1978: Warren Zevon - Excitable Boy
For reasons that now seem ridiculous, I wrote off Warren Zevon for a long time. Like They Might Be Giants — who I’ve also wised up about — I assumed for years that Zevon, despite his long career, was a wacky classic rock one-off: in his case, a guy who wrote a dumb song about a werewolf. I’m glad I came around.
I don’t remember why I suddenly became curious about his back catalog, but a few years ago I picked up his best-of, Genius, and became a convert. Not every song on Genius is great, but some are downright amazing, from the acoustic jam “I Was In The House When The House Burned Down” to classics like “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me.” The guy was ridiculously talented, but you know that already, right? Everyone seems to have known this for years, and I feel like an ass for not listening sooner.
I recently bought a vinyl copy of Excitable Boy for 99¢. The album works best on record, especially a used copy with pops and hisses, because as timeless as Zevon’s songs are, Excitable Boy is very much a product of the 1970s. Specifically, the album is late-70s California, dripping with post-hippie, post-Watergate cynicism. It’s disturbing, hilarious, and heartbreaking. In short, it is quintessential Warren Zevon.
The first side of Excitable Boy is basically unimpeachable, with titles as versatile and acerbic as Zevon himself: “Johnny Strikes Up The Band,” “Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner,” “Excitable Boy,” “Werewolves Of London,” “Accidentally Like A Martyr.” The first indication of the album’s genius lies in the story of Roland, a ridiculous plotline which Zevon tells with utter seriousness. Upon finding the man who blew off his head, Roland “aimed his Thompson gun, he didn’t say a word.” Because he, you know, doesn’t have a head.
That tone sticks around for most of Side 1, including the one-two punch of the title track (which I’d heard often on classic rock radio but never listened to closely for its lyrics about rape and murder) and the silly “Werewolves of London.” The latter is, of course, Zevon’s most famous song, but it’s more subtle than it appears — I don’t often laugh out loud when listening to music, but every time I hear Zevon intone “and his hair was perfect” followed by a bizarre, unwritable outburst (maybe it’s “bip”?), I can’t contain myself.
That Zevon follows “Werewolves Of London” with the heartbreaking ballad “Accidentally Like A Martyr” is an example of his extreme, and earned, confidence. The song is one of his best, from its Randy Newman-esque piano phrases to its understated lyrics, not to mention background vocals from Zevon cohort Jackson Browne (who co-produced the record). It’s a beguiling mix, proving that Zevon could use irony for more than humor.
The rest of Excitable Boy is more hit-and-miss than its stellar first side: “Night Time in the Switching Yard,” with its funk-meets-disco stomp, is the only true dud of the collection; and “Veracruz,” a character take on the Zapatas, is simply dull. But from there you get to the solid ballad “Tenderness On The Block” and the masterful “Lawyers, Guns, and Money,” which, in only a three and a half minutes, tells a funny story about espionage, poor choices, and spoiled rich kids.
The fact that I’ve rattled off Excitable Boy’s highlights without saying much about the musicianship is a testament to the record’s excellence. Almost all the songs feature only a guitar, bass, drums, and piano, which lends the collection a sense of intimacy. The band is astoundingly tight, and so are bassist John McVie and drummer Mick Fleetwood, on loan from Fleetwood Mac, who provide the rhythm section for “Werewolves Of London.”
If you’re looking for an entry to Warren Zevon’s canon, Excitable Boy is the perfect place to start — a solid representation of his songwriting and musicianship that also hints at the many peaks to come.
1992: Moonshake - Eva Luna
Moonshake should by all rights be legendary. However, they remain one of the most distressingly slept-on bands of the 1990s, dropping three albums and a handful of singles and EPs that earned deserved critical plaudits but — as often proves the case with bands that test and warp one’s conception of music — failed to find much of an audience, although they weren’t outright ignored. Here’s what they had going for them:
1) Dave Callahan fronted The Wolfhounds, who initially started out as one of the leading lights from the C86 and twee era before developing more of an aggressive charge on their later releases.
2) Margaret Fiedler started out in a band with Moby in the 1980s (she dated him, actually), played in an embryonic version of Ultra Vivid Scene, and was featured in a brief one-off group called Critical Mass with two of the members of Moose. Later on Fiedler and bassist John Frenett split from Moonshake and received greater recognition with Laika; Fiedler would later perform live with PJ Harvey and Wire while Frenett worked with Gina Birch (ex-Raincoats) in The Hangovers.
