33 rebellions per minute
"Let a smile be your fallout shelter"
1997
Tim Walters et al, LATEST FITS
I have this sneaking suspicion that my reviews here are not going to
send legions of young bands rushing to their mailboxes, eager to send me
their latest product for a dose of my influential praise. On the other
hand, maybe if I keep joining random polite arguments over whether Bill
Bruford and Carl Palmer were good drummers, I'll keep stumbling into
conversations with friendly unsigned musicians who just want me to hear
their demos. That's how I have these 74 minutes of various projects led
by Tim (of the improvisational texture-experiment electronic group
Circular Firing Squad), and it's more than brilliant enough to make me
try this tactic again.
Tim's 2 favorite albums of all time are by June
Tabor (a lovely singer of English folk) and by Henry Cow (founders of
the Rock In Opposition movement, i.e., the weird bastards throwing a
solid classical education out the window movement), and he has somehow
created music from which you could deduce both connections with equal
ease. He's also fond of They Might Be Giants, and my favorite song here,
"Calvinist Headgear Expressway", shows that infuence as deeply as a
folk/classical one. Most of the disc is divided into 4 temporary band
projects of Tim's--- I like Tango Uniform's tracks best, but when Kala
Din leads straight from the crazed, Tim-vocalized, ring-modulator-abusing "Sperm Bank Stomp" to a
gorgeous rendition of the traditional "Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah"
(sung by Nanci Lualhati, the best of a superb rotating cast of
lovely-voiced females), it's hard to think what larger difference might
apply between one band and the next. Until Slaw's 18 fast tracks,
designed to be part of series of 99 tracks each individually matching
one square of a Chutes & Ladders board, where Tim's electronic
weird-shit background (as well as that of partner Heather Perkins) comes
straight to the foreground, never letting up from the pace of "God Told
Me To Eat Your Furniture" except when doing original drama, like the
recreation of Orginial Sin (fatal last words: "You like that snake
better than me, don't you?"), which I suppose is either a big chute or a
big ladder unless Tim has cleverly invented a square for the
strategy-prone which sends you straight to the middle of an Axis &
Allies game.
In shifting mixes, this disc is pretty, clever,
Christmas-obsessed ("The Nine Warning Signs Of X-Mas", "Sangre de
Santa", a scout-camp-level rewrite of "Jingle Bells"), and some other
compliment of your choice. It is easily worth paying for if Tim,
walters@digidesign.com, happens to want that from you. I got my money's
worth long since.
1999
Pledge Drive, I GAVE AT THE OFFICE
Having gone through five band structures quickly enough to combine on one single-CD demo, Tim formed Pledge Drive as his vehicle for learning to write pop songs. It would have been fair for us outsiders to have approached this notion with some skepticism. Tim's first recorded venture, after all, was as one-fourth of Circular Firing Squad, an improvisatory electronics combo devoted, very simply, to making a bunch of fairly quiet weird noise for fifty minutes at a time. My untutored impression is that they were good at it, imaginative and with some on-the-fly grasp of structure; so good, perhaps, that someday I may succeed in listening to their CD, OXIDE ('97), in its entirety, rather than being hit by terminal antsiness within a quarter-hour. Although it will have to wait until I live on my own again this January, so I don't scare the cats, and so I don't scare my Mom. I'm quite serious, mind you, about tentatively admiring OXIDE; it is simply that with OXIDE as a comparison, virtually anything else is a pop song, including anything by Megadeth, including the cheerier segments of Harry Partch's microtonal operas, and certainly including any of the songs of Tim's LATEST FITS, even the brief and compact machinery noises of Slaw.
