On Second Thought: U2 — “War” (1983)

By Dave Gebroe

Whether it be from a priest, a rabbi, an outspoken relative, or the Almighty Bono Vox himself, my knee-jerk impulse to being preached at is exactly that: to knee that jerk, right in the groin.  Along the same lines, I also don’t look fondly upon Greenpeace pamphlets being thrust in my face as I walk into an overly expensive stadium show.  I just don’t care for activism in my rock.  None of this explains why at fifteen years old I went to see U2 on “The Joshua Tree” tour, nor does it explain why the show left me in a state of slack-jawed awe at the mystical intensity of the U2 experience.  The long and short of it is that this gaggle of stylistically-challenged Irish rockers contained the perfect level of grandstanding self-seriousness especially during the Eighties-for a zit-faced, teenage doofus like myself to truly call my own. 

No matter how many permutations they manage to force out of their once-vital band, for me the longstanding image of U2 will be their performance of “Silver And Gold” from that hot-air epic of Americana-seeking douchebaggery “Rattle and Hum.”  Dressed in a cowboy hat, of all things, Bon(z)o needles the audience with a mid-song anti-apartheid rant.  When he catches himself drawling on interminably, instead of poking fun at his own sermonizing tendencies (something at which he became more proficient during the “Achtung, Baby” era), he actually has the brass-balled audacity to implicate the audience!  “Am I buggin’ ya?  Don’t mean to bug ya.  Okay, Edge, play the blues!”  And the unintentional punch line, especially in light of the band’s obsession with uncovering the essence of what makes America tick, is that what comes rippling out of The Edge’s amps is as authentically bluesy as the theme song to “Sesame Street.”

Rewind five years and we have the dubious pleasure of bearing witness to the birth of Bono as caricature.  There he is, that quaint, mullet-sporting crusader waving a white flag and whipping up a “No more!” call-and-response with the “Live At Red Rocks” crowd.  Looking back now, I see some dude trying a little too hard to capture his place in the American spotlight after two albums hadn’t quite done the trick. 

Those albums — 1980’s “Boy” and 1981’s “October” — still stand today as powerful works from a band that hadn’t yet discovered its voice, and was all the better for it.  “War” (recorded in the summer of 1982, and released in February, 1983) was the fulcrum point at which U2 ceased to be an Echo & The Bunnymen-derived New Romantic outfit and began striving after its own sound and tackling its own messages, however weighty they tended to be.

For some strange reason, “War” is considered the high-water mark of their early work as a band.  It replaced Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” at the top of the charts, becoming the band’s first #1 album in the UK. There were three huge singles in America and the record was eventually ranked number 221 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

Objectively, “War” was U2’s worst album until 1997’s “Pop” came along.  Admittedly, the first three tracks are excellent.  The record kicks off with the martial-drum intensity of “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” then segues into atmospheric nuclear nightmare “Seconds,” and…yet another atmospheric nuclear nightmare (not to mention one of their best songs), the classic “New Year’s Day.”  At this point we’re running full steam.

The record then promptly drops off and never recovers.  “The Refugee” sounds like what might happen if Bow Wow Wow had a political conscience.  And yet, somehow, it’s even worse than that comparison implies.  “Like a Song…” was apparently intended as a response to those who believed the band was too worthy, sincere, and not “punk” enough.  Unfortunately, it’s too worthy, sincere, and un-punk to carry its message.  “Red Light” is a lame ditty about prostitution.  And so on and so forth, each tune wrapping itself around an issue and passing itself out like a pamphlet.

This might be a good time to mention that I typically try to ignore lyrics.  There are exceptions, but I have a great respect for the limitless interpretive possibilities inherent in good music.  When you take in the lyrics, it’s unavoidable that a definitive singular meaning’s going to stamp itself into concrete.  It’s like the old-time radio serial lovers who resented the advent of television; once the whole picture was available, with all the blanks filled in, the work had already been done and your imagination was no longer invited to the party. In that mode of thinking, political lyrics typically tend to be outright anathema to me. 99 times out of a hundred, it skews toward the nausea-inducing if the words are at all distinguishable. 

“And we love to wear a badge, a uniform / and we love to fly a flag / but I won’t let others live in Hell” (from “Like A Song”)

How am I supposed to get a groove on when some young rock star hopeful’s enunciating these putrid lyrics clear enough for me to hear?  Even “Two Hearts Beat As One,” ostensibly “War”’s love song reprieve from the relentless political proselytizing, kicks off like Bono forgot he was stepping away from the pulpit for a moment: 

“I don’t know, I don’t know which side I’m on / I don’t know my right from left / Or my right from wrong” (from “Two Hearts Beat As One”)

Christ, even his love songs from this era were framed in a context of political opinion.  I wasn’t surprised to learn that “New Year’s Day” started life as a love song Bono wrote for his new wife, but was promptly rejiggered into its current state as an Armageddon ditty inspired by the Polish Solidarity movement.  What an incurable romantic!