3) Guy Fixsen, who did the bulk of the engineering on My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, produced and served as a sort-of secret fifth member on Moonshake’s earliest records until he also defected to Laika.
4) After Fiedler left, luminaries like PJ Harvey, Katharine Gifford, and the late Mary Hansen (the latter two from Stereolab) made vocal appearances on the final Moonshake records after Callahan and drummer Mig carried on with the moniker.
5) Their sound started out as a less tinny take on the aesthetic of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless-era EPs, then veered toward an updated take on Can and Public Image Limited’s rhythmic propulsion with noisier guitar work and a predilection for sampling influenced by The Young Gods. More tinctures of jungle and jazz cropped on future efforts as well (drummer Mig would actually pound out the jungle beats himself while having to play against the band’s samplers) and the overall results sound like little else, bearing only passing resemblances to the output of Too Pure labelmates like Long Fin Killie and Th’ Faith Healers, as well as the somewhat recently reevaluated Disco Inferno.
6) Moonshake’s records have aged really well in the past 15-20 years. Most of their songs sound like they were committed to tape just yesterday, and the ones that don’t still aren’t too dated. Their lone session for John Peel’s legendary radio show on the BBC might possibly be the best one I’ve heard so far from his program, too.
7) As if there were not already incentive enough for you to look into them, they named themselves after a song on Can’s Future Days. (Just for the record, Can themselves borrowed it from a Japanese novel.)
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All three of Moonshake’s albums and some of their EPs would make worthwhile starting points deserving of their own DeLorean entries. On any other day, I might be prone to write about 1996’s unjustly overlooked Dirty & Divine; the nocturnal, dense and almost impenetrable qualities of 1994’s guitar-free The Sound Your Eyes Can Follow; or perhaps draft a feature on their most definitive and fractured statement, the 1993 EP Big Good Angel. All those and more warrant exploration from other writers and listeners. However, I’ll opt for 1992’s Eva Luna, their most popular effort (relatively speaking) and arguably most accessible.
Released back in 1992 on this reviewer’s sixth birthday and presumably named for the 1988 novel by revered Chilean author Isabel Allende, Eva Luna commences with the tone-setting “City Poison,” an initially spare song centered around the dubwise basslines of John Frenett that gradually features more slashing guitars as it progresses. Dave Callahan relays a nasty but compelling piece of finger-pointing through his cutting, disgusted snarl, sounding like a cross between Mark Stewart (The Pop Group) and Cathal Coughlan (Microdisney, The Fatima Mansions) as he delivers countless grievances: “You slag off everything that I hold dear/ […] You fuck to find your peace of mind/ You can’t see the mess you leave behind/ Your progress is empty but sincere/ As you bring your city poison round here.” Margaret Fiedler takes the lead on the kinky “Sweetheart,” where her half-discernible jaded feline purr stalks behind a groove from Frenett that wavers between walking bass and an even deeper form of dub than the preceding track. (The vocal duties and writing credits between the two singers are split 50/50 on Eva Luna, whereas prior releases sometimes saw them collaborating and even singing each other’s songs.) An oscillating synth, smeared guitar, brass fanfare, and a stuttering hip-hop beat replete with a slamming “When the Levee Breaks” snare sound flesh out the song in question. “Spaceship Earth” rides atop careening guitars, dissonant synths and a clattering rhythm not too removed from Public Image Limited’s “Poptones,” while Callahan caterwauls about a man and his myopic view of having no chance at a future. “Beautiful Pigeon” sounds like a funhouse mirror version of “Sweetheart,” featuring a similar beat but with flourishes of almost grunge-like guitar work. Fiedler coos what seems to be a love song/contorted sexual scenario steeped in penury, with lines about “sleeping in shit and broken bottles,” being “together under bridges” and keeping a rope tied around a lover’s legs.
