33 rebellions per minute
"Bedroom eyes lead to blurry vision"
1997
Veruca Salt, EIGHT ARMS TO HOLD YOU
I know. I shouldn't jump right into the Veruca Salt story with their second album, EIGHT ARMS TO HOLD YOU. Not only does narrative structure argue for starting with their debut, AMERICAN THIGHS ('94), there's also the fact that THIGHS sold a lot of copies and ARMS didn't. In my defense I can only argue that THIGHS was merely a good heavy album named after an AC/DC lyric. Whereas EIGHT ARMS, named for the provisional title of a Beatles movie, has become my favorite pure rock album of the 1990's, so it's far more fun for me to discuss. To summarize the debut quickly, though: THIGHS started the band's career with a demonstration of how naturally rock'n'roll enthusiasm can lead youngsters into making up music that, otherwise, corporate focus groups would've been forced to cross-breed into existence. Veruca Salt emerged at the peak of grunge with thick Black Sabbath basslines, tense soft/loud dynamics, vague but riot-grrl-friendly lyrics, and -- the Unique Selling Proposition -- strong female harmony vocals. Nina Gordon infused a Wilson Phillips ballad voice (graceful flawless pitch and discretely articulated notes) with Bikini Kill-style seething; Louise Post flipped between half-whispers and naive simulations of X-Ray Spex diatribe that completely failed to hide how adorably her voice still colored within the compositional lines; and both women, helpfully, were good-looking. Grim and lumbering enough for 120 Minutes and just alive enough to remember afterwards, they couldn't have missed, and for a while they didn't.
Naming their second album in honor of a band that also wrote tunes seemed a bracing challenge at the time, and for the first song-and-a-half it's far from clear why EIGHT ARMS would bother with such a standard. Of course, the Beatles wrote a couple of history's more vital moronic 1-riff swaggers ("Birthday", anyone?), and ARMS lead track "Straight" barrels along strikingly, its tightly compressed metal riff and gunshot drums punctuating a jealous vocal rant whose literal monotony seems more focused and dangerous with every precise spit-out note. The addition of second, third, and fourth vocal notes on the chorus is almost radical, but the simultaneous appearance of a cowbell part hints at pop, as does the 2:32 track length. "Volcano Girls" starts off just as note-averse, but starts racing up the scale in time for a propulsive, jumpy 6/4 chorus to race by on cymbals and more cowbells. By the end of the song, "ooooooooh" girl-group harmonies and an eager "Yowwww!" have readied "Don't Make Me Prove It" to sound as vigorous as the Ronettes singing the AC/DC songbook at near-Slayer tempo. By the fourth song, "Awesome", they do their racing in major key, with a shiny hair-metal guitar solo, and a brief gentle music-box bridge. "Goodbye humility!", they screech in joyous perfect pitch, and as odd as it seems to have heard THIGHS' awesomely grinding "All Hail Me" as cowardly or self-effacing, I suppose it could also be argued that "Volcano..." through "Awesome" were the first Veruca Salt songs that couldn't have helped sue the Cranberries for the rights to the album title EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING IT, SO WHY CAN'T WE?
"One Last Time" is slow and muscular, waltz-time power balladry for women who are pretty sure they don't have power and thus sing their romantic pleas with tight, constricted urgency. "With David Bowie", though, is rumored to have almost been titled "With Game Theory" (one of Nina's favorite bands), and while a love song to the music of Scott Miller would indeed have been commercially stupid, the melody is exactly the sort of giddy, fey, tumbling rush that made Scott songs special even before he founded Loud Family and learned to rock. "My heart skips around when I hear that sound/ I'm never alone cuz you're following me home" is a spot-on tribute to the miracle of recorded music, of mass-produced intimate philosophizings; and the handclaps and (again, yay!) cowbells help produce the same giddiness in me. "Benjamin" is grand power-ballad with hints of country, but the confident expertise of its performance shows nothing more than that Veruca Salt's real leanings were never as suspiciously true-to-the-moment as they seemed in 1994, and that's okay because I tend to doubt anyone's are. "Shutterbug" reminds us that their love of Black Sabbath is, after all, equally hard to distrust. Hey, the soaring Whitesnake solos and dual-vocal nonharmonies would probably have been necessary for Sabbath, too, if they'd ever written songs that confused lust with urgent love, need, and a willingness to "change".
