Music for Goth Girls to Lose Their Virginity to; The Coachmen's Free Rock; Rage Against the Machine; Teenage Fanclub
This week, I got two CDs that sit pretty much opposite in the packaging department. Nine Inch Nails' Things Falling Apart looks like pretty much any Nine Inch Nails album: a closeup of something metallic for the cover, a minimal booklet and all the text in that boring NIN font. Time Is Money, by South Park Mexican, has diamond-encrusted Master P lettering ("SPM") and our hero right on the front of the record, raking in 50s and 100s as they fall from trees. The booklet is 12 pages of ads.
I'll talk about Nine Inch Nails first, because if I don't, Trent Reznor might get offended and contract writer's block for the next five years. Don't worry, Trent. You put out a good, solid record. Things Falling Apart is mostly a bunch of remixes, but that's all right because it's what you do best. As those of us who were duped into buying The Fragile know, a full CD of Nine Inch Nails is a dubious proposition. The more songs you listen to, the more you realize (1) Trent Reznor is not a very interesting vocalist; (2) he doesn't write very good songs; and (3) he uses the word "decay" too much. Forget albums?in the past few years even a decent single has eluded this band (1997's "The Perfect Drug" was the last).
But that's all for the bad stuff. What Nine Inch Nails does do, to great effect, is make music for goth girls to lose their virginity to. I bet Trent Reznor was shrieking at a good 5000 deflowerings since Pretty Hate Machine came out in 1989. This is the guy who made a hit single that went, "I want to fuck you like an animal," with a simple, slow, glorious beat that made you want to do just that. And the best Nine Inch Nails record, known to depressingly few, remains Closer to God, the nine-track '94 release containing six different versions of the "Closer" single. Each version is more sexual and terrifying than the last?there are tracks that have "I want to fuck you, fuck you, fuck you" looped over and over, with animal noises and a preacher's rants in the background. It's wild.
Things Falling Apart hails from this section of the Nine Inch Nails catalog, though it falls far short of Closer to God. What Trent did was take five songs from The Fragile and rework them with Alan Moudler, Keith Hillebrandt, Charlie Clouser and others. Added to the final product are two Fragile outtakes and one terrific Gary Numan cover (no, not "Cars").
The first three tracks are best. "Slipping Away" pulls the "Tried to save myself but myself keeps slipping away" hook from "Into the Void" and repeats it like any good techno song, getting it so stuck in your head you'll have trouble sleeping. "The Great Collapse" features a jugga-jugga beat and guitars straight out of the Smashing Pumpkins' "Hummer." And "The Wretched" is the highlight of Things Falling Apart, with a digitally raped acoustic guitar backing "Now you know/This is what it feels like."
The album concentrates too much on "Starfuckers Inc.," which is remixed three times with no discernible gain. The Gary Numan cover is "Metal," and it shows how good Trent Reznor would be if he honed his song- and lyric-writing skills. Numan ends up with some of the best lines on the record: "I'd love to pull the wires from the wall," "I could crawl around the floor just like I'm real."
Things Falling Apart showcases Trent Reznor's talents as a producer, manipulator and all-out audio nut. It also shows how copied he is, especially by his protege Marilyn Manson, the red herring target of "Starfuckers, Inc." (really about Courtney Love, of course). It's $10 less expensive than The Fragile; it makes up for lackluster singing with sick vocal effects, and it completely avoids the word "decay." Go buy it and find yourself a goth girl.
As for South Park Mexican's Time Is Money, what can I say? It's not just rap; it's bad, cheap rap. Many people don't realize how little rap costs to make: all you need are beats, which you buy from a company that makes them professionally. Then you bring the talent, have him rhyme over the beats, and add backing vocals on key words ("Uuuuh").
Given that, there's no excuse for Time Is Money to sound like a setting on my cellphone ringer. Whoever produced this could've spent a bit more to make South Park Mexican's one fun song, "Twice Last Night," sound like it wasn't done on a Casio tone bank. This album has lyrics like "You didn't know the new Benz I just bought you/Could be tracked by satellite and that's how I caught you." I'm in a band called The New Mexikans and our demo sounds a lot better than this.
Ned Vizzini
The original Coachmen, circa 1978-'80, included a pre-Sonic Youth Thurston Moore as well as JD King, Bob Pullin and Dan Walworth. Nowadays, King (who on occasion does excellent illustrations for New York Press) is the only original Coachman still in the band. The rest of the current crop consists of Valerie Boyd on keyboards, Dave Wain on bass and UK transplant Simon Quick on drums. The Coachmen's heroes include Archie Shepp, Sunny Murray, Mingus, Cecil Taylor, Ran Blake, Neil Young and John Cage?among others. How do I know? Because they told me so. On the back of the LP and in the titles of their tunes.