Eva Luna is a hard album to immerse yourself in, requiring multiple listens (as in the case of this reviewer) before it really clicks. For me, “Mugshot Heroine” was the most difficult track to delve into, but it’s the most rewarding and might be my personal favorite on the record. It’s the nasty centerpiece — almost an anticipatory template for the dark The Sound Your Eyes Can Follow — centered around another booming bassline and beat in the vein of “Sweetheart,” an Arabic loop seemingly culled from something like a snippet of a Fairuz record (I don’t REALLY know that for sure, mind you), and a lyric about being sucked into prostitution and the resultant troubles stemming from it, with some jazzy horns cropping up during the chorus. “Wanderlust” features a tabla-centered polyrhythmic groove reminiscent of the sumptuous “Coming” from their First EP, but a little uglier. The opening line is a great perversion of “Lust for Life” (“Here comes Johnny Vaaaaaaaa-graaaaant!”) and Callahan sounds particularly John Lydon-esque as he rants about “the spoiled kids yakking at your feet/ the two-faced people that you meet/ the backstab business deal you just complete (sic)/ you wanna know why your culture stagnated!”
The mellow and jazzy “Tar Baby” features trippy descriptions of the activities of various fictional creatures like licorice eels and honey-ham cubs, but with tinges of familial and sexual politics. Sudden grinding guitar bursts frequently cut Margaret Fiedler off mid-groove, and the last flourishes dissipate into “Seen and Not Heard,” which — in this reviewer’s subjective and inflated opinion — should have done for music in 1992 what “Smells Like Teen Spirit” did for 1991. The dubby, pissed-off but (somehow) poised cool of the Jah Wobble-esque bassline anchors the track while careering guitars and snatches of flatulent synthesized noises top off the concoction; meanwhile, Callahan sneers as he embodies the role of a tyrannical father figure, subservient and respectable at work but changing personalities at home, winningly describing his family as “a microcosm: I’m the head of state/ my mother, she’s the Parliament/ the kids — the populace!” before spitting out, “In my house, I do what the fuck I want!”
“Bleach and Salt Water” rides a spacey, floating groove as Fiedler delivers an oblique, Kristin Hersh-esque caricature of a damaged woman, but the ending soon grows ominous as Fiedler’s screams emanate from far in the background (almost as disturbingly as Kate Bush in “Get Out of My House”) before the music fades and Fiedler intones, “I’m lonely.” “Little Thing” concludes the album, featuring a dreamy soundscape with a low scraping guitar tremolo, another Wobble-like bassline and a bizarre time signature, accompanied by Fiedler’s hallucinatory description of how her mind’s occupied with the desire to “open a hole in my belly/ grab for my guts/ find that they’re gone.” Then she lets her lover know about it before dismissing her preoccupation as insignificant. You don’t believe her denial, though, particularly when she repeats, “Maybe I’ll start bleeding.”
Eva Luna’s American edition on Matador also featured the three songs comprising the excellent Secondhand Clothes EP. The title track features another “Poptones”-like groove while Dave Callahan protests that he’d rather “sell (his) body to survive” and “realistically slit the chicken’s throat” than be caught in hand-me-downs. In a nice touch, Fiedler makes a rare collaborative vocal turn mid-song. She takes the helm on “Blister,” which actually features audible vocals from her AND a more direct lyrical approach than usual, this time concerning abuse and apprehension. She sounds like she’s almost on the verge of crying as she sings, “My hands shake/ no rhythm, no grace/ I feel like something has died inside me/ A face that won’t fade, a punch in the eye/ I start to see the years you put on my age/ growing in lines on my hands.” The music seems like a cousin of “Green” by Throwing Muses in its soft, dusky, and somewhat forlorn mood, but with dubbier textures, a free jazz saxophone break, and other assorted sonic flourishes. It’s possibly Fiedler’s best and most heart-rending song with Moonshake. The EP concludes with a Callahan track about a snitch and his sullied reputation called “Drop in the Ocean.” It features yet another big Frenett bassline and a stuttery but propulsive rhythm from Mig, with some dissonant samples alongside frequent, jarring screeches of guitar that eventually coalesce into a solo by song’s end.
Now that I’ve done the legwork in bringing Moonshake to your attention, give the songs above a listen, or preferably several listens so they’ll sink into you like pins in a cushion, and perhaps you’ll relish them as much as I do.