"The Morning Sad" contains enough melodic and guitar-production echoes of Letters To Cleo's "Awake" to remind me that Veruca did have company in their attempted girl-metal pop overhaul. "Sound Of The Bell"'s prettified keyboard glimmerings help link late-Bangles verses to frantic fedback choruses that imply Juliana Hatfield dragging Monster Magnet in her wake. "Loneliness Is Worse", another power ballad, is an exploratory one: gracefully incorporating several small stylisic detours, and extending its chorus melody far past any time horizons a focus group would tolerate. "Stoneface" illustrates how much fun grunge could've been, if Soundgarden or Pearl Jam had rushed through their whining with the chaotic urgency of a band informed that the last one in was a rotten egg while everyone else got to be Throwing Muses. "Venus Man Trap" is a breathy, glittering love song steamrolled by atonal 6/4 bass stomps and the finest in schoolgirl giddiness.
It is "Earthcrosser", the finale, that should resolve any grumpy lingering doubts that perhaps Veruca Salt are more a great sonic gimmick than a great rock band. Using all elements of the whisper-to-scream template, it plays its central riff at every level from tune-up (the fingers creaking audibly along the strings like "Bullet The Blue Sky" through damaged speakers) through quiet drama up to crashing grandeur, enhanced by strings in the happy-overkill way of Metallica teaming with a symphony orchestra. The song itself is smart, juggling superficial celebration ("the ring in my ears from playing too loud/ I hear the ocean, I hear the crowd") with the fear that they shouldn't need that crowd's approval ("unattached, and that makes me feel like a failure"). "It's 2 a.m., and it's quiet again. Where's my lip gloss?", Louise sings, and the hint of desperation can't keep its head up as she maintains the abruptly howled "gloss" on the same note for two measures, three, four, five, as the band stomps everything in its slow, measured path. The point of riot grrls was never, I suspect, that they were any less vulnerable or weak than the rest of us; the point was that they saw no reason to let fear keep them from making the best goddamn show they could in the meantime. And if Veruca Salt were pseudo-alternative enough, by 1997, to admit that they _liked_ a good show, I can't see that as anything but a strength.
2000
Veruca Salt, RESOLVER
Nina Gordon and Louise Post did not make a record together in 2000. Louise got to keep the band name, bassist, and drummer; Nina got to keep producer Bob Rock (better noted for work with Bon Jovi and Metallica) but had to use her own name and her own choice of famous session musicians. Normally bands break up for all sorts of reasons, and it's not really your business why. You could very easily assume, from Nina's record (see below), that this breakup was just a case of artistic differences. Problem is, RESOLVER makes no sense without the gossip -- so, with apologies, here goes. What I know is that Louise and Nina were best friends, in the together-constantly share-everything way; and that the friendship ended abruptly and angrily when one of the girls was found to be unaware that "share everything" means "_except_ my boyfriend, dammit". I don't know, for a fact, which of them was discovered in bed with whose boyfriend. But if you plan to listen to the records, which seems like a splendid idea to me, then trust me on this: it was Nina who cuckolded the innocent Louise. If by chance this is not the case, fine: the facts are wrong, I'm right. Because my interpretation lets RESOLVER make sense.
I go into RESOLVER with two strong, conflicting prejudices: that Veruca Salt are one fuckinamazing rock band, and that few things are less needed in my life than listening to some stranger rant for 48 minutes about how horribly betrayed she's been and how much she hates her former best friend. EIGHT ARMS TO HOLD YOU was hardly a record filled with lyrical brilliance, but both writers captured, with fair clarity, the moods they felt like capturing, from confidence to heartache to seductiveness to insecurity to carefully phrased relationship demands. Louise Post here maintains this skill to portray moods from anger to fury to vituperation to basic pissed-off-ness, and it takes some effort to swallow this. But okay: her best friend and her boyfriend betrayed her, basically invalidating most of her positive emotions for the past year or four. I can dig it. I would probably be a little obsessed myself. Thus I see no reason not to shape my reactions to this album according to "does it rock?". And that, it so happens, is her band's strength.