I didn't hear a lot of any of these folks' influences in the music, however. Neil at his noisiest, yes?but the notes hold up "Powderfinger" as a model. There's the final track, "Room Tone," which is four minutes and 33 seconds (get it?) of just that. There's a brief section of Mingus' "Meditations on a Pair of Wire Cutters" that sounds like the band's actually cutting wire. Maybe that's the Mingus they're thinking of.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Nobody has to be Cecil Taylor to make a good record. The setup is guitar, bass, drums and Farfisa, and there are certainly interesting sounds here. Buzzing bass, space-static guitar, authoritative banging of drums. Sometimes heavy reverb, reminiscent of surf guitar, other times meditative long tones. Zither-like sounds, squeaks and squeals, car horns in traffic, echoes in a laundry room. It's fun to let the record wash over you?you have to, since there's essentially nothing to grab on to, no beats, almost no melody. Basically, to my mind, a record of noise.
But "noise," like "free" or "jazz" or "trippy," is a word that means different things to different people. This is not the dense sledgehammer of Japanoise, nor is it the all-out assault of Borbetomagus. Closer to the mighty Swiss duo Voicecrack, but not as discernibly structured. Highly differentiated noise, since Ten Compositions is beautifully mixed so you can hear each individual instrument, and much of the time be impressed by what King or Wain or Quick or Boyd is doing. The problem is that the connections between what the various band members are doing remain, to me, obscure. Okay, they've detuned their instruments, but does that account for it?
Clearly I'm a retrograde, not ready for the paradigm shift this record represents. My favorite track was the one that departed from the others, "A Psychedelic Swirly (modal variations on a I, IV, V progression for garage quartet)." It sounds pretty much like the title implies it will, and I think it sounds pretty good. But then I'm the type of person who more often than not stops my Velvet Underground and Nico tape when it gets to "The Black Angel's Death Song." If you're not, you might really dig Ten Compostions.
Eva S. Neuberg
Now that Rage Against the Machine is referred to as the "Grandfather" of the rap-metal movement by flavor-of-the-month bands like Papa Roach, it's not surprising that Zack De La Rocha decided to move on to pursue a solo career. But before this chapter of Rage is closed for good, the band has given us an interesting last studio offering (their long-awaited live record is still postponed for the time being). Renegades is a covers record, Rage-ified versions of other artists' rebel songs. But they have all been musically altered so dramatically that they're more like new Rage songs built around other artists' lyrics, from the totally stripped-down, drumless whisper they create out of Devo's subtly ironic "Beautiful World" to the classic Rage hiphop-thrash built from the old-school street posturing on EPMD's "I'm Housin'."
It's a perfect swan-song for the band. Even those who accuse Rage of being major-label sellouts banking on empty leftist propaganda can't deny that the band has earned itself a place in the canon of political protest pop music. And in addition to being able to pay homage to former band movements like the MC5's White Panther Party with their cover of "Kick Out the Jams," Minor Threat's straight-edge movement with "In My Eyes" and Afrika Bambaataa's Zulu Nation with "Renegades of Funk," with Renegades the band at the same time sidesteps any possibility of being accused of one-dimensional sloganeering: someone else has already made the fuck-you's contained in these songs part of America's rock 'n' toll tapestry.
Most of it works beautifully. The band moves from the Stooges to Cypress Hill to Devo without ever sounding the least bit out of place. Much like the way they morphed Bruce Springsteen's ethereal character in "Ghost of Tom Joad" (a new, even more spirited version of which is included here) into a pissed off, tear-gas-eating protester, Rage takes Dylan's "Maggie's Farm" and swaps his folksy twang with seething, 21st-century-style pro-worker intensity. Especially creative is their techno-esque reworking of the Stones' "Street Fighting Man." Without the help of electronics, they manage to add spacey sound effects and paranoid sirens to fashion a funky, almost Big Beat song out of the original. The only real misstep is their flat, one-dimensional version of "In My Eyes." The sludgy power of Rage's funkier rap-metal style is mitigated when they crank up to mind-scrambling punk speed. And Zack screeching, "What the fuck have you done," doesn't quite indict with the same ferocity as Ian MacKaye's desperate bark did.
