Punk Country-Blues from the Kropotkins; Rock*A*Teens and Bobbyteens; Country Sensation Slim Cessna

Dave Soldier, an accomplished avant-garde composer who heads the great Soldier String Quartet and has played with artists ranging from Bo Diddley to John Cale, has put together the avant-garde, self-described "punk" country/blues outfit the Kropotkins. Besides Soldier, the band consists of the Velvets' Moe Tucker, former Swans drummer Jonathan Kane, Dog (Mark Deffenbaugh of Siouxsie and the Banshees), Charlie Burnham of James Blood Ulmer's band, and a young singer from Memphis called Lorette Velvette. The music this motley group makes is a tweaked, stripped-down take on classic American music and the most cliched images of the South?as Velvette sings on one track, "Your story's history's highly outrageous/Roll ya on a crate a RC Cola/Cause baby you're a broken down Ford." Sometimes the Kropotkins' peculiar take on these genres works terrifically, as on the twangy, rollicking hoedown "Truckstop Girls," or "Sissy Wa Wa," a spare number based on one of those naughty grade-school playground chants.

Velvette has a quavery, unconventionally expressive voice like a female Neil Young. She sings with a slightly breathless, pent-up energy and Tucker thumps away on the bass drum with something of the same quality. There's banjo and violin, guitar and bass on this album, but rarely all at once?even with a fife and harmonica on some tracks, the sound is not lush or dense but sparse and a little frantic. The lyrics?by Velvette, Tucker, Soldier, Burnham and poet James Tucker?tend to be sexual in a way that's oblique and somewhat coy. For every up-front moment?"I like my man who is thick at the root"?there's something that rings totally false, like Velvette singing "get back woman you messing my stuff up." It's a toothless threat.

The artier this stuff gets, the harder it is to take. A song about Charlie Starkweather has these lyrics: "Christ the carpenter is nigh, Master of the Badlands/hammering people down like crooked nails." Now if those were rock lyrics, sung with the right delivery, they might work. But Soldier has chosen to use piano on this track, and Burnham sings in a very pretty vein, with the unfortunate result a Blue Gene Tyranny-type oratorio. The RC/Ford lyrics come from a song called "Justice Down South." The irony here, I think, is supposed to be that the "justice" applies to a lovers' relationship. The problem is that apart from taking place in Biloxi the relationship has no relation to anything recognizably real, either physical or emotional.

Mulatta Records' site actually boasts that the disc "explor[es] a theoretical parallel world in American culture." Isn't real American culture bizarre and fertile enough? Then there's the problem that it's just inherently hard to punk this stuff up. What's more punk than a washboard and spoons, or a 10-bar blues? And what's more self-mocking of stereotypes of drunks and inbreds than a country tune like "I'm My Own Grandpa" or "Face on the Bar Room Floor"? Five Points Crawl is worth a listen because of its sonic unorthodoxy, but the lyrics could use a dose of something real and true and direct, the thing that made the classic songs just that.

Eva Neuberg

 

Under One Roof: Singles and Oddities Barbara Manning (Innerstate) Like a lot of people on the wrong side of urban gentrification, Barbara Manning lost her long-term rent-controlled apartment recently. The city in question was San Francisco, where bohemianism ain't exactly what it used to be (add to that list New York, Boston and Seattle). She finds herself an artist in exile. It's unfortunate that in this reputed economic boom, it's sometimes the more genuine articles that are being weeded out. I doubt Eminem has to sweat for digs. Barbara, on the other hand, was more or less run out of town on a rail. But she's also been one of the few truly gifted artists of our time, and her debut album, Lately I Keep Scissors?recorded way back in 1988?was the predecessor to the girl-urchins who reigned in the 90s. Manning has received a lot of unfair treatment, from being driven from her spiritual hometown to not getting asked to play Lilith. That's the story of her life, which is why her work is always convincing. After the Scissors album she built her reputation in the indie underground through a brilliant series of singles and compilation tracks recorded for a host of obscure labels. These singles came and went, and if you were lucky you grabbed 'em. Forty-fives are "cool" and all, but they're a hassle; being more the practical man than cultist, I've been salivating over the thought of this album for years.

