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.
Showing posts with label greatalbums. Show all posts
Showing posts with label greatalbums. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Great Forgotten Albums: The Mekons (aka Devils, Rats and Piggies) by The Mekons
A collection of songs about war, murder, child abuse, corporate crime, revolution, mining disaster, and the nastiness of suburbia, this is one of the strangest and most atmospheric albums ever released. But it is one that is easily missed and often dismissed by critics who find it lacks the Hank Williams cover versions and good-time spirit found on their later disks.
Its obscurity is not helped by the fact that people can't even agree on its title - it is sometimes called Devils, Rats and Piggies, and sometimes The Mekons or even Second Album. But we know that it was recorded and released in 1980 on Red Rhino in the UK, the follow to their debut The Quality of Mercy is Not Strnen (whose strange title echoes monkeys typing Shakespeare).
The band came out of the late-70s punk scene in Leeds that also produced Gang of Four and Delta 5. But after early singles like Never Been In A Riot, the Mekons rapidly moved away from the guitar-based sound of punk, becoming by 1985 the proto-alt-country act which recorded the classic Fear and Whiskey.
This record might be the most interesting point on that strange journey. Mixing horns, synths, and violin with distorted guitars, it sounds cheap and muddy with frequently-incomprehensible vocals. Yet beneath that facade are compelling if half-mumbled messages about a world obsessed with propriety, high culture, and success, that hides dark secrets of destructiveness and lust.
It begins uncompromisingly with "Snow", a wintry account of some kind of revolution or failed revolution, a riot going on outside, a prisoner about to be executed, the singer hiding out of the way (echoing the situation of their debut single "Never Been in a Riot"). We are used to revolutions in hot countries; at least for a Briton the snow brings it home. Over a buzzing synthesiser and chugging upbeat rhythm, a mechanical voice intones lyrics like "The strong now have another hero" and "The burned-out homes of left-wing names tell us all where power remains". It sounds horrible yet compelling, much like revolution: it is a statement of intent that this will be an album that confuses, dismays, and sonically violates the listener.
"St Patrick's Day" is about "chamber music in a bungalow", the sociology of music, the lower middle-classes listening to high culture. It echoes the philosopher Roger L Taylor, author of "Art an Enemy of the People", that art exists to legitimate those in power, providing a facade of civilisation that hides their crimes. A tuneless voice chants "the third movement structures and orders a meaningless intelligence". The bleak, horrid sound of the Mekons begins to take on some sort of sense; there is no way to use the old cultural forms of the society that rules us: it is necessary to be oblique and half-repellent. "Refinement and taste - you're not even rich." Sonically, this track is based around blaring horns and rapid strings that build up a nervous tension; the strings of course echo the reference to chamber music, while existing to discomfit the listener, not to soothe.
"D. P. Miller" follows post-punk bands like Au Pairs, Gang of Four, and Raincoats in offering a critique of prostitution or the objectification of woman. The singer complains "standing in these high shoes is breaking my back" and moans "these illusions disillusion me", a strikingly Gang of Four-esque line. The female point of view is ironically countered by the very masculine, awkward, rough singing. The repeated phrase "not the rub" recalls both dialect and Shakespeare.
"Institution" looks forward to the Mekons' later country direction. It's a wilder song, far less controlled and more emotional, with tinkling piano and screeching violin, almost ready to fall into a rollicking jam. The key line is "They took me up to the top of the hill and we looked at the institution in the valley below" - this references both Moses viewing the promised land, and Satan taking Jesus on a mountaintop to tempt him.
"I'm So Happy" is particularly incomprehensible, shouted lyrics in which you can make out the odd phrase like "I feel so drunk". Despite the doomy bass it's first cousin of Ian Dury's raucous list songs, though equally like Joy Division. Again, drunkenness is a direction they would later pursue.