This sense of weighty grandiosity all starts with that album cover; it sports the same kid from “Boy,” but his childlike wonder’s gone the way of the dodo.  Check him out, scowling at us, admonishing us for the poor state in which we’ve left the world he’s inherited.  Hey, come on!  What the hell did I do wrong?  How did I get implicated just by picking this record up off the rack?

Like many important artists through rock and roll’s long, storied history, U2 is sensitively attuned to the tweaking of their aesthetic strategy based on what’s come just before.  But there’s something about their approach that feels more like a marketing plan than an artist’s bid for mercurial, outside-the-box thinking.  Their entire journey of “growth” can be traced back to “War.”  After this record, there was a lyrical de-emphasis in favor of ambience (“Unforgettable Fire“), followed by a maniacally grandiose lyrical re-emphasis (“Joshua Tree“), which prompted a nose-thumbing at themselves, beating the wags to the punch in their attempt to control the depth to which they were satirized (“Achtung Baby”), etc.  In retrospect, all these moves seem suspiciously calculated to keep any and all detractors of the band at bay.

There are apparently those close to U2 who feel as I do, as can be evidenced by producer Brian Eno coercing Bono to tear down his mulleted crusader image by fully improvising a set of mumbled lyrics for “Elvis Presley & America” on their next record.  Although I do dig the tune, so begat a career of low-rent about-faces designed to keep the record-buying public convinced that they were still the best damn band in the world.  The grand sum of this people-pleasing bobbing and weaving leads me to believe that they must have felt more than just a passing feeling of kinship with Sally Field as she took the stage at the 1985 Oscars and immortalized herself by admitting that, “I’ve wanted more than anything to have your respect. The first time I didn’t feel it, but this time I feel it, and I can’t deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me!”

U2 — “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” US Festival, 1983:

On Second Thought: The Kinks — “Lola vs. Powerman and the Money-Go-Round, Part One” (1970)

by Dave Gebroe

“Lola Vs. Powerman And The Money-Go-Round, Part One“ was the Kinks‘ most successful record on both sides of the Atlantic since the mid-60s. It single-handedly elevated them to arena band status in the U.S. Its title track became their legacy, an FM standard that refuses to die. Ask any classic rock fan what record springs to mind when you say “The Kinks,” and 99 times out of 100 they’re going to say “Lola.”

But pull back the curtain and look a little closer. “Lola” planted the seeds for a once-great band’s creative demise, as tremendously gifted songwriter Ray Davies began spinning a solipsistic cocoon that eventually led to him simply floating out to sea. Starting in 1970, Ray’s choices seemingly began to be made solely on whether or not he wanted to convey the impression of giving a shit about being appreciated. During the first half of the decade, he apparently couldn’t have cared less (much to new label RCA’s chagrin). After “Lola,” Ray escaped into himself, finding comfort inside concept albums whose last priority was musical excellence. They were mainly dopey nostalgic forays that made it clear that Ray Davies was now a man who felt extreme discomfort in his own skin. Precious little of the output from this period (1972-1975) holds up as listenable and I’d only loosely define much of it as music. Then, after 1975, Ray flip-flopped and spent the remainder of the decade pumping out generic stadium rock in a listless concession to the idea of “giving the people what they want.”

 

Ray’s utterly conflicted, thoroughly bizarre knee-jerk reaction against commercial acceptance can be traced back to 1965, when the Kinks were banned from re-entering the U.S. by the American government. For four years, one of the greatest, most creative bands on the planet all but disappeared from America, focusing instead on following their muse and creating distinctly British masterpieces that had the unfortunate effect of thrusting them headlong into a sales slump. By 1969, their star had fallen precipitously. They needed a hit to bring them back in a big way.

 

Ray later talked about wanting to write a song that would “sell in the first five seconds.” Enter “Lola,” their new single. Based on a real-life experience of Ray’s back in 1965, “Lola” was an instant smash, reaching #1 in the New Musical Express in the U.K. , and #9 in the U.S. This wasn’t just a shot in the arm for the Kinks — it was necessary for their continued existence as a band. Their last album, 1969’s brilliant “Arthur,” had topped out at #105 on the charts. This was it and Ray Davies knew it.

