2009: Bear In Heaven - Beast Rest Forth Mouth: Remixed
Although I recognize the necessity of re-releasing previously self-released records when artists get signed or get big, as someone who’s job it is to give a crap about when exactly an album came out, it can be a little annoying to deal with these discrepancies. Bear In Heaven’s move to re-release their breakthrough record Beast Rest Forth Mouth (like the cardinal directions “East West North South,” geddit?) a little under a year after its original road to acclaim, is an understandable one; the Hometapes label can rake in more cash while the Brooklyn-via-Georgia-and-Alabama band gets to up the quality of the LP they’re selling at merch tables and record stores across the world.
But what makes BRFM’s reissue a commodity in and of itself is that it comes packaged with Beast Rest Forth Mouth: Remixed, 10 reimaginings from Twin Shadow, High Places, Deru, Justin K. Broadrick, The Field, BRAHMS, and others. These tracks push what was already fairly dance-driven fare well into house territory as remixes are wont to do. Although the original BRFM was synthy and anthemic, it remained more solidly in the realm of new wave and psych pop – sometimes even going tribal. Unsurprisingly, then, the album’s strongest tracks succeed equally on Remixed. Twin Shadow’s take on nostalgic single “Lovesick Teenagers” utilizes orphaned vocal samples and dissonant layering to great effect. Likewise, Pink Skulls’ “Wholehearted Mess” remix pulls directly from the strength of the original composition, with its manic drumming and warped echoing.
Conversely, there’s the BRAHMS version of “Fake Out” which bubbles, bouncing with energy even though it’s a lot thinner than the original’s overpowering wall of synths. And the Studio remix of “You Do You” subverts all lyrical emphasis and turns the very idea of the song on its end, an exercise reminiscent of Yeasayer’s Odd Blood.
Admittedly, I don’t have a lot of personal use for ten remixes back-to-back outside the context of a sweaty club or dance party in my living room. But the fact that this double album will increase the profile of the original Beast Rest Forth Mouth – one of my favorite records of 2009 – is something I can get behind. It’s been fascinating to watch the band’s trajectory from down south art school grads, videographers, and graphic designers to Brooklyn residents plugged into the scene – suddenly racking in the type of publicity that’s allowed them to tour repeatedly behind acts like Crystal Castles. Bear In Heaven deserves any dance party they can get.
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1991-2003: Melancholia Top 5
What’s the most depressing song in the world? Surely it’s subjective, for as Tolstoy said, happy families are happy only in one kind of way, but unhappy families are each unhappy in their own unique way. In the most extreme interpretation of that logic, unhappy songs should be uniquely unhappy too, and we should be dancing around to the songs that others weep to. However, in practice, certain tunes seem to exact a universal ‘misery price’ from the most objective listener.
The other day I was considering roundly cursing Tori Amos on a certain social networking site that shall remain unnamed. I had just revisited some old Tori songs in a fit of nostalgia for the teenage years, when I realized I was sincerely annoyed and depressed after listening to them. It wasn’t just that they brought back a wave of unfettered feeling, but rather that they had consistently acted as an irritant ever since I’d known them; upon listening, the life narrative would take a break from its plodding acceptance of the human lot, sniff the air, and wail that it wanted to be re-branded as a self-help title: ‘How being a woman ruined my life and other stories’ (or something just as self-pitying and nonsensical).
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1. Swans - “Failure”
Now, as far as I’m concerned, straightforwardly sad music is exempt from the charge of being depressing. It’s too romantic. The most depressing song on this list, Swans’ “Failure” (1991), is completely devoid of any attempt to prettify the human condition; in fact, it’s borderline hilarious how horrible humanity looks through its dirge-like lens. I can’t fully explain why, but the rock-bottom sentiment of the lyric “When I get my hands on some money/ I’ll kiss its green skin/ And I’ll ask its dirty face ‘Where the hell have you been’” delivered in the metallic grunge drone of Michael Gira is so nhilistic, so self-consciously worldly, that I can’t help but discern a note of absurdity in it. The lyric about the “mechanical moan of the dying man” is more affecting, but likewise, after listening, you shake your head, perhaps utter the name of Christ, and then you either jump off a bridge or you take a moment to piss yourself laughing.