"Chopper Song" combines a detailed account of respectable domestic boredom with references to violent crime. "At least he can talk to his wife tonight. They can talk about that night down the club and what's become of Bryan and Susan and the kids". Many of the songs express a contempt for suburbia. In 1980 there was a strong sense that the middle classes all did essentially the same things, exemplified by mainstream sitcoms that portrayed its boredom and narrow horizons. Today there is less class cohesion with middle-class people more likely to act like the working-classes or like kids. The song concludes with the discovery of an axe - the "chopper". It should be remembered that the Mekons' home in West Yorkshire was the hunting ground of the Yorkshire Ripper, who wasn't arrested until 1981 and was killing girls around the time this was released. Despite this, it's musically one of the more pleasant tracks, with long synth chords and conversational vocals, and it welcomes the viewer by offering an easy target to hate.
"Business" is about the corruption of the international banking trade and its relation to violence and war. Musically it sounds close to the Associates with its melodic synths, despite the savageness of the lyrics (repeated phrases "attache case" "uzi machine gun" "powder burns"). It's probably one of the first pop songs to mention Uzis - the singer pronounces them in an English style, /juzi/ with the first vowel as in "use", rather than the now-more-common /uzi/. It's one of the most mainstream-sounding tracks on the record; you could almost imagine it on a crime film soundtrack.
"The Trimden Grange Explosion" is a cover version of a 19th century folk song about a mining disaster in County Durham in 1882 when 74 pit workers were killed. Musically, there are discordant guitars and high-pitched keyboards that stand out more than the vocals, meaning that the impact of this tale of death is lost.
"Karen" is about a 42 year old man (a schoolteacher, it is hinted) who develops a passion for an eight year old girl. Its linkage of violence and sex again recalls the Ripper and the tense atmosphere of the time, as captured in David Peace's Red Riding books, with the killer Peter Sutcliffe preying on innocent young women. Yet rather than condemn outright (as they do to the middle classes in multiple songs) it is told sympathetically from the point of view of the man "Now I'm sure I've found my wife, her name is Karen and she's very important to my life" - not quite mentioning her age yet. A high-pitched male voice saying "Hello I'm Karen" is comical. Perhaps his passion is less reprehensible than middle-class anhedonia.
"Corporal Chalkie" is more comic, about war past and future. "I know what happened before I was born. The Huns and the Nips got uppy with Blighty and Tommy went out to beat them all up" - a crudely populist description of German and Japanese aggression that trivialises the conflict (Tommy being the archetypal British soldier). "It's another war, we say." It's the most accessible track and one of the more well-known, being re-recorded by the Mekons' Sally Timms. It ends in mock-cockney, "There is no more to war than cor lummie, Sarge."
"John Barry" musically pays tribute to the film composer with its guitar riff and horns, showing the band's sonic inventiveness. Lyrically it is about someone watching the TV news, and not being affected by the horrors: "In the world an event occurs. [...] I never see the relevance." The reference to John Barry also suggests a soundtrack as something detached from the action, overlaid and false. It is more sympathetic to the tv viewer than some of the songs: "sitting down we take off our shoes, this was a very busy day" repeated over and over again hints that people have no ability to engage with current affairs because of the drudgery of their lives.
"Another One" concludes the album with a more commercial sound than the first couple of tracks - suggesting the tunelessness is deliberate. However despite its slightly dub rhythm, it is a less compelling song than many.
The reissue adds two new tracks. "Killer Ken" is disposable, but "Another Set of Teeth" is a lively piece of country music that again points towards Fear and Whiskey.
The album stands at a cusp in the band's history. Although parts mark it as a product of early 80s, it often sounds outside anything of its time. There are strong hints of the direction the band later took by repurposing country music as political text, this record combines folk and country with experimental new wave and synth sounds. Country was crucial to the band for offering a more deeper and complex idea of rebellion than punk, with country's interest in honour and sin, pessimism and romanticism, altered mental states (principally drunkenness), and sympathy with the underdog. Yet country is essentially a conservative style in a way that this album is not: nostalgia and sentimentality are things even the Mekons could not always avoid. But here, instead of the timeless tales of failure and apocalypse of Fear and Whiskey, the band has a dark timely paranoid feel that recalls Yorkshire in the 1980s, facing both Thatcher and Peter Sutcliffe.