Finally someone's gone ahead and put all those rarities in one place. The oldest stuff dates from 1989; the most recent, 1996. This CD is a fitting summary of those years (the real heyday of indie rock). Some highlights: Manning's long-lost single recorded for Forced Exposure in 1990, "Don't Let It Bring You Down"/"Haze Is Free (Mounting a Broken Ladder)." The a-side was important in the "guilty pleasures" category, being a Wings song and all, but the dirgelike delivery and scrapyard needles-and-pins guitars bring out the true meaning of McCartney's opus in a way the unctuous ex-Beatle never could. This was the triumph of Manning's era?a redefinition of rock from which traditional "rock" would never recover. "Haze Is Free," perhaps her magnum opus, goes heavy on the wind machine (oscillator) and revolves around the line, "I wish I could mail you a ball of flame." Manning never got such a unique guitar sound again, an almost discordant symphony of harmonic density. Dramatically this song builds to crescendos as epic as those in "Like a Rolling Stone" or "Gimme Shelter" (or "Heroin" for that matter). There's a foreboding texture, spiced by Manning's edgy delivery as well as the thundering timpani that signal each stanza. After this song, there is nothing left but apocalypse.

Speaking of which, "Someone Wants You Dead" was the first song I ever heard by her. A song almost mystical in its divine iridescence, but the sentiment was still punk-cynical (hence the title). The key moment comes when she sings "bury the ax and clear the air"?suddenly the whole song takes on the liberating feel of an orgasmic epiphany. Why they chose this version, which was already on the One Perfect Green Blanket album, and not the less-readily-available SF Seals version?which has a more jangly and even-tempo'd groove?I don't know. "B4 We Go Under," from '93, represents the era when this stuff was in abundance. Once again Manning creates the perfect juxtaposition of oddly tuned guitars cascading like falling spikes and ethereal vocals (of which she was the absolute empress?it was only after her that Rebecca Odes, Mary Helium, etc., sang flat).

The beauty of Barbara Manning is that, although she was embraced by the collegiate types who made up the indie-rock audience, she was never really one of them?she came from something much purer, and ultimately crazier (as opposed to the controlled "craziness" of the college creeps). Speaking of crazy, check out her version of "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away": here was the ultimate pop mutation, taking a song that was instantly familiar to just about everyone and subjecting it to the ultimate postmod redefinition. The result sounded like a 12-year-old singing a Christmas carol through a shortwave radio in the midst of nuclear fallout. Her guitar solo, grating and piercing as a dentist's drill but still surprisingly in tune, as are her monotone vocals, was like the final rape-job of the 60s songbook, an even more radical defilement of mere "rock" standards than even Devo's "Satisfaction."

There are some omissions here: for instance, where's "Eights," a collaboration with Seymour Glass that was one of the druggiest and most ethereal opuses of the whole age? But considering we're not gonna get much more of this stuff, I guess we should be satisfied. Barbara Manning's one of the more important musical figures of our time and the legend starts here.

Joe S. Harrington

 

Sweet Bird of Youth The Rock*A*Teens (Merge) It was bound to happen. Having released several of the most distinctive albums of the last decade?Cry (1997), Baby, a Little Rain Must Fall (1998) and Golden Time (1999)?the Rock*A*Teens are experiencing some overdue growing pains. Their fifth full-length, the spotty, too-long Sweet Bird of Youth, is hardly a dud, but it buries the sweaty stomp of the quartet's best material under needless layers of poop. Admirably, leader Chris Lopez strives to avoid repeating himself, but he winds up marred by overdubs, boxy production, a goopy mix and a surplus of gratuitous orchestration and assorted vintage flotsam. The group, who hail from the Cabbagetown section of Atlanta, have always reinterpreted 50s and 60s AM stylings, but for the first time, those stylings seem obvious and cute. When fop pop and disgustingly quirky instrumentation became the indie standard (see Belle & Sebastian, the Elephant Six label, the Ladybug Transistor and other Pet Sounds/Sgt. Pepper-indebted swishiness), the R*A*Ts fought back with the coolest guitar tone around, a frayed, reverberating gnarl somewhere between hooky garage, dreamy surf and Psychocandy-era Jesus and Mary Chain. Lopez's gut-wrenching holler turned a surge of echo into dramatic and catchy waltzes that still rocked out. On "Car and Driver," the tipsy keyboard tinkle that opens Sweet Bird of Youth, the retro-tinged courage has turned to camp. Next up, an otherwise grand gesture of snaky pomp-bop, "If I Wanted to Be Famous (I'd Have Shot Someone)," nearly withers from the cloying guest backing vocals by those gals from the tacky Ultrababyfat.