 

With the prospect of an honest-to-goodness comeback looming ahead, Ray shaped an entire concept album around the song. In a particularly strange gesture, when considered side-by-side with the years of struggle they’d just endured, the LP created around the 45 flat-out rejected and negated the success that seemed within their grasp as a result of that very song! This insistence on biting the hand that fed them at this crucial juncture in their career is, arguably, the fulcrum point between the undimmed brilliance of the Kinks up to that point and the extreme musical self-indulgence of their output from 1970 forward.

 

The basic concept: a struggling band makes a go of it, releases a single that tops the charts, achieves huge success, and has to contend with the faceless, soul-crushing behemoth that is the music industry. The funny thing is that at its root the true concept of “Lola” is something of the inverse of that — a well-established act releases a huge hit and shoots themselves in the foot in a misguided attempt to prove their integrity.

 

I wouldn’t say the record’s a total disaster; “Lola” truly is the great single it was created to be, and “Get Back In Line” and “A Long Way From Home” are two of Ray’s most poignant, affecting ballads. “This Time Tomorrow” isn’t bad, either, communicating with great economy the whirlwind isolation of life on the road, a topic that would be far more laboriously explored on 1972’s double-set “Everybody’s A Star.”

 

However, what saps “Lola” of its power and its message is the acerbity that lingers in the listener’s ear. Somehow, during this period, when Davies attempted to express himself with bitter resignation, his ability to connect emotionally was awe-inspiringly on the money (i.e., the twin-ballad attack mentioned above, “Celluloid Heroes,” “Where Are They Now?”, etc.), but when he stripped that bitterness of its resignation he had a tendency to come across as shrill and ungrateful.

 

Is the man allowed to whine? Has he earned the right? Sure. But, as his career path eventually revealed, once a rich, famous rock star begins bitching and moaning about his woeful existence, it becomes a chore for the listener to relate. Let’s face it, Ray had already shown signs of being a crotchety old man in the 1960s. On “Lola,” he finally got to yell at his audience — and the music world at large — to keep their collective ball off his lawn.

 

Although the material on “Lola” is quite varied — there’s folk, music hall, even metal — much of it is blunt, generic, and uninspired. Right off the bat, there’s “The Contenders” — a piss-poor attempt at blues rock that comes off sounding like a generic Ten Years After outtake. The second single, “Apeman,” sounds like what might happen if “Weird Al” Yankovic took a cod-Calypso stab at “Lola.” Dave Davies‘ “Rats” sounds as pseudo in its intent to rock out with its cock out as “You Really Got Me” felt like the real deal and the seething swipes at the music industry — “Denmark Street,” “Top Of The Pops,” and “The Moneygoround”—barely qualify as songs.

 

Indicators for all the various, half-hearted dead-ends the band were to barrel down thereafter were there for the seeking on “Lola”: the throwaway music hall whimsy, Ray Davies’ lyrical over-reliance on autobiography and the compulsion to populate his records with villainous character-types…even the desire to take twice the time to say half as much (as can be surmised by the title, a part two was originally intended). The essential Kink konundrum can be found in the lyrics to its closing song, “Got To Be Free”:

 

“Got to be free to say what I want
Make what I want and play what I want”

 

What a beautiful declaration of artistic independence! Unfortunately, from this definitive fork in the road of Ray’s musical concerns, we’re able, now with the benefit of hindsight, to trace the outcome of this pronouncement. He took that freedom and promptly utilized it to transform himself into an inebriated music-hall stooge. Within two short years, Ray had bottomed out in a confused mess, leading to this stunned, momentary insight of the music-hall insanity he’d come to embrace:

 

“If my friends could see me now, dressing up in my bow-tie,
Prancing round the room like some outrageous poove,
They would tell me that I’m just being used
They would ask me what I’m trying to prove.
They would see me in my hotel,
Watching late shows till the morning,
Writing songs for old time vaudeville revues.
All my friends would ask me what it’s all leading to.”

(from “Sitting In My Hotel,” 1972)

 

Unfortunately, in Ray Davies’ case, what it led to was a great band being flushed down the toilet in a sacrificial gesture to one man’s bold yet increasingly diffuse vision.

 

 

CD Review: A Little Bit of Stomp, A Little Bit of Whomp

by Casey Dolan

Rudder

“Matorning” (Nineteen-Eight Records) Most rock listeners will not know who the hell these guys are, coming up, as they do, from the modern jazz ranks. That’s an injustice and just ridiculous. Rudder should be major. This is neither jazz in the strict sense nor rock, nor any of the conventional notions of fusion, although Rudder owes much to all three traditions. It is music, call it Party Whomp, that should appeal to an extremely wide variety of listeners – from lovers of new electronica to jam band enthusiasts; from the most discerning jazz musos to crunchy rockers (despite there being no guitar in the band); from trip hop isolationists to acid jazzers of every stripe.