Its obscurity is not helped by the fact that people can't even agree on its title - it is sometimes called Devils, Rats and Piggies, and sometimes The Mekons or even Second Album. But we know that it was recorded and released in 1980 on Red Rhino in the UK, the follow to their debut The Quality of Mercy is Not Strnen (whose strange title echoes monkeys typing Shakespeare).
The band came out of the late-70s punk scene in Leeds that also produced Gang of Four and Delta 5. But after early singles like Never Been In A Riot, the Mekons rapidly moved away from the guitar-based sound of punk, becoming by 1985 the proto-alt-country act which recorded the classic Fear and Whiskey.
This record might be the most interesting point on that strange journey. Mixing horns, synths, and violin with distorted guitars, it sounds cheap and muddy with frequently-incomprehensible vocals. Yet beneath that facade are compelling if half-mumbled messages about a world obsessed with propriety, high culture, and success, that hides dark secrets of destructiveness and lust.
It begins uncompromisingly with "Snow", a wintry account of some kind of revolution or failed revolution, a riot going on outside, a prisoner about to be executed, the singer hiding out of the way (echoing the situation of their debut single "Never Been in a Riot"). We are used to revolutions in hot countries; at least for a Briton the snow brings it home. Over a buzzing synthesiser and chugging upbeat rhythm, a mechanical voice intones lyrics like "The strong now have another hero" and "The burned-out homes of left-wing names tell us all where power remains". It sounds horrible yet compelling, much like revolution: it is a statement of intent that this will be an album that confuses, dismays, and sonically violates the listener.
"St Patrick's Day" is about "chamber music in a bungalow", the sociology of music, the lower middle-classes listening to high culture. It echoes the philosopher Roger L Taylor, author of "Art an Enemy of the People", that art exists to legitimate those in power, providing a facade of civilisation that hides their crimes. A tuneless voice chants "the third movement structures and orders a meaningless intelligence". The bleak, horrid sound of the Mekons begins to take on some sort of sense; there is no way to use the old cultural forms of the society that rules us: it is necessary to be oblique and half-repellent. "Refinement and taste - you're not even rich." Sonically, this track is based around blaring horns and rapid strings that build up a nervous tension; the strings of course echo the reference to chamber music, while existing to discomfit the listener, not to soothe.
"D. P. Miller" follows post-punk bands like Au Pairs, Gang of Four, and Raincoats in offering a critique of prostitution or the objectification of woman. The singer complains "standing in these high shoes is breaking my back" and moans "these illusions disillusion me", a strikingly Gang of Four-esque line. The female point of view is ironically countered by the very masculine, awkward, rough singing. The repeated phrase "not the rub" recalls both dialect and Shakespeare.
"Institution" looks forward to the Mekons' later country direction. It's a wilder song, far less controlled and more emotional, with tinkling piano and screeching violin, almost ready to fall into a rollicking jam. The key line is "They took me up to the top of the hill and we looked at the institution in the valley below" - this references both Moses viewing the promised land, and Satan taking Jesus on a mountaintop to tempt him.
"I'm So Happy" is particularly incomprehensible, shouted lyrics in which you can make out the odd phrase like "I feel so drunk". Despite the doomy bass it's first cousin of Ian Dury's raucous list songs, though equally like Joy Division. Again, drunkenness is a direction they would later pursue.