The clear majority of the songs could, in isolation, have easily passed muster on the previous record. The production by Brian Liesegang of the industrial band Filter is maybe a notch less glossy than Bob Rock's, but the chugging, metallic-yet-buoyant guitar/bass sound is still, to me, easily identifiable. Nina Gordon's contributions to the band seem to have been (1) that her voice is the steadier of the two and (2) that she's the one with a deeper loyalty to quick, giddy pop tunes; neither difference is much noticeable in song-by-song doses. "Born Entertainer" is as blunt and tuneless a slashing as "Straight". "Best That You Can" goes from insinuating sing-song melodics and backwards guitars, to electric riffing that sounds as carefree as any jumprope chant -- albeit while asking "what would she do to fuck you?", and it's been a long time since I've heard "fuck" sound as rightly, appallingly vulgar as this. "Wet Suit" sounds like Aimee Mann, solo with guitar on severe sleep deprivation, until the grunge chorus sets in. "Officially Dead" gets by on guitar clangs and shouting. "Used To Know Her" starts to chafe my patience with soft-loud-pissed, but it's certainly well made, and I'd probably really enjoy the phase pedals and note-precise feral screaming on a good mixtape.
What's unexpected and very pleasing about this record, though, is that Louise seems to feel obliged to branch out, and does so with imagination. The apologetic "Imperfectly" suggests the Aimee Mann of elegant, sweetened Jon Brion production, but lacks either Aimee's or Louise's form of lyrical venom. "Disconnected", an instant favorite of mine, builds hypnotically on a taptaptaptaptaptap 6/8 snare rhythm, open-ended hints of jazz-funk bass, synthesized woodwind, sudden percussion overload, and a wavering litany of accusations that hits far harder for avoiding the theater of yells. "All Dressed Up"'s guitars glisten as if from a gentle rain, and shape the song far more than a frustrated bass-driven "you don't even care!" buildup that still sounds more resigned than anything. "Only You Know" chugs along on rhythm guitar and 8th-note drum thwacks and Louise's most attractive autoharmonized singing on the verses, which leaves "you're a hopeless liar and a hypocrite" sounding unnervingly seductive; it settles into pretty, blurring production effects and faraway piano, with no more catharsis than the rhythm guitar's volume-knob increase."Pretty Boys", despite its 3:07 length and its mild use of bowed strings and a nifty cascading keyboard effect, never stops sounding like an intro, perhaps to the Nirvana song Pink Floyd never tried to write. It's the 2nd-to-last song, though, so being an intro makes sense; "Hellraiser" steps up the pace with lithe guitar and a modest but effective snare patter before the expected macho album climax.
"Yeah Man" is the really remarkable song here, to me, though. Starting with whispers over bass that pulls off a Radiohead "Creep" machine-error effect, she sings to her ex-lover with what in better circumstances would have been rueful affection: "I know you in the dark/ by the ways your hands tear me apart/ I know you in the day/ by the way you're here but far away". The bouncy chorus points out that she could keep him by chaining him, but instead praises him, before unraveling into the frightened chant "you won't let me down". The second version of this launches, from what should have been the final syllable, into a triply raucous chorus of "down, down, down, baby/ take me high and hazy/ leave me limp and lazy/ you can't save me, you can't save me", and is one of the most purely unhinged-sounding moments I've heard in pre-recorded music. Sure, it's probably pieced together from the 8th, 14th, and 19th takes; sure, the fingernail-on-blackboard shards of feedback in the last verse were tailored. I know. But the conviction that a boy can't save her is probably patched together from her 729th, 2954th, and 8567th mental re-ponderings, and that doesn't make _it_ any more solid in her head, either.
RESOLVER is, to me, an exhilirating record from how it sounds, and I started out by rationalizing its lyrics away. But evolution gives us feelings for reasons that have nothing to do with making us feel good, and so Louise Post is hardly the first otherwise sensible person to get trapped in negative energy. I've never experienced her specific negative feelings, and I hope never to, but I've noticed little thrills of shared general emotion in her songs, sometimes. The desire to have someone else take your problems away isn't healthy when you're in your 20's, but that same desire was absolutely necessary before then; it lingers. RESOLVER won't take your problems away, or mine. But there's value in having problems converted into sharp tunes and riffs and singing. Anger is an energy.