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2. Arab Strap - “Fucking Little Bastards”
Number two, Arap Strap’s “Fucking Little Bastards” (2003), is a charming ditty about the effect of female gossip on the male psyche. The line: “They’ve seen me in the shower with shit down my legs” never fails to make me feel extremely uncomfortable, though lately I’ve learned to treasure it as a freakishly ugly artifact of melancholia (the bric-à-brac of the depressive state, if you will). If anyone ever asks me why Arab Strap deserve the journo-invented epithet ‘Scottish miserabalists’ (which rarely happens by the way), I point them in the direction of this song.
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3. PJ Harvey - “To Talk To You”
PJ Harvey’s White Chalk (2007) is, without a doubt, one of the most depressing albums ever made. Although it was a breakthrough album for Harvey — paving the way for a new sound — it is the musical equivalent of an infestation of poltergeists. It is not a gritty prospect like the above; it is a creepy one. Take, for instance, the song “Oh Grandmother.” The singing is dire, and the piano is diabolical, making obscure and meaningless gestures at a safe distance from the congregation of droning sounds that accompany it. The lyrics are weak petitions to the corpse of an old woman: “If I lay on the earth/ Would you hear me.” It is not a bad song; it is an extremely effective one, a feat of musical passive aggression in fact, if such a thing were desirable.
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4. Slint - “Don, Aman”
With rumors still circulating that band members spent time in mental institutions, Slint make it their business to terrorize young people starting out on the ‘way of post rock.’ Indeed, before being admitted to the inner circle of this po-faced rock ‘n’ roll religion, the initiate must spend one night in the haunted house that is Slint’s Spiderland (1991), listening to such torch songs as “Good Morning Captain” and “Don Aman.” The latter is the more psychologically strained of the two, unfolding through the not-so-splendid isolation of a youngfella whose twisted perspective makes his friends appear to have eyes “like the heads of nails.” Cue emergency parent teacher meeting to discuss the worrying behavior of the creative, but quite obviously troubled author of the following words: “Don woke up/ And looked at the night before/ He knew what he had to do/ He was responsible/ In the mirror/ He saw his friend.”
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5. The Book of Knots - “Traineater”
The Book of Knots is a supergroup oddly comprising individuals no one has heard of: Matthias Bossi, Joel Hamilton, Tony Maimone, and Carla Kihlstedt, who in 2003 co-embarked upon a musical project to explore aspects of decay in smalltown America. “Traineater” is the title track of the album that’s a tribute to America’s rust belt. The depressing thing about this academic tribute is that the quartet of extremely accomplished musicians responsible for it end up playing the roles of a chorus of mourners who announce that all the characters in a tragedy are dead. It’s not clear whether the intention was to elegize or lament dead industrial towns, but either way, the sense that something lifeless is being commemorated in an atmosphere of museum-like hush is pretty depressing.
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There are many ways then that music can bring a body down. Different ways, as Tolstoy suggested, but all with equally unhappy effects. And therein lies the flaw in the extreme interpretation of Tolstoy’s logic, which to be honest, was exploited for the purposes of this writing without regard for the consequences. It demands an acceptance that music is a completely subjective, not a shared experience, despite evidence suggesting that only in a universe quite unlike our own, where there is no common appreciation of the pleasant or unpleasant qualities of music, could that purely subjective experience exist. We can usually, at the very least, appreciate the quality of moods in music, even if we cannot agree on what we like. That is why a list appealing to the lowest common denominator — mood (and the lowest common mood in fact) — is the best excuse to assemble a bunch of stuff that just plain appeals to you. Nevertheless, the universal health warning still stands: these songs should be approached with caution and consumed only after consulting your parents.
1993, 2003: Charizma & Peanut Butter Wolf - Big Shots
It may seem startling that the most intriguing aspect about Big Shots, Charizma & Peanut Butter Wolf’s apple juice-themed debut, is its history. Initially recorded in the early 90s under the Disney-owned Hollywood BASICS label, Big Shots sat for months without experiencing the slightest marketing development. Charizma & Peanut Butter Wolf soon grew irritated with Hollywood’s lack of action, leaving the label shortly before its collapse. Then, just as the duo began to pick up steam once again, Big Shots was further delayed by Charizma’s murder in late 1993. It was only 10 years later — when Peanut Butter Wolf established Stones Throw Records — that the album finally found a platform.
How then, should Big Shots be interpreted? Being that its release was 10 years delayed, the record could be experienced either as an oddball re-release or a bona fide debut album. Strictly speaking, it isn’t a re-release — but to make equal company out of Big Shots and the remainder of 2003’s hip-hop productions feels unbecoming. The thing plays like a dusty 90s hip-hop LP for sure, but the release date listed on its wikipedia page reads 2003 regardless.