The second album from Keith Carlock, Tim Lefebvre, Henry Hey and Chris Cheek doesn’t depart too far from their 2007 eponymous debut. The same comical, herky-jerky heads, the deep, molasses grooves, a pretty ballad (“Lucy,” with a seamless arc of crescendo in the arrangement) – they are all there with each player adding his signature style. In other words, there are few surprises, but there are some. Tenor sax player Chris Cheek seems to have added more effects (no saxophonist alive works a wah-wah like him — check out “Tokyo Chicken” and “One Note Mosh”) and bassist Tim Lefebvre, conversely, seems to be playing with more organic sounds this time and less coloration. Not so with keyboardist Henry Hey who uses his usual bag of tricks that seem to lift as much from bad science fiction films as from the chitlin circuit. The undeniable center of Rudder’s universe, though, the quasar, the eye of God itself, is drummer Keith Carlock, one of the greatest drummers in existence.

Think I’m talking hyperbole here? That’s because you don’t read drummer polls or hang out in New York jazz dives. That’s because the musician’s world of musicians is not a concentric universe with radio play, or the appallingly (un)hip music magazine focus or whatever awful thing makes it on a TV soundtrack these days. Please, take it from me. Whether your percussive God is John Bonham, JackDeJohnette, Al Jackson, Mastodon’s Brann Dailor, Bill Bruford, Ringo Starr, Charlie Watts, Neil Peart, whomever…Carlock will make you weep. Live, he is an electrified muppet, multi-limbed like Shiva, but he dominates the proceedings (and not in an overbalanced sense) on both the first album and “Matorning.” It is Carlock (with some help from Lefebvre) who will make you bounce around your house uncontrollably with a cattle prod up your bottom and not merely because of his tribal thumping, but the sound of it as well (listen to his beautifully hollow kick drum on “Jackass Surcharge” or his snare on “Innit”).

But Rudder is not a showcase for Carlock, it is a band. And a band that displays much humor. There’s a Funkadelic cartoon feel to some of the tunes, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have subtleties. The album is far from painted in primary colors. The 7/4 whomp of “Jackass Surcharge” has a soft, insinuating horn arrangement that sounds like cats mewing or distant traffic (Lefebvre is astonishing on this, popping away). There are the fun games with meter: “Lucky Beard” has Carlock laying down a funky 6/8, but Cheek is playing in 4 with a bar of 6 thrown in, and it works beautifully. “Daitu” has Lefebvre channeling Jack Bruce’s distinctly trebley bass against an acid jazz background. “Neppe” (possibly the most otherworldly track on the whole album) weds an “Addams Family” sax to trip hop. And Hey deserves special recognition as a keyboardist who really knows when to play it simply and be most effective. The closing track, “CDL,” has him playing eighth-note chords almost throughout, lending a Radiohead feel to the track.

If “Matorning” has an inherent cautionary tale for its participants, it may be to always keep things lively and fresh, to not become complacent with a sound. This is such a fine aggregation of musicians that they should be willing, on occasion, to put the Party Whomp aside and stroll into unheard territories, to consider greater use of electronics, tape manipulation and digital editing, maybe to even add an instrument or two. (What would happen if Four Tet, Danger Mouse, Dan Deacon, Adrian Sherwood, or one of those bhangra nutjob remixers did mixes? Could be monstrous). The second half of the album begins to do that, but it might be a good idea for album number three to go further and eschew even that solid stomp that Carlock supplies (at least part of the time). I believe Rudder has the capacity to do almost anything and the compositional skills of all three writers — Cheek, Lefebvre and Hey — could lead the band into greater recognition and success.

This is a video from the 2007 Fall tour in the Rex in Toronto. “Circle of Jerks”:

CDs on Shuffle: A Look at Some (Terrific) New Releases

by Casey Dolan

The Lonely Forest

“We Sing the Body Electric!” (Burning Building Recordings)

When people say of Kurt Cobain that he had a pop composer’s sensibility, I never quite understand what they mean. He may have loved the Beatles, but he didn’t write like Lennon & McCartney. Bridges and choruses ape verses, dynamic changes become a predictable soft-loud-soft-loud paradigm, melodies stagger half-drunkenly over mumbled poetry. Maybe Nirvana was a necessary cathartic purging for a generation.