"Chopper Song" combines a detailed account of respectable domestic boredom with references to violent crime. "At least he can talk to his wife tonight. They can talk about that night down the club and what's become of Bryan and Susan and the kids". Many of the songs express a contempt for suburbia. In 1980 there was a strong sense that the middle classes all did essentially the same things, exemplified by mainstream sitcoms that portrayed its boredom and narrow horizons. Today there is less class cohesion with middle-class people more likely to act like the working-classes or like kids. The song concludes with the discovery of an axe - the "chopper". It should be remembered that the Mekons' home in West Yorkshire was the hunting ground of the Yorkshire Ripper, who wasn't arrested until 1981 and was killing girls around the time this was released. Despite this, it's musically one of the more pleasant tracks, with long synth chords and conversational vocals, and it welcomes the viewer by offering an easy target to hate.
"Business" is about the corruption of the international banking trade and its relation to violence and war. Musically it sounds close to the Associates with its melodic synths, despite the savageness of the lyrics (repeated phrases "attache case" "uzi machine gun" "powder burns"). It's probably one of the first pop songs to mention Uzis - the singer pronounces them in an English style, /juzi/ with the first vowel as in "use", rather than the now-more-common /uzi/. It's one of the most mainstream-sounding tracks on the record; you could almost imagine it on a crime film soundtrack.
"The Trimden Grange Explosion" is a cover version of a 19th century folk song about a mining disaster in County Durham in 1882 when 74 pit workers were killed. Musically, there are discordant guitars and high-pitched keyboards that stand out more than the vocals, meaning that the impact of this tale of death is lost.
"Karen" is about a 42 year old man (a schoolteacher, it is hinted) who develops a passion for an eight year old girl. Its linkage of violence and sex again recalls the Ripper and the tense atmosphere of the time, as captured in David Peace's Red Riding books, with the killer Peter Sutcliffe preying on innocent young women. Yet rather than condemn outright (as they do to the middle classes in multiple songs) it is told sympathetically from the point of view of the man "Now I'm sure I've found my wife, her name is Karen and she's very important to my life" - not quite mentioning her age yet. A high-pitched male voice saying "Hello I'm Karen" is comical. Perhaps his passion is less reprehensible than middle-class anhedonia.
"Corporal Chalkie" is more comic, about war past and future. "I know what happened before I was born. The Huns and the Nips got uppy with Blighty and Tommy went out to beat them all up" - a crudely populist description of German and Japanese aggression that trivialises the conflict (Tommy being the archetypal British soldier). "It's another war, we say." It's the most accessible track and one of the more well-known, being re-recorded by the Mekons' Sally Timms. It ends in mock-cockney, "There is no more to war than cor lummie, Sarge."
"John Barry" musically pays tribute to the film composer with its guitar riff and horns, showing the band's sonic inventiveness. Lyrically it is about someone watching the TV news, and not being affected by the horrors: "In the world an event occurs. [...] I never see the relevance." The reference to John Barry also suggests a soundtrack as something detached from the action, overlaid and false. It is more sympathetic to the tv viewer than some of the songs: "sitting down we take off our shoes, this was a very busy day" repeated over and over again hints that people have no ability to engage with current affairs because of the drudgery of their lives.
"Another One" concludes the album with a more commercial sound than the first couple of tracks - suggesting the tunelessness is deliberate. However despite its slightly dub rhythm, it is a less compelling song than many.
The reissue adds two new tracks. "Killer Ken" is disposable, but "Another Set of Teeth" is a lively piece of country music that again points towards Fear and Whiskey.
The album stands at a cusp in the band's history. Although parts mark it as a product of early 80s, it often sounds outside anything of its time. There are strong hints of the direction the band later took by repurposing country music as political text, this record combines folk and country with experimental new wave and synth sounds. Country was crucial to the band for offering a more deeper and complex idea of rebellion than punk, with country's interest in honour and sin, pessimism and romanticism, altered mental states (principally drunkenness), and sympathy with the underdog. Yet country is essentially a conservative style in a way that this album is not: nostalgia and sentimentality are things even the Mekons could not always avoid. But here, instead of the timeless tales of failure and apocalypse of Fear and Whiskey, the band has a dark timely paranoid feel that recalls Yorkshire in the 1980s, facing both Thatcher and Peter Sutcliffe.
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