To be fair, the disc isn't all distracting experiments of the neat-we-found-an-accordion variety. The R*A*Ts' no-bullshit victories include the lounge-strutting "Betwixt or Between," the rousing fuzz-swoop of "Hwy R," the resigned "I Hope You Never See Me Like This," the throwback "That Day Is Today," the aching "Lee Knows Every Raindrop" and the shout-along fanfare of "Pretty Thoughts Strike Down the Band." The spirit, the songs, the lyrics and Lopez's desperate pleas can still move mountains; it's the arrangements that suck. On the strength of their live sets and back catalog, the R*A*Ts remain one of America's most magnetic and important musical attractions. Next time they enter a studio, however, they better leave the chintzy ballpark organ at Turner Field.

Jordan S. Mamone

 

 

Candy Falls Here Union Kid (1970 Recordings) Life is black, white, multicolored. Full of primary images and the most clumsy of slogans. Time is written in large, clear, binary symbols and rock songs have big, shouty choruses that can be memorized after half a listen. It must be ace being Braintree, Essex band Union Kid. There's so little to this UK power-punk band's debut album, it's irresistible. Songs are rushed through at 100 mph, harmonies and melodies stick to the same basic three-chord blueprint the Ramones first invented all those years ago?which means there's a certain amount of 60s girl group teen angst present. Also, a smattering of Beach Boys surfing tunes (single "Fort Disney"). Rock is anything but complicated in this trio's head, but it's not there to be scorned or made cheap fun of either (a la Rancid, Blink 182). Rock is as serious as cancer.

The key to understanding the appeal of Union Kid's music lies in the pictures adorning the sleeve: an Atari Asteroids game cartridge, a stack of colored pencils; multicolored piles of cheap candy. Each one could correspond to a song, whether it be the dumbed-down Nirvana-isms of "This Is Killer Island," frantic buzzsaw Dinosaur Jr.-inspired riffing on single "3% Seattle" or lovelorn "Quality Time," which sounds spookily like prime mid-70s Pink Floyd. There are tunes to roll around with in the muck and grime for days on end.

Everett True

 

Always Say Please and Thank You Slim Cessna's Auto Club (Alternative Tentacles) I never realized the full extent of my drinking problem in college until I heard this Alternative Tentacles debut. As far as Jello Biafra goes, I can't forget the hard-earned wages from Baskin-Robbins, Pizza Hut, Denny's, San Francisco Music Box Company, et al., that he stole from me and every other high school punk rocker across the land at not one but two of his early 90s spoken-word events. My friend Harlan Cridle, who grew up on the other side of the country, and who told me of his Biafra-high-school-spoken-word-experience (which when added to those of Henry Rollins could easily be considered the great equalizer of my generation) put it best. "He was talking about taking all the bombs and pointing them at Washington, DC or something, and everyone in the room was cheering like mad," he told me. "I jumped up and screamed, 'Wait a second! I think he's serious!'" Personally I feel that much like the head of any other fascist regime, Biafra owes several thousand then-16-year-olds retribution for the lost money we should have been spending on drugs and condoms. That said, the man has damn good taste in music. So I wasn't surprised to find he'd snatched up country sensation Slim Cessna and his Auto Club, whose fan base in Denver is so loyal that not only did they travel to Las Vegas to see Slim and the boys open for Mr. Johnny Cash years ago, but it was reported that several grown men actually cried when their band took the stage. Many a Saturday night did I myself spend at Denver's Bluebird Theater or the infamous Lion's Lair, where the Auto Club boys gave us not only an excuse to abuse alcohol and our bodies, but a reason to hoot and holler while we did it. Many will never be able to say thank you often enough. Sure there was that odd, eerie moment when Frank Hauser Jr. stood behind his accordion wailing about baptism and we realized he actually believed in Jesus, but as long as there was nothing Christian about those evenings, we were happy. This, for me, was around '94. In '99, a friend brought the band's latest CD to New York for me to hear, and I was a little disappointed. It wasn't all I'd remembered, but I chalked it up to the fact that while many bands are made for the studio, thank goodness others, like Slim's, are best enjoyed live, with an arm about your waist and a cold one in your fist.

Then I got a copy of Always Say Please and Thank You, and really saw the light?that some memories are hazy for a reason. Possibly it's because the band has gone through major lineup changes since their heyday. Slim's trademark gold tooth and enduringly Southern congeniality remain, yet the absence of Hauser's delusions of Nick Cave and John I-look-just-like-Rick-Ocasek-only-I'm-sexy's rhythm section are apparent. There are a few great tracks here, like "Goddamn Blue Yodel #7" and the bizarre, epic journey of "Cheyenne," but on the whole I feel like we're getting a Wings album (and not the greatest hits) in Beatles packaging.