It is with these recorded gems that our DeLorean section thrives. One thing that’s often overlooked in the fast-paced abyss of new-music music-writing is the influence of temporal context in the interpretation of a piece of art; which makes sense, as it’s an easy assumption that a contemporary piece of art should only be evaluated in terms of the, well, contemporary environment. The only drawback in harboring this assumption is things tend to become complicated when unusual circumstances arise, such as those that surround the release of Big Shots.
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To those who remain unaware of their history, Charizma & Peanut Butter Wolf sound like nothing more than a classic hip-hop revival act. Either that or the duo is hopelessly stuck in the past. Think about it — it’s nearly impossible to listen through Big Shots without having engaged a certain amount of nostalgia for hip-hop’s golden era. Peanut Butter Wolf’s lo-fi sampling (which wasn’t so lo-fi for 1993) and aged drum machine (once again, not so aged at the time) are chronologically watermarked by the time they were laid to tape, so there’s no getting around the fact that Big Shots sounds like it was written in 1993. All the uninformed audience knows is that the record came out in 2003, and that Charizma & Peanut Butter Wolf’s music couldn’t be more reflective of the early 90s.
The tragic bit is, with either scenario — Charizma & Peanut Butter Wolf being either revivalists or hopeless — the duo seems to suffer a loss in artistic credibility. Revivalists are scarcely recognized as closet geniuses, and the relentlessly nostalgic experience a comparable fate. But with Charizma & Peanut Butter Wolf, the act is too spotless. Assuming that this uninformed audience does exist, and that they really do reach one of these two conclusions, then Charizma & Peanut Butter Wolf should appear frighteningly on top of their game. As a revivalist record, Big Shots is too perfect an encapsulation of 1993. Every revival record works inside certain modern blemishes to give away the façade, but such is not the case with Big Shots. Likewise, if Charizma & Peanut Butter Wolf really do become interpreted as stuck-in-the-past types, then the listener would have to reconcile their debut’s overarching excellence with its seemingly oblivious authorship.
No matter how you attack it, Big Shots is a difficult record to classify. Its release may have been embedded in misfortune, but its consequence is nothing short of fascinating.
1998: Soul Coughing - El Oso
I’ve been putting off writing this one. There’s just something unruly about the final Soul Coughing album, something rough-edged and unmanageable. Though it has some concise pop gems — “Circles” is one of most radio-friendly songs of the 90s — much of the record is rambling and relentlessly dark.
Fittingly, “Rolling” opens the album with a minor key drive. “I’m rolling,” lead singer M. Doughty repeats, making the phrase as much a warning as a declaration. “Misinformed” is next, followed by “Circles”: already the album is an odd mix of styles and tempos, even for the famously mix-happy Soul Coughing. This isn’t the coffeehouse jazz of “Chicago, Is Not Chicago,” or the pop sound collage of “Soundtrack to Mary,” this is, well, drum ‘n’ bass. This is the 90s needing a place to go, a way to die.
Not that El Oso is nothing but a slog. It can be great fun following the trio’s muses, from the hyperactive “Blame” to the mellow, tweaked-out “So Far I Have Not Found The Science.” The album excels most when Soul Coughing trusts their instincts to incorporate darker and lighter elements in one song, as in “Fully Retractable,” which layers a standard rock guitar phrase on top of a growling bassline, with a sprinkle of strings on top. It’s a big, fat, mid-tempo piece that somehow stays lighter than air, like a Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon.
El Oso hodge-podge feel is testament to its multiple producers. However, where Soul Coughing’s previous records were all about the kitchen-sink approach, El Oso has these different sounds partitioned off. There are the snare-heavy freakouts, the murky songs, and the few tracks that overlap the two.
I don’t remember much about hearing this album in 1998, other than putting “Circles” on repeat while driving around my hometown between years of college. I don’t think I listened to the rest of the album very often, and I don’t think I would have wanted to. Not because El Oso is bad, but because it’s a collection of confusion – it was end-of-the-century anxiety that I wasn’t quite ready for. By the time the final track “The Incumbent” comes along — “New York, New York, I won’t go back/ indelible reminder of the steel I lack/ I gave you seven years, what did you give me back/ a jaw-grind, disposition to a panic attack” — you have been through some shit.