2000: The Paper Chase - Young Bodies Heal Quickly
Back in the 90s there were plenty of young men in rock bands who were in danger of plunging to their deaths from heights of seemingly unrealizable ambition. Like their fellow shouty post-hardcore rockers Cursive, The Paper Chase formed in the 90s but enjoyed the most successful moments of their career in the 00s. They too favored jagged song titles that pointed to endless hurt and betrayal lodged painfully in the bitter exchanges between frazzled couples on the edge of breakup. They also hung around on the edge of the mainstream in a peculiarly 90s way that suggested they still harbored ambitions to be huge. And they responded to various challenges by pushing the boundaries of their square genre into all kinds of uncomfortable looking shapes — ending up with a post-rock parallelogram that was naturally even geekier the more experimental it became.
Claustrophobia and expansive ambition are not good companions, and the late 90s/early 00s scene that produced the overwrought Mars Volta at times seemed fatally marred by a sense of frustration with the limits of rock. Perhaps it’s just me, but Fred Durst’s after image seems to ripple like a Polaroid tossed into water somewhere between the bouncy rhythms and elbows-out mic handling of Cursive, At The Drive-In et al. In hindsight, nu-metal looks increasingly less like a creation of the music industry, and more like a commercialized offshoot of a hardcore scene that subsequently disowned it. The Paper Chase’s fixation with brash verse chorus song structures and borderline hip-hop shoutiness is barely concealed by abrasive guitars and dissonance on their later albums. Young Bodies Heal Quickly, however, is an early gem. There is a focused rage to the technically proficient metal playing and tight drumming on their debut that lends urgency to instrumental rants such as “Goddamn These Hands.” The latter employs your typical scratchy under-track, featuring an insincere but nevertheless apologetic female reciting the usual breakup spiel.
The album is one of recurring themes rather than songs, as when the lyrics and piano riffs on “These Things Happen,” “Neat; Manageable; Piles,” and “When (And If) The Big One Hits… I’ll just meet you there” are cut and pasted between these tracks. “When (And If) The Big One Hits,” like “Neat; Manageable; Piles,” is atypical of the album, with its warm sound and steady rhythm. The aforementioned tracks bookend the album in a neat manner, letting what’s on the inside thrash away and work all the nasty stuff out.
Like so many of their peers, The Paper Chase seem conscious that “great” music — and indeed all “great” art — is a high wire act. Of course, because of this, and being eager young white guys, they are prone to lose their balance by a precocious handling of their own material, rather than through artistic daring that promotes something really original. The nice thing about their debut album, though, is that experimentation and urgency are present in equal measure there. No need to tear down the rock edifice just yet when there’s plenty of relationship angst to be remedied with a hearty dose of guitar virtuoso madness. And then, why not throw in a piano? That’s the right attitude, and it pays off on Young Bodies Heal Quickly.
1991: Malaria! - Compiled
Malaria!’s 1983 track “Thrash Me” (key lyric: “thrash me for my pleasure”) would be the best place to start dismantling all those Berlin clichés on their behalf, were they not probably impossible to tear down now (like art posters clinging to lampposts in strips, not like walls or anything). In the early 80s, the band members were indeed young and radical. They played at Studio 54. They wrote a song about the holocaust called “Geh Duschen” (take a shower). They took the opportunity to film burning cars outside vocalist and saxophonist Bettina Koester’s apartment in Kreuzberg, knowing that it would be the next best thing to the music video they couldn’t afford to make. Also during that ‘crazy time,’ Bettina Koester claims to have been propositioned by Catherine Deneuve, who was wearing a slinky red dress, natürlich. So far, not so bad for the few short years that Compiled revisits: namely 1981 to 1984, when the band were together.
Also, almost accidentally — or so it seems — they fashioned some amazing new wave electronica out of very few elements by today’s standards: essentially the traditional rock quartet plus saxophone and keyboard synths. The reason these efforts still startle may be because it is now the rage to praise the spectacle of chubby fists connecting with primitive keyboards straight out of the ark/attic, or it may be that the band actually did something that still sounds fresh today. Perhaps my jaded, elitist ears deceive me, but I think it’s the latter. By way of comparison, the Chicks on Speed remix of “Kaltes Klares Wasser” is boring, an attempt to salvage the menace of a counterculture that’s not their own. The original has a real bassline that moves around shattered glass piano, a noodling synth and the strident voices of Bettina & Co., but the chicks harvest something vaguely exotic from the German phrases, meanwhile abandoning all the fervor of Malaria!’s version. The harsh electronic edge that seems so pioneering on Compiled is actually enhanced by elements that could easily be overlooked because they’re traditional: Bettina Koester’s voice and saxophone playing. “Your Turn to Run” happily marries these disparate elements: stealthy, but skillful drumming with an incongruous yet catchy handclap beat; no wave jangly guitars, driven by a Velvet Underground-style riff; the brazenness of Bettina Koester’s voice and saxophone with Gudrun Gut’s arthouse whispering (check out her smooth, late night radio voice on a recent podcast).