Should Rage actually break up after Zack's departure (rumors are flying that the three remaining band members may continue on with B-Real or Chuck D. taking over vocal duties, though the band won't discuss any replacement possibilities at this point), this record will serve as an apt final testament to what spectacular musicians they are. While the Limp Bizkits of the world have mimicked their rap-rock hybrid and soft-verse/explosive-chorus dynamic, even having some success with creating record loop-sounding effects using live, nonsampled instruments, no one in that band or any other rap-rock band can hold Rage guitarist Tom Morello's jock when it comes to inventive guitar-playing. The band says in the liner notes that they used samples to help create "Pistol Grip Pump" and "Renegades of Funk," though it's nearly impossible to distinguish them from the sonic wizardry the band pulls off using guitar, bass and drums. The bomb-squad-like sirens and steady, repetitive groove sustained on "Renegades of Funk," the sudden change of tempo, mood and sound mid-song on Cypress Hill's "How I Could Just Kill a Man" designed to replicate the part of the original song when the DJ switches to a new record, and the cello-sounding bass feedback shading "Beautiful World" are all done with a quaint, good old-fashioned guitar band setup.
I don't know if that live record is ever actually going to come out, but even if it doesn't, Renegades has already given us one last reason to miss these guys now that it's all over.
Mike Bruno
Oh, sweet nothin'. The career purgatory in which Teenage Fanclub has found itself over the last half-decade?plenty of fans in England, bupkus here?is not terribly unique, but the way the band has developed during this period certainly is. No desperate publicity ploys, no makeovers, no grand plans to recapture the commercial promise a few A&Rs and journalists saw in them 10 years ago?nothing that would end up in a Ray Davies short story. Instead, they've turned pastoral, calm, meditative. They've actually grown up and moved toward themes of humility and self-respect?such a rarity for any rock band, and such a miracle for a group that had a glimpse of fame and saw it disappear.
Howdy! is, like the little-noticed Songs from Northern Britain before it ('97), the sound of a rock band totally at peace. Dry harmonies float around clear guitar chords as brilliant as sunshine?no more distortion for these grunge survivors. Tempos are easy, everybody's sitting down, it's late at night, you're talking with your best friends about what worries you most in life. A song you love wafts quietly through the door to the next room.
On the album, which has been released in the UK only, Teenage Fanclub seems to be down to three principal members: Gerard Love, Raymond McGinley and Norman Blake, who have each developed wonderfully as songwriters over the last several years. The words actually matter now. And each of them sings very graceful songs about spiritual confusion, comforting themselves with beautiful music through painful questions like, How will I know what to do with my life? And, Have I been living my life wrong all this time? These are basic questions of anybody's second adolescence, which can happen anytime, and the clarity and honesty of the lyrics are as inspiring as Who's Next, the only point in Pete Townshend's career in which he wasn't spewing bullshit about things like sex-determination experiments or cosmic communion with the universe through pinball. (As any Who nerd can tell you, this is only because the mega-concept Lifehouse was ditched and its thematic scraps became the relatively straightforward Who's Next, which was recorded as a demo.)
Again and again on Howdy!, the theme of directionless drifting turns up, of dormant potential that needs to find expression: "Don't know what I want to do/My laziness will see me through," McGinley sings on "Happiness." "My life feels so worthwhile/And I'll go where you send me." Blake nails it with "I need direction/To take me to you," which has spiritual, musical and career connotations. As with Townshend, the most inspiring thing about it is that the answer to all the longing, confusion and aimlessness is the equated love of music and love of a woman. Townshend's sharpest insights were not the ambiguous agitprop of "Won't Get Fooled Again" or "Baba O'Riley," but the scaled-down introspection of "Behind Blue Eyes," "Getting in Tune" and "Bargain," in which the singer finds meaning and direction simply in the song he sings. If you're in tune with your instrument, you're in tune with yourself and with the one you love. And if you give up everything for love, it's a bargain.
Teenage Fanclub picks up the theme admirably. "Take me back to what I know/'Cause I don't know where to go/And I'm finding it's so hard to stay in tune," Blake sings in "Dumb Dumb Dumb." Elsewhere the idea expands into music as therapy and spiritual metaphor. On "My Uptight Life," McGinley sings, "I'll stay in bed till I stabilize/I try to write this song to move my life along," and on Love's "The Town and the City," the group chorus urges patience and devotion to music and love: "If you can't see it right away, don't just walk away/You've got to listen, you've got to listen/Don't just walk away, listen for what you're missing."
It should be bad news for the band that their musical epiphany comes almost a decade after most of the world has dismissed them as a trendy footnote of the shoegazer/grunge phenomenon, especially since it's unavailable to American audiences. But the important thing is that they got there. Doesn't really matter how.
Ben Sisario