2000
Nina Gordon, TONIGHT AND THE REST OF MY LIFE
Luckily, anger is not the only energy, and there is much in Nina's album, too, to make me guess (perhaps wrongly) that she's the one who got to treat the other's boyfriend as a shiny new discovery. Five years after helping Louise and company with a between-albums EP called BLOW IT OUT YOUR ASS, Nina Gordon took producer Bob Rock and made a 13-song album so edgeless and romanticized, even when the lyrics turn disappointed, that his "Rock" surname is about 76.9% a bizarre joke. If I seize any obvious comparison for most of these songs besides Scarlet's NAKED ('95), I find myself venturing into the realm of bands I don't tend to think of myself as liking. Okay, I could read the ringing country-rock guitar and open-hearted melody of "Now I Can Die" as Michael Penn-ish, and the politely thundering drums as part of where where Tom Petty and Bon Jovi intersect, but Nina's septuple-tracked vocals are a more shameless tradition altogether. "2003" has the persistent grandiose sway of Natalie Imbruglia and a hint of the clunkily-assembled backing vox of a Spice Girls ballad. "Tonight And The Rest Of My Life" has prom-theme synth-pad half notes and a 4-chord sequence that hasn't recovered a lick of freshness since Green Day, the Offspring, and Better Than Ezra put "When I Come Around", "Self-Esteem", and "Good" (same damn chords) at the top of the college-rock charts for six months running. Then you'll have to skip around a little if you're trying to sneer at Nina's conversion, but here, I'll help: "Horses In The City" is to country music what the Corrs are to Celtic jigs. "Fade To Black" uses a ludicrously obvious synthetic strings hook, the sort that made the record store clerk stare in disappointed horror at me the day I bought a copy of Heart's DESIRE WALKS ON. "Hate Your Way" assembles soft-rock mush into 90-decibel soft-rock mush with the precision (and lack of a separate chorus melody) of Winger. And she ends the record with a mournful piano/strings cover of the decades-old hit "the End Of The World", in which disappointment in a recent boyfriend is rendered tantamount to apocalypse, and it's not intended as funny. (I want to see Slayer tackle this song topic. _Their_ narrator would feel the apocalypse part at least deeply enough to convince all the local news teams.)
The easy start to rationalizing why I love this album is: Nina's voice. As graceful and flowing as Imbruglia, swooping through the large melodic range of latter-day Scott Miller, and still with strong traces of the girlishness of Nerissa Nields, she has a voice I think I could happily listen to in really bad contexts.
I do not, however, consider TONIGHT AND THE REST OF THE LIFE a bad context. I've already credited both Salt girls with being expressive lyricists, and little of the record's mood seems to warrant vicious power chords. "He takes me everywhere he goes, and he goes everywhere/ He likes to try on all my clothes, but not my underwear", the album opens, and it's the sort of starry-eyed amusement that blends easily into a chorus of "Now I know the secret of the world: I am the girl, and he is the guy/ I never dared to be simple and wise/ he opened up my eyes/ I understand everything and now I can die". Dude, most of my friends are girls; I haven't felt this myself, but I've watched my friends go through times when they've used paragraphs trying to encapsulate this feeling. "2003" pledges, if not eternal devotion, at least three more years of it. "Tonight...", though signaling the record's mood twist downwards, asks for help in making a moment of happy semi-consciousness last forever. "Hold On To Me" insists "I still believe in a thing called forever". Clever lyrics like "I wish I was older, I could hold my liquor/ then I'd blow your cover instead of my own" slot in with paranoia about "they don't even miss me" and the plain assertion "I still love you". It is music for the togetherness impulse. And I realize something.
A key to quite a lot of my musical tastes, I think, is that I usually listen alone. To some degree, of course, this is true by definition. Listening, as opposed to hearing, _is_ a private act, the assignment of private values and private memory encoding schemes to public sounds. If in 2014 I have a wife, six kids, two mistresses, and a tri-lingual Schnauzer teaching me advanced chess tactics in exchange for room and board (applications welcome at e-address below), I will still usually listen alone. But it's also true that i tend to hear music alone, and that the social aspect of my listening comes from sharing those experiences with other people who are comfortable hearing music by themselves. If last night I took a long walk and listened to a mixtape whose first four songs were Attrition's "Monkey In A Bin", Cat Rapes Dog's "An Ass For A Brain", a Bunchofuckingoofs' "Coke: The Real Thing For Real Assholes", and Bodycount's "Copkiller" -- which I did -- this was, to be sure, a pro-social activity, friendship in action, me recalling my fondness for the Ontario friend who made the tape shortly before dropping by my Boston house for five days. That said, I think music _does_ impose limits on the emotions one can feel while hearing it. Cat Rapes Dog make fine music, say, for remembering my friend the erroneous way I'd vaguely pictured her from her sentence-fragmented, lower-case, goofy, "Rock on!"-punctuated e-mails: fat, hyper, an anarcho-cheerleader with short blonde bangs. For that matter, Veruca Salt music fits my old image of her more closely. But Nina Gordon was, by coincidence, the actual music I was listening to at the moment when I first saw my friend in person, checked around to make sure there weren't somehow _two_ young women in Disc Diggers, watched her recognize my smile, and avoided making a low impressed whistle only because I don't know how to whistle. (I also don't know how to wiggle my ears. Pisses me off.) And as worried as I was to later expose my friend to the Nina Gordon side of my tastes, there are moods in the human repertoire that her music does seem to fit, and TONIGHT seems to be a record Nina made knowing this.