The Lonely Forest (terrible name, guys), a young Anacortes, WA band that takes many cues from Nirvana (the angry gargle, the occasional sonic roar), adds piano and that extra dimension of complexity in pop songcraft (true bridges, imagine that!). Their new album, “We Sing the Body Electric!” (another unfortunate choice for a title, taken from one of the lyrics but, more importantly, borrowed from Ray Bradbury, who had been previously pillaged by both Weather Report and Since by Man), merges the two often conflicting worlds of raging punk and chamber pop. John Van Deusen writes memorable tunes –  “We Sing in Time” has the potential to be a big single — but it’s his voice that grabs center stage, ranging, like the music, from the strangled Cobain to the purest falsetto. The only concern might be that some of the prettiest harmonies are sung by Van Deusen himself and thus not replicable live. There is a hint of emo in Van Deusen’s delivery and one shudders to think what a grand emo producer like Howard Benson would do with a band like this. I hope they keep it hairy and raw like this album, which is not to say these guys aren’t tight. Drummer Braydn Krueger is a powerhouse, coming up with some surprising accents and parts but always grounding the band.

If there is a weakness, it is in the lyrics which occasionally smack of cloying sentimentality and pithy idealism: “When will the world start moving forward?/Let’s lose the hate and drown the sorrow!/Give love/Just live love!” sings Van Deusen in “Golden Apples of the Sun, Part II.”

“We Sing in Time” live at Folklife in EMP’s Skychurch, 2008:

 

 

Dan Deacon

“Bromst” (Carpark Records)

The album begins with the slowest fade-in in history– a dramatic entrance, sounding like an alarm from the dystopian world of “Minority Report” and opening into one of the most varied sonic topographies this listener has heard in a very long time. “Bromst” beggars description and is an easy candidate for one of the year’s best.

Dan Deacon, the Baltimore wizard of sound, explores a full spectrum of sonorities — from a jagged sawtooth to the purest sine wave, an impossibly fast drum n’ bass groove to mid-tempo Kraftwerkian vocoder pop — but he never stays in one territory long. Inevitably, the glistening mercury turns to sand. The layers multiply exponentially. Loops are edited with a composer’s ear for detail; samples defy source identification. As any good symphonic composer, Deacon mixes timbres, instruments to surprising effect. “Paddling Ghost” begins with something close to a kalimba sound on overdrive, and then, of all things, a Farfisa organ enters. “Surprise Stefani” suggests gamelan, but filtered through the post-rave landscape. Ambient series Brian Eno finds an unholy union with the synclavier-era Frank Zappa (and all his obsessions with VSO) and the American shaman composer, John Adams.

For those who think that Aphex Twin and Squarepusher were really on to something in the mid-90s, Dan Deacon represents the next step forward. His previous outing, “Spiderman of the Rings” (2007), is almost as good, so it is clear that he’s on a roll. Catch him when he hits the Troubadour on April 22. The live shows are legendary.

The entire record can be streamed here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101150484

An Horse

“Rearrange Beds” (Mom & Pop Music)

Fresh from an appearance on David Letterman last week, this Brisbane duo (bassless, naturally) of Kate Cooper and Damon Cox play songs that read like diary entries from an anguished, overwrought teenage girl, but they still manage to make things rock and not sound like adolescent whinings. Tagged by Tegan & Sara to open for them on tour, it’s easy to see why the Canadian duo liked An Horse so much — a strong frontwoman songwriter in Cooper with emotional direct simplicity in the songs. Even guitarist extraordinaire Kaki King has covered an An Horse song. Cooper is the focal point and, as can be seen in the video of their Letterman performance of “Camp Out,” she doesn’t really have to even look at the audience to be riveting. The album packs a stark but aggressive punch.

Here is the Letterman performance of “Camp Out”:

 

Micachu & the Shapes

“Jewellery” (Rough Trade)

Magnificent little engines in a Rube Goldberg contraption run in perfect syncopation, their square gears setting off whistles. Cymbals pin the meters into white noise and a slightly adenoidal English teenager starts yammering. There’s a bit of hysteria throughout the debut album of Micachu & the Shapes, like a giddy Noel Coward on a gin and pills jag and don’t we really all want that in our lives? Noel weaving down the hallway, martini glass in hand?

Can music get more fun than this?

The toyshop explodes in “Eat Your Heart” until a yodeling chorus brays about eating your heart. The guitars on “Lips” sound like outtakes from Beefheart’s “Trout Mask Replica” rehearsals. “Calculator” starts off as a low-fi garage beater, but then all these strange sounds appear and it devolves into a subway busker.