It leaves me wondering what John's up to now, and having a hunch it's probably better. I'm planning a trip back to Denver soon, so hopefully I'll run into him at the Lair and find out. Is the velvet lion painting still hanging in the corner? Do the La Donnas still play/alienate their fan base weekly? I missed Slim's show recently with 16 Horsepower (who, along with the Apples in Stereo, are a hell of a nice group of people). If they're playing the Bluebird when I'm in town, you can bet I'll be up front, wearing my faded, green Auto Club t-shirt, drunk as a skunk and praying they'll prove me wrong.

Tanya Richardson

 

International FSK (Catamount) SK (that's short for "Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle") is one of the most freewheeling rock bands that the often tinny and tight-assed German rock scene has ever produced. They've been around since 1980, producing a persistently wriggling array of work ranging from noise rock to country and back again. FSK have often been linked stylistically (not to mention politically) with the Mekons, a band that's been around slightly longer and shares some obsessions (art rock, beer, waltz tempos). Reading the liner notes to FSK's latest American release, International, you'd have that comparison at the front of your mind. Cheeky, pseudo-intellectual asides to songs like "Olympiaturm '72" ("They say the subway system built for the Olympic Games in 1972 killed Munich's thriving postwar Bohemian underground") and "Roxy Munich 2" ("Kraut pleaser Brian Eno released three to four great albums before he somehow died in 1980") recall similar scrawlings in the Mekons' 1996 "art book" Mekons United or the odd "reading lists" accompanying the lyrics on 1987's The Mekons Honky Tonkin'. The differences, however, are more substantial. FSK prefers to play its country more farcically than the Mekons ever did, emphasizing the yodeling and oompah and polka and waltz elements. They've always been Spade Cooley to the Mekons' Hank Williams, as the countrified stuff on International and their 1995 Flying Fish release, The Sound of Music (which was alt-country before alt-country was cool), clearly shows. The Mekons brought an embittered and seedy edge to their take on country, but FSK play it more (but not always) for laughs. It's hard to forget the goofiness of FSK's German trucking anthem ("Diesel Oktoberfest") on The Sound of Music, and a good deal of International picks up there. When a band kicks into an accordion and washboard-driven song called "Jane Fonda Lied" (and its play on the English word and the German word for "song") with lyrics like "Ba-ba-ba Ba-ba-barella," you're in a place where parody is touching politics in a way that most rock bands who toy with country can't even touch. It's really nothing short of brilliant.

On the other hand, their art rock sensibilities are a tad more acute and pop-centered, as that sort of stuff on International (and on earlier FSK releases like 1995's Bei Alfred, which Catamount will rerelease in 2001) demonstrates. The Mekons' art rock noise is diffuse and messy stuff; FSK keep it melodic to the point where they occasionally sound like another German group that revels in the swank but cheesy possibilities of noise: Stereo Total. Or does Stereo Total sound like FSK? Let the academics of pop criticism decide. Both bands are fun when they go this route, and FSK seem to be leaning back toward this sound if the word about an even more recent FSK album, Tel Aviv (still unreleased here), is anything to go by. The aforementioned "Roxy Munich" (both 1 and 2) and "Olympiaturm '72" are foremost in this regard.

There are pleasantly weird moments on International, like the short instrumental "The Moog Banjo Revival," and a Berlin cabaret piss-take wrung through Tennessee honkytonk thrash called "1+1=3" when both elements get thrown together like scorpions in a bottle to fight it out. Former Camper Van Beethoven and current Cracker leader David Lowery's presence as producer and multi-instrumentalist adds to this spoof level; his sensibility revels in these kinds of juxtapositions. (His Cracker anthem "Euro-Trash Girl" gets another spin here, with bassist Michaela Melian's chilly deadpan vocal.) There's so much in these 22 songs to like that it seems silly to quibble with individual songs that fall a bit flat. (The cover of the Jeannie C. Riley chestnut, "To the Other Woman," for instance, sung by guitarist Wilifred Petzi, seems like a very 1992 joke to me, something that you might decide to record after listening to that Bongwater box set from a few years back straight through.) But such songs?there aren't many and they'll vary according to your particular sensibility? are over before you know it and then FSK is on to the next wonderful thing. International comes highly recommended.