“You You” on the other hand sounds less experimental today, as it wears its darkwave influences on its sleeve (the band played with Siouxsie & The Banshees and New Order) in lines like “You love degradation” over a standard melodic synth-led verse chorus structure. Malaria! could also be plain abrasive sometimes, especially on the tracks that didn’t make it onto the album.
Almost every song on Compiled is more than the sum of its influences though. One striking idea is being worked out all the time, such as on “Einsam” (loneliness), where a keyboard riff courts a flat saxophone inside a cathedral of echo-y synths and huge, stadium rock drumbeats. This is followed by the rousing, recognizably European number that is “Macht” — with a folk time signature that suggests something either raunchy or sinister — and later on the last track “Gewissen,” where children’s voices insist on something in German while Bettina Koester is joined in her declamations by a man’s baritone over a repetitive, spooky piano. These ‘declamations’ are probably one of the cooler things about Malaria!, as they sound authoritative in that serious Germanic way that all English graduates foggily cherish in their memories of epic poetry seminars. These days, female vocalists in electronic bands tend towards the bouncily non-committal (hello, YACHT) or they brandish their alternative sexual preferences in a threatening manner (Gaga, Peaches, The Chicks et al.). Though Malaria! undoubtedly did make audiences uncomfortable in their time (see an interview with their forerunners in Mania D, who recall male fans aggressively suggesting ways of turning the band members back into ‘normal’ girls), they mostly come across as a band’s band who happened to be, quite literally, ‘all-woman.’
1986: Neu! - Neu! 86
The album released this year as Neu! ’86 had another life as Neu! 4, originally released in 1995, nearly a decade after its initial recording, itself a reunion of Neu!’s core of Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger. Neu! ’86 is the result of Rother reassembling the album from the original master tapes following Dinger’s death in 2008. All in all, then, it’s an odd hybrid, a reconstruction of an album that had its own ephemeral existence, first in bootlegs and later in a Dinger-sanctioned release. After three critically lauded, hugely influential albums, what might someone make of this — a work that might very well earn the “lost album” label?
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On first listen, Neu ’86 might prompt some panic. “Dänzing,” the second track and first ‘full’ song, sounds a bit like what one might expect from a Neu! album recorded in the mid-80s: a penchant for danceable pop rhythms and the sort of glossy sheen that’s as much a signifier of the era as any unfortunate sartorial choices or overabundance of hair product. Another sign of the era: the fifth song is a programmed-beat-driven sound collage titled “La Bomba (Stop Apartheid World-Wide!).”
Thankfully, the duo’s sense of experimentation and penchant for perfectly constructed rhythms becomes central here, just as it did in their earlier works. “Drive (Grundfunken)” applies scuzzed-out guitars over a loping bassline; it hearkens back to the group’s first album, with only the minimal drumbeat giving away the temporal distance. And the subdued interlude of “November,” the penultimate number, may for sheer simplicity (and no small amount of beauty) be the album’s highlight.
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Elsewhere, the same fondness for collages that manifests itself in “La Bomba” returns with mixed results. “Paradise Walk” begins with a turn towards auditory bliss that is soon broken by the introduction of a looping sound echoing a car alarm. There’s a similar sensibility afoot in “Euphoria,” a song whose title perhaps too literally encapsulates its idealized mood. Some of these moments sound jarring, but not in an encouraging way; instead, for a band whose discography has largely aged impeccably, these moments feel all too dated.
The moments when this album does shine are intriguing. It’s an odd cap to a legendary band’s discography and, even in this updated form, not the most essential part of that body of work. And given that Rother has begun touring again (with members of Sonic Youth and Tall Firs, under the name Hallogallo 2010), it remains to be seen where this album fits in with the story of Neu!.
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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