Mica Levi, a.k.a. Micachu, is all of 21 years old, thoroughly grounded in composition at the Guildhall School of Music, a violist and is a fan of Harry Partch, Bela Bartok, the Velvet Underground, Joy Division, Al Green and Johnny Cash! Bully for her to bring such iconoclasm and individuality to the table. Fundamentally, Micachu and the Shapes are pop, albeit a skewed, funhouse mirror version of the genre. They’re in SXSW this week. Here’s hoping they get heard by discerning ears.

Here is a performance of “Lips”:

Reissues:

Dukes of Stratosphear

 

25 O’Clock and Psonic Sunspot (Ape House Records)

There are many compelling arguments for the claim that XTC is one of the two or three most important bands to come out of post-Seventies England. These two albums, made under the moniker of their psychedelic alter-ego, contribute to that claim. Strangely out of print for a long while, Andy Partridge’s cottage label, Ape House, is resurrecting them. Fans can discover that the albums work as musical statements far more than mere pastiches of Beatles, Who, Kinks, Hollies, Small Faces, (Syd Barrett era) Pink Floyd, Beach Boys and Byrds. The excellent songwriting of Partridge and Colin Moulding that made the parent band revered (particularly among musicians) is evident on these albums. “25 O’Clock” is more consistent a disc, but each contain demos, extra songs and a video as bonus items.

You Too Can Have U2 For Free

Cover art for U2's new album, "No Line on the Horizon"

by Casey Dolan

Fans of the Irish band U2 can hear an exclusive preview of their new album, “No Line on the Horizon,” streaming for free on www.myspace.com/u2, the official MySpace Music profile site, starting today. The album will be released on March 3 and also be available for purchase from MySpace Music: www.myspace.com/music.

“No Line on the Horizon” is the band’s 12th studio album and the hit single, “Get on your Boots,” was also officially premiered on MySpace Music. The album has been greatly anticipated since their last effort, “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb,” was released nearly four and a half years ago. Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno return as producers with Steve Lillywhite offering additional production and sessions were truly multinational being held in Fez, London, New York and, naturally, Dublin.

Photograph by Hiroshi Sugimoto

CD Review: Incognito “More Tales Remixed”

Incognito

“More Tales Remixed” (Heads Up International)

By Devon Wendell
The unparalleled success of the U.K.’s Incognito has a lot to do with producer and group founder Jean-Paul “Bluey”Maunick’s acute understanding that the group has a club friendly, musically aware fan base favoring styles ranging from Acid Jazz, Disco, Funk and Hip-Hop to Old School R&B, Electronica, and British House.  All of which are prevalent in the group’s unique, anti-wallflower fusion.

The impact of 2008’s “Tales From the Beach” inspired “Bluey” to recruit some of the most popular DJ’s and mixers from around the world — Dimitri,  DJ Meme, Simon Grey,  Ski Oakenfull, Tortured Soul, Yam Who?, and Outside, among others — to add their own spin to the original album’s tracks, culminating in the band’s newly released “More Tales Remixed.”

Remixes of tracks such as “Feel the Pressure,” by Mark De Clive-Lowe, “Happy People,” by Mystery & Matt Early, and “I Come Alive (Rimshots and Basses)” by DJ Day are both subtle and individual.  Each adds new flavors to the polished fusion/funk and the electronic, disco-rooted horn and rhythm arrangements, bringing to mind the likes of Roy Ayers, Sylvester, George Duke, Earth, Wind & Fire, The Horny Horns, Chic, and Tower Of Power with well-placed synth bass hooks and syncopated digital loops.

The production quality is stellar, leaving no mystery as to why Incognito’s brain child Bluey has been so highly acclaimed and respected for several decades.  The Band’s atmospheric vocalists — Maysa Leak, Imaani, and Tom Momrelle – shine throughout.  And Joy Rose’s confident singing fashions the anthemic “Step Aside” into an album highlight, transformed by Dimitri & DJ Meme into a party-ready extended mix.

Longtime collaborator Ski Oakenfull brings a melodically psychedelic R&B mix to “I’ve Been Waiting,” and the popular Yam Who? deliver their Grace Jones-meets-Junie Morrison, sweat-induced disco grooves to “Freedom To Love.”

“More Tales Remixed” is a cleverly delivered experiment that also gives fans what they want; and, like all of Incognito’s music, it’s not designed to be listened to alone. This is no holds barred party music at its best and most infectious.