Anyway, the good news is that Tim wasn't kidding, himself or us. "King Of Burgers" and "Too Much Perspective", sung with gruff, wheedling enthusiasm by Tim, sound like They Might Be Giants with slightly odder melodies and a slashing, but simple, guitar attack. The volume-knob games and abrupt finish to "...Burgers" are fun, as is the unaccompanied opening (interrupted by lurching power chords) to "...Perspective": a trick well-learned from the Loud Family's "Top-Dollar Survivalist Hardware", but also making the music a coincidentally good blunt-force approximation of Ani DiFranco's "Gravel". The tone of these two is satirical, about fast food ("You watch your churls and thralls increase
your yields/ Your vassals bring you tribute from exotic lands/ We eat it with our hands"), and somehow about Elvis "the sixth constipated man in the Bible" Presley, with the immortal rhyme "Everyone wants a kiss from Dracula/ everyone wants a cure for scrofula", as well as "The flock never stops/ the stock never flops/ cuz the vox always pops" (I'll let you guess the next three phrases, why should he do all the work?).
Tim is not, at root, a satirist, though, being too sincere to pull that off as a full-time job; and one of the central passions he's sincere about is folk music, meaning the kind that goes back several hundred years, propogated through dozens of versions of sheet music. Many of the eight original songs on I GAVE AT THE OFFICE reflect this, as, of course, do all five of the "trad. arr. Pledge Drive" songs. Walters original "Down Among The Dead Men", like FITS's "Calvinist Headgear Expressway", merges folk song with TMBG, but this time using peppy staccato trumpet bleats, soft winding horn melodies, recorder, and a confident major-key melody. The lyrics are a drinking song with arguments about health that could've been penned centuries ago: "Here's a health to the king and a lasting peace/ To faction an end, to wealth increase/ So come, let's drink it while we have breath/ For there's no drinking after death/ And he that will this health deny/ Down among the dead men let him lie". It could also have been written by Smash Mouth, of course, an archaism or three aside, but as long as scientific evidence supports both "drinking makes life shorter" and "happiness makes life longer", there's no reason the argument needs to disappear. Tim also sings the quietly resigned "Bags", traditional in a more vaudeville sense, short and crammed with wordplay enough for TMBG's ramshackle 1986 debut.
"Swallow", a mournful dulcimer/trumpet piece about death and memory and probably the only use ever of the metaphor "the city's steel and concrete votive candles", is sung instead by Rebecca Marculescu, who has a strong, traditionally lovely voice. She also sings "Nuptials", unplugged in the MTV sense, meaning all the instruments are electric but there's no distortion pedals so they all sound unreasonably pretty. Bits of "Nuptials" seem quasi-Eastern, which is as usual rock-crit speak for "I don't know what the hell I'm talking about"; the cryptic but not-entirely-respectful verse lyrics ("We sang along with the insect choir") are clarified by the reverential and not-entirely-uncelebratory chorus: "What we have joined let no one put asunder/ a circle is stronger than a square/ grasp a hand to keep from going under". The ringing guitar tones are a close match to those in
"Willie McGee McGraw", a dignified and processional heavy-metal arrangement of a traditional folk song, where Tim sings with his own measure of subtlety - and if you demand some unity in your albums, those two songs are the necessary link keeping Tim's and Rebecca's halves together. I say it works (although I still wish Tim and Rebecca had sung "…Perspective" in unison - if he can fake elegance, surely she could play Exene Cervenka to one raggedy song of his John Doe?). You can also pair "Down…" with the Rebecca-sung version of Sydney Carter's "Julius Of Norwich", showcasing sprightly recorder and their self-described "dulcimer-driven beat combo" style.
Otherwise, "Shenandoah" is almost a capella, Rebecca and the group's vocals doing gorgeous call & response. "My Lagan Love" is a simple duet between Rebecca and Loud Family vocalist Scott Miller. "My Cathedral Home" is folk-rock; "Sangre De Santa" is silly; and "Schubert & Pachelbel" is slightly less useful in teaching about classical music than "Roll Over Beethoven", but does feature four verses in the pattern of
I know a poodle breeder name of Rupert
Who runs his Chevy van on muscatel
Take me to your lieder, Mr. Schubert
Shoot me with your canon, Pachelbel
You can order your copy of the CD from pledgedrive@feastofweeds.com for $13.00. But if you don't, finish "Schubert and Pachelbel" for yourself. You'll thank me for it later.
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