Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Great Forgotten Albums 2: Mecca Normal's "The Observer" (Kill Rock Stars; 2006)

A concept album about online dating written by a feminist experimental semi-riot-grrl art-rock band with no drummer, this might sound a really bad idea or a really good one. Your judgement may be influenced by whether you're a deadbeat man or a cynical and single woman.

Mecca Normal was formed in 1984 in Vancouver by vocalist Jean Smith and guitarist David Lester. Smith has also had a few novels published by small presses, and both she and Lester are visual artists. Their early recordings had an influence both on riot grrl and on the Olympia, Washington twee scene centred around Calvin Johnson. They are frequently of low sonic quality, and make little attempt at writing songs - it's more like someone thinking aloud while someone else tunes up their guitar. This makes The Observer stand out with its mix of catchy pop songs and epic spoken word tracks.

The album starts as fairly conventional alt-rock. "I'm Not Into Being The Woman You're With While You're Looking For The Woman You Want" is self-explanatory, about a man who's looking for "a like-minded woman" but apparently hasn't succeeded. It's an upbeat and catchy opener, with constantly shifting guitars, by turns crunchy and melodic, and succinct summings up of the dating game like the title and: "He says he hasn't found what he's looking for yet. After he's met me."

And there are plenty more failures to meet like-minded people. In "Attraction Is Ephemeral" she describes her time with a seductive and wealthy man, a successful architect: "He says, I love a woman who adorns herself with jewellery. I like a woman who has variation in her wardrobe. ... He suggests I visit a website of Austrian designed underwear. It's expensive but it's beautiful, he says. I stand there by the stove in my slutty outfit the total of which probably cost me $15 including my $1 panties."

She contrasts his worldly sophistication with her own skill at finding discount vegetables: "I don't buy crackers and cheese and pickles and cookies because they're too expensive, and I know the prices of almost everything in the little shops, and if oranges are 50 cents a pound here and 49 cents a pound across the street I will cross the street to save whatever it is, a pound, on my oranges, and brag about it." "He says he'll bring his grand piano out of storage", and all the time she's wondering if they've really connected or if everything he says is "just another line".

"Attraction Is Ephemeral" also introduces sex. "I lie there under him. 230 lb. 'Am I crushing you?' he says. 'Sort of,' I say." Maybe that's why she seems so underwhelmed. "I'll Call You" starts "I want cold impersonal sex during which I'll pretend I'm with someone else." For all the cynicism of its what-people-are-really-thinking lyrics, it's one of the songs you could more easily imagine being played on the radio, along with "To Avoid Pain" with its "Hey hey" refrain.

Some of the later tracks are weaker and break the theme. "The Caribou and the Oil Pipeline" is worthy and dull environmentalism. "The Message" has the rawness and tunelessness of the band's earlier material.

"1922" isn't about dating but is much better: Smith is reflective, outwardly nostalgic but inwardly sad, with lyrical guitars from Lester. "Nothing's automatic, nothing's precise", she says, describing old pictures, thinking about the simple life: "The museums are for men. We know this. Men need history. We need it. We are men. We need to remind ourselves of this." It's funny but always with a harshness in her voice, sometimes barely hidden, sometimes out front, and that links it with the rest of the album.

The album's centrepiece is the twelve-and-three-quarter minute long "Fallen Skier". Over an endlessly repeating riff she describes a first date with a man who arouses both pity and contempt in her, though nothing like love. As you do on a first date, they swap life stories, and she offers a detailed biography of him, a life that never quite took off. He's a "fallen skier, waiter, party guy" - a man aged 47, who had dropped out of school to be a ski bum, later waiting tables at a Greek restaurant "where the staff were encouraged to drink half price on arriving for work", an addict, and is now at college, planning to backpack around Europe. "I don't think he realises it yet but his life has gotten away from him."

She also enumerates his reactions to her, and hers to him, in a series of quotable lines. "No one moves to skid row to get clean." "Will i be playing the part of the woman helping him get his life on track?" "He asks me about this music of mine, is it ever all-out punk? ... I stand a middle-aged woman in a fantastically subtle silk jacket all the way from Japan, Hush Puppies, curly hair flowing in the wind, and this guy's fretting over the possibility that I'm actually Henry Rollins." All in her fantastic delivery, turning on a dime from dry and throwaway, to indignant or tragic.

Time and again she contrasts her own intellectual and creative life with the poverty of his existence: "Carefully I ask if he does anything he might call creative. ... He thinks for a minute and says he doesn't make music or paint if that's what I mean but he does watch TV. Free cable ... I can only half think about being so grey and dispassionate to call watching TV creative."

Although harsh, her lyricism does something to justify this. "Standing on the pier half-watching the sun go down. A cloud of mist is giving great definition to the trees which should have been flat and invisible. I'm thinking of saying something about how the mist is making things clear, but I decide to keep that thought to myself."

How listeners respond to the record will depend heavily on what they make of Smith. She is frequently condescending, particularly in "Fallen Skier", and when she discusses her own faults it is often to boast about them: meanness becomes frugality. But the intensity of her examinating gaze, the brilliance of her lyrics makes up for this. She comprehensively fails to be the observer; like everyone who is dating, sifting through the deadbeats to find a partner, she is the judge.

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