…And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead…Reborn

by Casey Dolan

Conrad Keely sits behind a desk sketching. His alert brown eyes dart up, absorbing what bandmates Jason Reece and Kevin Allen are saying regarding the upcoming album for …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead. The academic Keely provides a deep foil for Reece, who displays a voluptuous, convivial athleticism. Reece is talkative despite the rigors of a rough and ready one-off gig the previous night. The laughs come easy. Less so for the taciturn Allen, whose bloodshot eyes indicate a slower recovery.

The Austin band is in recovery mode in toto. Once one of the most praised groups of the post-rock era, an unhappy deal with Interscope resulted in three albums in which the band’s curious mix of melodic beauty and wild anarchic blare was reduced to a programmatic repertoire tailored for radio (although the first of the three –2002’s “Source, Tags and Codes” – is, in all fairness, its most widely praised album earning a 10 out of 10 rating from Pitchfork).

The band left Interscope in 2007 and formed their own Richter Scale Records, partnering with Justice Records (the home of Willie Nelson and Kris Krisofferson) and distributed by Fontana/Universal outside of Europe. Following a teaser EP released October 21, “Festival Thyme,” that gives clear indications of what is to come, the band will release the most ambitious album of its career on February 17, 2009 and possibly put together its most ambitious tour. To complicate the current demands, frontman Keely moved to New York last year leaving the remainder in Austin.

No sign of any schism between the three principals was seen the night before. In a one-off performance intended to recapture their noisy early days in Austin, …Trail of Dead appeared as a bassless trio at the Echo. The audience, who had expected a much fuller ensemble, initially seemed confused. Old familiars — “Gargoyle Waiting,” “Another Morning Stoner” — received muted response, but by the night’s end they were ecstatically pumping fists in the air through the two encores.

The trio stressed the raw, punk side of their more multi-faceted expanded ensemble. This was the profile that earned their initial reputation in Austin nearly 14 years ago, but it masked their consummate abilities in other directions.

At the beating heart of …Trail of Dead there has always been a duality: between atavism and religiosity, a restless pushing and pulling between the Dionysian abandon of a falling Marshall stack amid screams to the pagan gods of rock ‘n’ roll toilets everywhere versus the Apollonian calm of a transfigurative mysticism, some of which harrowingly depicts a final judgment worthy of any Michael Wigglesworth stanza or Yeatsian epiphany. None better illustrates this than a verse and chorus from “Bells of Creation”:

I was standing in the midst of the great company

Listening to their voices in ecstacy

And I watched as all creation was sang into being

It kept changing

 

And all at once I caught a pulse and felt a rhythm

And I thought of the Song of the Ages

But then the balance tipped and opened up a schism

And it felt like raging.

Given the size of the Echo and their still enormous sound even as a three-piece, the set often sounded like a cement mixer pounding pebbles. The sound man tried to compensate for the harsh high-end by boosting Reece’s kick drum (and it worked to some extent as a bass simulator), but, sadly, so much of the band’s melodic invention was lost in the engine’s roar.

As a preview of the album, the gig failed and was, indeed, irrelevant. Only one song from both the EP and album, “Bells of Creation,” was performed and the overall sound bore no resemblance to the greater part of an album which could very well signal a turning point in the band’s career.

The still-untitled album is an enormously expressive work that acts as a summation of everything that came before and points toward a future of greater musical complexity. There is a majesty, a maturity and gravitas that suggests “masterwork.” All of Keely and Freece’s melodic gifts are on display and the interweaving guitar parts, layered vocals, rich and diverse keyboard sounds employing real string samples combine to form an overwhelming whole. Changes in meter from 4/4 to 6/8 (and 9/8 in one tune), a signature mark of the band, are never token nods to prog inclinations, but seamlessly integrated into complete song statements.

No single is immediately obvious, although “Bells of Creation” seems a likely candidate.

Old fans will appreciate the blood and thunder of the opening three tracks. The spirit of a pop Sonic Youth is there — with screams, feedback, noise and simple Mogwai-like immensity. But as the album begins in violent birth, so it transforms by the fourth track and, lo, enter beauty, consideration and wisdom. That might win them new fans — fans who appreciate the composer’s compass of a (dare I speak the name?) Radiohead — but it could equally continue to alienate those who dismissed them several albums ago.

Not so surprisingly, given Keely’s heritage, Irish motifs spring up at various points: the opening instrumental track title (see below), the sing-song chorus on “Fields of Coal” and a quasi-ceilidh band effect of string sounds on “Isis Unveiled.” Bells, feedback loops and startling close harmony vocals contribute to the rich palette of sounds.

