence being that
almost all of the 13 songs relate to this (with "My Famous Mistake",
about getting kicked out of the pubs for being too drunk and sleeping
next to a nativity scene, with a chorus of "Oooh ah oooh ah, what's left
to lose?", not breaking the spell either). Other songwriters, of course,
have had girl problems. Brent's "Earwig", however, is fairly
distinctive, in that it plays something a version of Radiohead's "Creep"
in which Johnny Greenwood's violent bass interjection is repeated over
and over till it takes over half the song, in which the calm acoustic
parts are played brittle and jittery, and in which the fact that the
singer is a creep and a weirdo is left to _us_ to deduce, using the
repetitions of ""Tell your Mom 'Hi' cuz I am home again to break what's
left like I just don't care" as evidence. "Edward Smith" has the chunky
beat of Everclear's "Father Of Mine", but the half-dozen extra chords
are a less notable difference than between an Everclear song with the
implied metamessage "you jerked me over, and I'm confused and hurt, so
I'll embarrass you nationwide", and a Thought Industry song with the
implied metamessage "you jerked me over, and I'm confused and hurt, and
maybe if you're lucky I won't peel your skin off layer by layer". "Her
Rusty Nail", a riff-rocker in 3/4 except the rightly obtrusive
3-beat-5-beat alternation of the chorus, salutes his girlfriend "Heil!".
"World" would be a midpoint between the calm baroqueness of XTC and
feedback walls of My Bloody Valentine were it not for the loudly sung
chorus "I hope you drink yourself in line. Love is vile and devours".
"December 10th", like the new accessible hit-single-band Metallica but
with piano etude instead of classical guitar, attempts some salvage but
without letting go: "Tell me yours and I'll remember mine, a crushing
hug for ruined girls with mushroom clouds in mind". And the
just-above-a-whisper "24 Hours Ago I Could Breathe", self-explanatory,
isn't threatening but does seem to imply that the racks of pop-psych
advisory books on coping have not come into existence to serve his
personal benefit.
"Tragic Juliet"--- which, except for the heavy cymbals + kickdrums and
the easily understood singing, is almost ready for R.E.M.'s CHRONIC
TOWN--- is a love song, but one for a phone and mail relationship with
someone he's never met, and it could desperately use an infusion of
TMBG's "Ana Ng" playfulness. Thought Industry fill UMBRELLA with
sharp metallic riffs, a still slightly-twisted sense of song structure, an
outstanding creativity with dynamics and with keyboard supplements,
Brent's expressive voice (he can even sing!), a good drummer (albeit no
replacement for charter drummer Dustin Donaldson), and enough residual weirdness to howl "Without you, I can't hug the stars, tilt my head back, and drive Cole's combine towards Pluto". To me, it adds up to a
genuinely excellent album. But I hear the words, I see the proudly-bored or
shamefully head-covered band photos, and I strongly wonder if suffering-for-art is overrated.
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