Richard Byrne

 

Not So Sweet The Bobbyteens (Estrus) Lying on my bedroom floor staring at the ceiling with the new Bobbyteens album cranked, I began to shake. My head was almost in full head-banging mode when I started to sing along to "Do You Want Me," the second song on Not So Sweet. I screeched in a most perturbing matter as I attempted to sing along with "You caught my eye/is it a lie/I can't help but wonder why/do you want me baby/or am I just a maybe?" Reflecting on the current state of my unresolved personal life, I began to think that I, too, was just a "maybe." And that appreciating an album for its catchiness as well as its lyrical content had to do with believing that the lyrics are true, not whether or not they actually are?that you can like a song purely for its ability to relate to real-life situations. On "Liquid Love" Tina Lucchesi sings, "You were only 14/well I can make you feel 16...enchant me with your liquid love." All of us have been tempted, taunted and fallen victim to young lovers over too many drinks?like my recent run-in with a handsome schoolboy who I'm not sure can legally buy alcohol. The Bobbyteens can bluntly verbalize thoughts about boys, kissing, rock 'n' roll and getting it on; I would never be able to sing, "Close your eyes/and I'll show you how to kiss...how to give a kiss/one that would be missed," to this young lad. Or the lyrics to "The Way You Look at Me" for that matter. But I can continue to sing them out loud in the privacy of my own room and fantasize, right?

Sometimes I do just that to motivate myself in the mornings. The Bobbyteens run on the same adrenaline rush as bands like the Runaways. Not So Sweet is all about memories of being a teenager, having minimal responsibilities and wanting to make out with cute, awkward boys. Continuing in the same vein as their first album, Not So Sweet upholds their trademark Ramones-esque style of songwriting and Donnas-looking-for-trouble brand of rock 'n' roll, with 11 songs totaling around 25 minutes. Short, sloppy, garage/pop-punk numbers are what the Bobbyteens do best. Consisting of three ladies and ex-Mummies and Phantom Surfers' member Russell Quan, the Bobbyteens are infectious and fun?just like being smitten in the summertime. While most of us wussies are only capable of daydreaming about such things, it's nice to hear songs that translate impure thoughts into great rock 'n' roll numbers.

Lisa LeeKing Maroon The Webb Brothers (Mews 5/Warner Bros.) This album has a tearful resonance for me that will linger long after its melodies fade and lose their symphonic charm. No, hold on. Take that sentence and reverse it. That's better. First up, let me say how I think the 99-second "All the Cocaine in the World" is the most melancholy song I've heard all day. That's quite some miserable, what with the rain and those scary 15-year-old mothers hanging around outside Sainsbury's on London Rd., and their even scarier chainsmoking toddlers. Imagine?a drug fiend admitting over festive bells that the substance of choice is ultimately useless. Now that is low! Fortunately, Chicago's Webb Brothers never let the weather affect them for long. Very next track is the sun-kissed, sumptuous single "Summer People"?the one with the video showing hordes of scantily clad gorgeous women swamping the band in concert, how very male?and it's like, yes, a giant cloud has been removed from our eyes. But hold up! What's "Low Grade Fever" doing, if not singing about the downside of hedonism and the trauma of falling in love? Something tells me that these gorgeous Webb Brothers have stayed out in the night too long, and it's time to stock up on supplies of OJ very soon.

Throughout this album, vibes and strings and trumpets contribute to gorgeous, orchestral pop harmonies?somewhat akin to Brian Wilson, as usual?that Charlie Manson probably did kill for. There's something very peculiar going on underneath the surface gloss and big pop melodies, though. Take the waltz-time "Fluorescent Lights" with its line, "It's three in the morning she's lovely/But ugly to me/In fluorescent lights we'd be sickening to me." Take the telling "Are You Happy Now?," a song that repeats the question in the title in sinister fashion over and over, squelchy synthesizer noises. These men?and yes, there are brothers Christian and Justin, they even have a younger sibling joining them on tour on keyboards?have quaffed at the cup of life too deeply, and found their chameleon existence to be deeply unsatisfying.

That reminds me, the tearful resonance that I mentioned in the first paragraph. This album reminds me immutably of Chicago, all the rain-soaked, neon-lit nights I would try to kill myself vomiting in my sleep, having my head shaved by arch glam-core band Urge Overkill while a red moon shone above the Sears Tower. I like music personal to me. And believe me, this melancholy, beautiful eulogy to the underside of hedonism is deeply personal to me.

Everett True