Producer Chris Coady (TV On the Radio, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Grizzly Bear) was a boon addition to the project, bringing a wealth of technological savvy the band hadn’t employed before, but his involvement was necessitated by a severing of ties.

Reece explains, “We started recording in the March of this year. There were a lot of breakups in time…we lost a producer (long-time associate Mike McCarthy). We kind of “switched producers.” It was kind of mutual….”

“It was a moving along,” interrupts Keely. “I think he felt that in the direction we were going, he probably didn’t feel like he knew how he could contribute, trying to do this new ambition…. It was a long relationship that came to its conclusion. I think, with especially what we were trying to do, that we [wanted to] embrace recent technology, like take what’s going on right now. To me, the changes in technology always have to be at the heart of the creative expression. Mike McCarthy’s a traditionalist; he’s not really moving with the times. The choice of Chris Coady had a lot to do with his ability to grasp…obviously, a common vocabulary.

“Chris had his own opinions about how to make soft synths sound rich. So I was constantly giving him files in Logic [Apple's studio application]. It would just be raw data that you’d pass through a million processors and that’s where he lost me because I don’t know anything about gear in that sense. I’m learning, but it’s a pretty arcane art to me.”

“A lot of cables,” adds Reece.

“…Patch this together,” says Allen.

And, finally, Keely says, “It was a very small studio.”

“But it’s still basically analog,” Allen says. “It only has 24 tracks.”

“The basic stuff is analog, you know, what we did live,” says Reece. “Live to 2-inch tape: drums, guitars, bass, flying around in a room…. Some songs have two drummers.”

Keely laughs. “One song has three (‘Halcyon Days’).”

The band received some unexpected assistance during recording.

“We had people come in and guest on it,” says Reece. ”Yeasayer…and Brenda Radney. She’s on Justin Timberlake’s label. That was like a weird accident…. [Producer] Chris Coady has this one area [of the studio] and John Hill [the producer/writer of Santogold]…has this other area. All the people who were going through his place walked through this corridor, so they would have to hear us working. This girl was like, ‘Hey, what you guys up to?’”

Keely elaborates, “That was the fun thing about working in New York. You had this small community of other people in bands to call upon, pop in. Chris was friends with Yeasayer and brought them in. We had friends, Dragons of Zynth, and just local bands who…just came in and sang.”

But nothing was simple in the development of this album. Even the final process had to be redone. Jason Reece explains, “We actually mastered this record before, then we just didn’t like the way it sounded, so we had to revamp, rethink everything out.”

Keely continues to sketch. Perhaps at his fundamental core, Conrad Keely is a visual artist. His artwork for the album is close to finish. He’s working on a elephant processional scene, “Classical. Slightly Graeco-Roman. The elephant is the symbol of our label and the procession is supposed to illustrate the idea of moving forward.”

The touring group will be six in number, but, if Keely has his way, will also include traveling art exhibits, spoken word interludes and other forms of multi-media.

Album song titles and current sequence (Regarding the sequence, Keely says “The final version [was figured out on the plane from New York two days earlier]. The first three songs will never change. That was part of the original sequence.”):

1. Giant’s Causeway (renamed, but still Irish-themed, from “The Betrayal of Roger Casement and the Irish Brigade” on the EP and a different mix)
2. Far Pavilions
3. Isis Unveiled (The first three songs work as an almost continuous intro to the whole album. Each song neatly dovetailing into the next)
4. Halcyon Days (Allen says, “This is where the album really changes, in that breakdown in the middle…. [The album up to that point is like] the last scene in ‘2001.”)
5. Bells of Creation (available as a stream on the band’s myspace page and on the EP in a different mix; also available as a one-week only download at RCRDLBL.com)
6. Fields of Coal (with a Dylanesque vocal and quasi-sea shanty chorus)
7. Inland Sea (available in edited form on the EP and a production highlight)
8. Luna Park
9. Pictures of an Only Child (one of Keely’s earliest songs, mainly autobiographical and with surprising changes in key)
10. Insatiable I (a stripped down piano waltz)
11. Ascending (has a double, not doubled, vocal with one singing half-time. A section of the song is in 9/8)
12. August Theme
13. Insatiable II (The fuller reprise of track 10, and ends with a mighty repeated chorus: “I’m the monster, I exist/On this summit, I am lost/On its slopes I’ve seen/The world as she was meant to be seen.” This Shelleyan ode (both Mary and Percy) to the primeval was inspired by Gigantopithecus, the historical King Kong that lived in southeast Asia almost a million years ago and, in the song, our source ancestor).

Photo by Rachael Warner