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1993: Royal Trux - Cats and Dogs
Under the “About this record” section for Cats and Dogs on Drag City’s website is a statement that reads simply: “Do you remember the summer of ’93? Our brief stay in Camelot…”
That’s a joke on nostalgia, I’m guessing, but for music fans of a certain age and sensibility, it’s a bittersweet one. If 1991 was the year punk broke, 1993 might be considered the beginning of indie rock’s brief golden age, the year indie went from describing DIY-style labels and bands that were financially independent from major labels, to signifying a sound based in guitar-oriented rock groups that favored lots of distortion and quirky if not obtuse lyrics and album art. It was also the year Matador partnered with Atlantic Records for distribution.
1993 was the year between Slanted and Enchanted and Crooked Rain, the year of Bubble and Scrape, Painful, Vampire on Titus (though, truth be told, most of us wouldn’t know that until next year’s Bee Thousand), On the Mouth, Icky Mettle, and so on. Choose-your-own-indie-rock adventure. These are considered seminal albums now, and back then the bands responsible were starting to get wider distribution and even some radio and MTV play, thanks in no small part to corporate America trying to figure out what was and wasn’t “grunge.” And for some of the bands, the best was yet to come.
How does Cats and Dogs fit into all this? The answer, as with most things Truxish, is unconventionally. Despite having introduced Pavement to the world via their early singles and EPs, Drag City was never an indie rock label, à la Merge or Matador. It was home to sullen songwriters (Smog, Palace), conceptual groups steeped in art theory (Red Krayola, Gastr del Sol) a Popol Vuh-admiring psychedelic-folk artist — back when that wasn’t so commonplace (Flying Saucer Attack) — and whatever the hell Royal Trux was. Drag City’s flagship band, Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema’s outfit made two albums of difficult, art-damaged rock, and a more accessible but still kinda weird untitled record before releasing 1993’s Cats and Dogs, a recording that was easier for indie rock fans to digest, and one that helped them get signed to Virgin records.
Cats and Dogs didn’t sound like indie rock so much as a comment on — or reflection of — indie rock, something that seems even more apparent 17 years on. Like Jean Luc Godard’s earlier films, Royal Trux albums often played like critiques of the genres they were operating in while remaining wholly enjoyable in their own right. You could groove on them whether or not you caught all the references, but once you did, your understanding and enjoyment changed, almost always for the better.
Cats and Dogs is littered with sounds that would be familiar to anyone listening to college radio at the time. The guitar tone and slow/fast tempo change of opening track “Teeth” borrows a style that was already a cliché for innumerable indie bands formed in the wake of Nirvana, and every band had at least one song that featured a similar languid coda that allowed for scorched earth guitar soloing; “The Flag” apes early Pavement’s love of unsynced doubled vocals and noisy scuzz placed over a pop song; “Friends” sounds like a Sonic Youth noise digression (though of course the spectre of SY loomed large over every rock band in the 90s); “Tight Pants” could be Sebadoh attempting math rock; and I’ve always heard the funky break beat and vocal breakdown near the end of “Skywood Greenback Mantra” as a send-up of Hagerty’s former bandmate Jon Spencer’s flirting with minstrel-like band Blues Explosion or a prediction of the coming of Beck’s shtick.
Of course there’s plenty of stuff here that has a more tangential relationship to then-current sounds. Side one ends with “Turn of the Century,” surely one of the great tracks in the Trux catalogue. Backed by a wistful piano figure, Hagerty’s multi-tracked guitar playing has rarely been as gorgeous, his duet with Herrema never as emotive. It’s comedown acid rock for clever kids, music as narcotic. Like the heroin dealer/user in the movie Rush said, “It’s like floating on a cloud of titties.”
The feeling gets a bit queasier with side two opener “Up the Sleeve,” a song about scoring/using drugs. It has a real menace to it, the guitars and analogue synth creeping along sleazily only to be interrupted by fuzz-peddle riffing near the end. If “Up the Sleeve” contains the first real hint on this album of the antisocial troublemakers who recorded Twin Infinitives, that druggy duo seems to have been resurrected in full for album closer “Driving in That Car.” It’s a lengthy dirge propelled by what sounds like handclaps and cowbell, a retro to the future synth that sounds like a spaceship landing, and chants about time and taking off your shirt.
Whether you accept this reading of Cats and Dogs as self-conscious indie rock or not, you have to admit that Royal Trux were one of the most referential bands of the era, with an astute critical sense. Not for nothing was the word deconstruction used repeatedly in Trux reviews and profiles of the time, and even if you didn’t fully understand what that word meant (I submit few of us truly did), you knew what these Cultural Studies-steeped writers were getting at.