Don't get me wrong. I applaud any couple who can make out to All's excellent new pogo-pop record PROBLEMATIC, pause to giggle at the Dead Crimsonoid spasms of "She Broke My Dick", and pick up where they left off when the normal rigid chords of "Better Than That" resume. I congratulate any girl who -- though rationally insisting that nothing happening here should alter the course of a fine distance friendship -- nonetheless decides to order her own copy of the Science Group's avant-joyride MERE COINCIDENCE as a long-term souvenir. But I have to guess, with some reluctance, that attempting to kiss someone in 17/16 time (but 3/4 on every fourth measure) would be interpreted by the kiss's object as showing wrongly divided attention. I think the baffling time signatures of Solex make great dance music, but that's my privilege in not having anyone's shoes to avoid stomping on in a miscommunicated instant. (I've had girlfriends. They don't dance.)
Human quirkiness is a lovely thing, but to the degree that it's yet another evolutionary tool for finding love, it tends to drop out the better it works. Extremely intelligent people are capable of sitting nose-to-nose, staring deeply into each other's eyes, postponing sensible action by saying "I haven't finished looking at you yet", even if the lookee is quite sure he never won Most Look-At-Able in high school. And sometimes even a very creative man will think that "You know, you really do have beautiful eyes" is new and true and worth a mention, and it _will be_ worth a mention. More worth a mention, in fact, than the equally new and true revelation "Your eyes kind of remind me of the CBS logo", and that despite her probably never having heard that one before.
Because sometimes what counts is being able to follow the same script with as little distraction as possible. I don't know if evolution or neurology made I-IV-V-I chord patterns, or the precise Hertz intervals of the notes of Nina Gordon's "Hold On To Me", comforting and easy. Probably not, they didn't have to, we have decades to instill that ease and comfort ourselves. But the preference for moving in twos and fours, left-right, instead of sevens and thirteens? Natural, programmed, and its very commonness can make it pleasurable to run. Legato instruments, smooth transitions, layers of sound supporting each note: I may have no use for Miles Davis, no understanding of his entire idiom, but even I can feel why his music is used for more seductions than John Zorn's. Nina's unhappiness in "but this is my goodbye kiss/ and now I'm only singing for my health" doesn't sound, musically, like Louise's unhappiness in "what did she do to fuck you?", because it couldn't. Its assumptions, about the worth of sharing an emotional language with other people, are exactly the opposite.
With all that said, I'm not sure I could spend even five days with even an unexpectedly thoughtful and pretty young woman without at least 23.1% of our common language devoted to private, incomprehensible mockery ("Iguanas _don't_ look like guns!", he mutters determinedly, forgetting that you don't know to reply "Pardon?" and cackle); and I'm not sure TONIGHT would make my year-end Best Of without three churning, hyperactive EIGHT ARMS TO HOLD YOU impulses. "Badway", fading in with choppy ominousness like Big Country being remixed by the Cars, turns jubilantly into "Volcano Girls" part two. "New Year's Eve" is Nina doing a darker, more elusive impression of a Scott Miller melody, the thick processed guitars putting it near the Loud Family's TAPE OF ONLY LINDA. "Number One Camera", meanwhile, is what Game Theory's TWO STEPS FROM THE MIDDLE AGES almost was had the guitars been kickier: a pure melodic rush, gleaming like a favorite toy being freshly returned to its user. It's got friendship reminiscences about "playing records and posing in the nude" and the flippant goodbye "I should prob'ly sort of miss you".
She should, and she does, and most of the record is a split testament to how overwhelming it can be to act like generic(tm)-brand People In Love, and why the rest of us might want to pick our targets more carefully. Luckily, if Nina's version is so seductively lovely that we miss the warning half of the message, we can put on RESOLVER to remind us.
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