33 rebellions per minute
"Every wide angled snapshot, every story needs telling"
1999
Tamara Williamson, UNCONSCIOUS PILOT
As overoptimistic as it might seem, I always buy a new album in the hopes that it will -- in some dimension or other, of the thousands possible -- be a new and remarkable extreme in my collection, something that in one quick phrase justifies my listening to it instead of dragging out one of the hundreds of vinyl LP's that, reunited with this summer as I returned to my Iowa home, I've had sadly little time for (a few enthusiastic dub-tapings of Swamp Thing's naively plaintive "Mileage Song", 10cc's sparkling commuters' anthem "From Rochedale To Ocho Rios", and Rendered Useless's sweetly deranged "Yup Yeah" aside). UNCONSCIOUS PILOT achieves this instantly: it is the quietest album I've ever fully adored.
Quietist Worthwhile Album is a distinction that I've passed on repeatedly in the last year, as my respect for the purposefully unspectacular has deepened. Perversely, the motivating force has been my fandom of the Rheostatics, whose best moments include more than a few chunky-yet-soaring deliveries of feedbacky guitar chords (the opening chords of "Who", the whooped chorus of "Fan Letter To Michael Jackson", the Original New Wave Rock of "Me and Stupid"…). But their producer produced WITH LOVE AND SQUALOR for Mia Sheard (then married her), and the Rheos' Martin Tielli guested on guitar, so I had to try Sheard's album, which shifted the Rheos' abrupt soft/loud dynamic transitions far to the soft side of the ratio. Then Veda Hille cited the Rheostatics as one of her four central influences, and her album SPINE managed, sparsely arranged and at low volume, to wield an emotional intensity equal (albeit separate) to anything the Dead Kennedys ever managed. Tamara Williamson used to be Tielli's girlfriend, plus she ran a band called Mrs. Torrance (reference to Stephen King, who's my favorite novelist, for reasons I'll defend some other time), so one good review of her second solo album was enough to send me after it. Or actually I sent my Canadian friend Jer after it -- he graciously nagged an HMV music store into a special order for me -- so I can't include any purchase instructions for non-Canadians except "e-mail me, and I'll see what I can figure out".
PILOT may also serve the distinction of being the only guitar-centered album never to author a single chord. On "Jeanie" and "Unconscious Pilot" she picks out circular melodies, string by string, while Doug Tielli (Martin's brother, co-leader of People From Earth) plucks single cello notes and watches them reverberate. "First Snow" adds the soft accompaniment of xylophone, and Tamara harmonizes with herself in delayed, tape-distended syllables. "That's Why I Kicked Her Out" not only has string-at-a-time guitar, but uses one muffled bass note (the same one) every two measures as its "rhythm section"; her softly echoing "ba ba ba" backup vocals have enough resignation to deflate three 1910 Fruitgum Company harmonies using the same non-words. The cheerful "Famous Five"s bass, again acoustic, is fast, agile, and jazzy, aided by muted, shuffling drums, trombone, and 8th-note cello; it is, with "…Pilot", one of only two drum appearances on the record, and "…Pilot"s follow a quick 2/8 psssss-Tok! pattern in blasé irrelevance to the song's 3/8 time signature. "It's Time", the densest song, sets two acoustic guitar lines in counterpoint while Tamara's lyrics are set in vocal rounds with herself, as if she was singing over a canyon and the echo was miked. "Sundays" is pretty guitar, a bit of violin, and a looped sound that may be the part of the violin note where the bow is being lifted from the strings.
Loops: PILOT is also experimental around the edges, like Tall Dwarfs without the goofiness. "Everest", percussive and taut already in its vocals, is built on a clanging like an ironsmith hammering a bicycle bell; a horse's clip-clop; and an ambiguous rising metallic-friction noise. "West Coast"'s base vocal loop goes "uh [chk] uh, uh uh" in African tongue-click fashion. "Peace", the album's final and perhaps most fascinating song, completely fails to integrate its sketchy guitar-vocal songness with a percussion buildup suggesting a heartbeat that can't decide if it's activating a hummingbird or a person. Tamara's voice is also part of the pretty vs experimentalist tension. It's clear and accurate enough for hymns, let alone the lilting folk melodies she often favors; but as near-whispered as Lisa Germano, and with the perpetual hint of strain you'd get by writing melodies out of your natural pitch range.
The songs, like the sounds, are intimate, intense, but non-threatening. The line between "perception" and "self-centered whining", in introspective songs, is necessarily slippery, but for me she seems consistently on the right side of the divide. "Jeannie"'s tale of passivity is both third-person and first, with both Jeannie ("a lovely girl") and Tamara ("I don't care if I'm ugly") feeling a need to escape from the subtle emotional blackmail of a world where "I was always loved when I smiled". "…Pilot" and "West Coast", admiring songs to friends, put the only genuinely negative characterizations of the album on her own shoulders: again charges of passivity, a flaw which comes with its own virtue of easiness-to-please: "You both look outward, you both investigate/ I'll look in the mirror and shove it in my suitcase/ I like the waves, crashing in our eyes" (and she probably does feel basically satisfied with the waves, so take that). "Famous Five" is the love song, about the freshness of being provoked ("it doesn't take car to drive me up a wall/ but boy, when you drive me, sometimes I feel comfortable"), so "First Snow", the romantic breakup song, needs no harder complaints than the unavoidable loss of that novelty: "from the dusty summer breeze, I stare you out/ until your black eyes disappear in fur lining/…/because there really isn't much we haven't done, and talking isn't always so much fun". "Sundays" and "That's…" explore the connections between girl friendships and romances, the former with friendship as antidote in tough times, the latter hurt by friendship's limits. "She told me he was useless/ she told me he was mean/ she told me I was lovely/ then she'd go and have sex with him". If not every child is raised by parents who love each other, Tamara's explanation is clearer than a thousand you-betrayed-me songs.
So far, all the best quiet albums in my collection are written and sung by women (see also Kristen Hersh, Jennifer Kimball, Sarah Slean, Emily Bezar... I should also salute Tori Amos, Dar Williams, and Liz Phair, though they all rock righteously when needed). I think maybe it's because songs so quiet are ideally personal -- antipollution rampages, say, ought to get the blood flowing more -- and women, so far, seem better at being thoughtful in that context. I know that Red House Painters, Low, Hayden, Sebadoh, and American Music Club, male-led bands, are proudly decibel-challenged; from what I've heard of their work, including what I've liked, they're also defeatist and depressing. Perhaps, I dunno, attempts to separate masculinity from machismo are still challenged enough, made damaging enough, that sensitive-male and hypersensitive-male become hard to disentangle. Or perhaps it's coincidence, or bad statistical sampling on my part. I hope to see counter trends in the future, or (better) in bits of the past I haven't discovered yet, or better still (who knows?) in some of my old vinyl that I've been ignoring all month. But for now, at least, Mr. Tielli's women friends and their spiritual compatriots are keeping me pleased and provoked.
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