Hagerty has famously claimed that Royal Trux’s three records for Virgin were a conceptual trilogy, representing rock music from the 60s, 70s, and 80s: Thank You (produced by Neil Young compadre David Briggs in 1995) was ostensibly their take on 60s rock, though the early 70s swagger of Stones/Faces/Mountain is equally present. Sweet Sixteen (1997) was their trip through 70s glam rock, the icing on the toilet bowl cover image mirroring the dirty riffs and guttural vocals sweetened with stadium-sized production and mixing, while Accelerator (1998) topped it off with a shrill-sounding take on 80s pop rock. But before this trilogy, they had already executed their take on the sound of the 90s with Cats and Dogs. I don’t mean to suggest they approached the album with the strict idea of “covering” that decade, that their intent and purpose was so thoroughly fleshed out as it would be, just that they were deliberately tweaking the sounds of their contemporaries. They were operating in an aesthetic they had yet to define, making it up as they went, reinventing their sound from album to album. Cats and Dogs is as different from the previous year’s Stonesian untitled (the “Skulls” album) as that album was from the broke-down futuristic nightmare of Twin Infinitives as that was from their rickety debut as Royal Trux were from Hagerty’s previous band Pussy Galore.
In addition to their abundance of ideas and self-reinvention, what most distinguishes Royal Trux from their peers of the 90s is Hagerty’s guitar playing. No one else seems to have his understanding of — and affection for — classic rock, using its tropes in a non-ironic way that explores the further edges and possibilities of hoary riffs and solos. While other bands would acknowledge classic rock with a wink and a smirk, as if those sounds were dumb fun they liked to revel in but were ultimately above, Hagerty seemed to embrace them precisely because they were dumb, almost awed they could be as powerful and musically malleable as they were.
So maybe the summer of 1993 was a too-brief stay in indie rock Camelot. The music got more predictable and codified as it got more popular, and the internet would soon show up and make everyone an instant expert, rearrange our idea of historical narratives by crushing all of pop culture history into one infinitely sided dice where every era touched every other one. Neil and Jennifer (surely a better Jack and Jackie than Ira and Georgia) wouldn’t continue into the new millennium as Royal Trux. They split up, breaking off into Hagerty’s prolific and often baffling project Howling Hex and Herrema’s somewhat confused take on Sunset Strip rock, RTX. The late-period Trux records are great (and absolutely perfect for road trips), and in many ways superior to what came before — certainly more listenable for most people. But Cats and Dogs stands as a perfect transition from their provocative experimentation to a more standard idea of a rock band. Never again would they turn their penchant for re-appropriation so inward, evaluating their own time while also transcending it.
I can’t believe this record was ever out of print.
[Drag City reissued Cats and Dogs last week.]
1982-1992: V/A - Monster Ballads
I have friends who snicker when they catch me listening to Monster Ballads. Why? Because the late-night advertisements for it showcase the most audacious personalities this side of 1985 — because they lack the requisite level of self-awareness to pull off high irony? Fuck that. Monster Ballads is awesome. That should be the only argument you need. At least, that’s the only argument the artists featured on this compilation are prepared to offer.
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Hair metal is so shallow that it genuinely aspires to nothing more than kicking ass and getting laid. In that way, the genre is enigmatic; never do its musicians attempt to consider originality, authenticity, or any other muddying, meaningless concept. They just don’t care. Essentially, the whole genre boils down to how strong your tunes are, and nothing else matters.
Now, I’m sure we’re all familiar with this collection. Among “serious” music patrons, Monster Ballads is mostly a joke. One listens to hair metal ironically while drinking with friends and scarcely touches the stuff when it’s time to bring out the headphones. But when its sounds are actually taken earnestly, their affective qualities feel unlike those of any other genre. As a collection, Monster Ballads is melancholy in the grandest sense of the term — not only are the choruses independently sentimental, but their utter transparency further intensifies the bummer. Each progression is just plain miserable; the music may be founded exclusively through cliché, but its superficial ubiquity only allows the sound to impress upon a wider range of emotion. And the shit comes easy. What’s humorous is that plenty of contemporary musicians are attempting to thoughtfully realize this brand of downheartedness when, as it happens, bummer tunes are as thoughtless as hairspray and cigarettes.
