There’s never been more a more dangerous threat to rock than restraint, never a more pernicious maxim than nothing in excess. Well, that might not be a rule that can actually be generalized for every case, but it goes some way in describing the pleasure of listening to The Speaking Canaries’ fourth album, Get Out Alive: The Long Version. That’s not to say there aren’t quiet moments, and it’s also not to say that the album’s more violently noisy passages won’t suddenly erupt into well-executed, “anthemic” (maybe even “catchy”!) indie rock choruses. But there is an equal portion of the album displaying the band’s mastery over a build-and-release aesthetic that folds into sheer fucking joyousness — the contrasts that frame and heighten the excess. So, an expansive opener verging on half an hour long is immediately followed by a more restrained song that features glockenspiel and falsetto singing, followed again by a hectic clanging racket.
Although The Speaking Canaries’ main guy Damon Che is better known as Don Caballero’s drummer (which he does a little here too), it’s his guitar playing that’s the protagonist in this particular tale, employing everything from chaotic six-string torture, to hacking and jittery math-rock, and all the way to pinch harmonics and back again, almost to the point of note-per-minute showoffery. Che is also the vocalist in this project, and when the lyrics turn out to be not-cutesy metaphors or surreal evocations (“She’ll spear your heart in the Fox Chapel/ She’ll stomp it on Squirrel Hill”) and are instead grounded references to Pittsburgh geography, they serve to pull the album back down to more earthly realms. Other times — as with the barely intelligible spoken narratives low in the mix on “Last Side of Town Pt.1” or the shrieked exchanges with a mysterious Ingrid on “Life-like Homes” — they push things further from the everyday. This is most evident with Che’s periodic yells and whoops, which feel like pure expressions of some uncontainable whatever. Or at least until you compare them to the joy-yelps on the previous album, Songs for the Terrestrially Challenged, which appeared in exactly the same places on the completely re-recorded version as they did on the first version. So, maybe it’s not the same story on Get Out Alive. But planned or not, the spontaneity and joie de vivre feel real all the same, transmitted as they are directly and without need of the messy matter of meaning.
And about the album title’s qualification: there are a few different versions of the album (the CD and LP versions have the subtitle The Last Type Story), but you should be listening to “The Long Version,” the 76-odd-minute CD-R incarnation. Cobbled together from bits of EPs and extended versions, it’s a perfect junkyard assemblage. It’s the least diluted and most comprehensive version; constraints are least in evidence. Over the course of its running time, there’s scarcely a concession to coherence or to the usual standards of contemporaneous indie rock good taste (though no Van Halen covers on this one; you’ll have to go to back to Songs for the Terrestrially Challenged for not one, but two of them). Sure, the production varies on the tracks and the levels of the drums fluctuate, but it just doesn’t matter when the album is so busy delivering its consignment of exuberant rock.
After the release of Get Out Alive, a few new songs were performed on a WFMU radio show, and there were whispers on the internet that a new album had been recorded. But alas, it never emerged. For better or for worse, Che reformed Don Caballero (without any other original members), and a couple of their newer songs were somewhat Canaries-esque, but we haven’t heard from The Speaking Canaries since.
