Miss Piggy Lunchbox

I went with this meme just a few posts ago, but what the hell, if it works I’m going to use it. The last time I reviewed something by Norwegian electronic- and film-composer Kaada, it was his collaboration with Mike Patton. Therein, I said:

[T]his CD holds its own for what it is. This is great early morning listening, particularly a lazy Sunday morning when memories of your prior night are still coming back to you in waves. It goes down easy and yet has a lot of nuance to delve into when you want to forget….

The same goes here, with this slow, dreamy set of “film music” that wasn’t composed for any film in particular. You won’t find any catchy tunes per se, but you will be willfully hypnotized by the rich-but-not-dense layers of artfully arranged and composed pieces. There isn’t a lot that will fit on a mix, but it’s perfectly self-contained. Its low points (the lowest of which is “Birds Of Prey”) aren’t as low as those of his debut Thank You For Giving Me Your Valuable Time or Romances, but there’s also nothing as good as Romances’ “Seule” or even the best moments of Thank You. In the end, none of that matters because this album absolutely nails what it intends to do.

And that is actually kind of special, because Kaada’s gone out and formalized the genrefication on a non-genre that had been genrefied. I mean, on the surface, “film music” is music used in a film. And a healthy percentage of film composers will still insist that’s what it is. And they have a point…film composers shouldn’t feel constrained to write in a certain style that is a style of film…they should write what fits the film. (This ignores the gesamtkunstwerk ideal that the relationship be more symbiotic, but whatever.)

But honestly, when I say “film music,” you get an idea of what that sounds like. So despite some composers’ most strident theoretical insistence, film music has become a genre. And what Kaada’s done here is gone and thrown away any presumption that it’s not a genre, accepted the most obvious sonic parameters given the non-genre’s history, and turned it into a film-less, enjoyable listening experience.

As such, this album represents evolution. Evolution from the first generation of film composers in the “golden age” of film who were the pioneers, through the second generation of film composers, like John Williams, who defined it and made themselves stars of film in their own right while struggling to define it by not defining it, and onto the third generation, of which Kaada, born in 1975, is directly a part. This kind of evolution can only happen generationally, when what previous generations created is accepted as a given, only then can it be redefined.

Or something like that. Just be glad this review didn’t take the “what’s a ‘moviebiker’?” angle.

Rating:

Mixers: “Mainstreaming”
Keepers: “Smiger,” “Julia Pastrana,” “No Man’s Land,” “Daily Living,” “The Small Stuff,” “Celibate,” “Retirement Community”
Filed Between: Thank You For Giving Me Your Valuable Time and Kaada/Patton (Romances)

I don’t know what the saloon is a reference to, but the tango in the band’s name is not rhetorical: this is definitely tango. For the most part, this project of Julian Curwin is traditional tango, including a couple covers of Astor Piazzola tunes, but there are aspects of modernity and experimentation thrown in, like synthesized timbres and complex start-stop song structures.

The biggest problem is that there are too many areas where the music gets bogged down in itself with no passion to pull it up. And tango without passion…well…it’s not really tango. It’s the novel composition that causes the most problems. The worst parts are when the songs either hit some jam-band rut or become too interesting for their own good.

But even when it’s not all that great, you’ve still got that interesting to fall back on, and when the focus is on sound instead of structure, the disc shines. The 70’s sci-fi sounds that pepper “Man With The Bongos” and the last 25% of “Intermission” are reminiscent of Messer Chups, and the mixers are must-hears. Even some of the non-keepers have grown on me in the last few days as our recent heavy cloud cover (honestly, a recent eastern- to western-border drive confirms that clouds in Seattle are simply darker and more depressing than clouds elsewhere) has mellowed me to the point of being more in tune with the pleasant but passionless non-keepers. It’s still not tango without the passion, but whatever it is, those tracks are not a bad accompaniment to a chill mood.

Rating:

Mixers: “Upon A Time,” “La Calle 92”
Non-keepers: “Overture,” “March Of The Big Shoe,” “Carol,” “Intermission,” “The Little Plane That Could”
Filed Between: Talking Heads (Popular Favorites: 1976-1992) and Art Tatum (Piano Starts Here)

With this two-disc, thirty-song compilation of film composer Ennio Morricone’s early work, my 2005 Ipecac collection is complete, save the non-Collectors Edition of Fantômas’ Suspended Animation, of which I own the Collectors Edition. Along with Messer Chups, this album has the label brining their worst year to date to a close with a couple of 3.5-lunchbox releases…the high points of their year.

You may not know Ennio Morricone by name, but it’s likely you’ve heard his work before. He’s most famous for scoring Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, like A Fistful Of Dollars and The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, and he’s also done several modern films like The Mission and The Untouchables.

As you would expect, a compilation like this lacks cohesion. These pieces were all composed to accompany Italian films between 1968 and 1974 (plus an outlier in 1981), not each other, and so any review of this album as an album is a bit unfair. The music here is very heady, artsy, and challenging. There are a lot of things on here that are very cool, but are not necessarily something you’d want to listen to casually. There’s a wide variety of sounds, including psychedelic guitar, a splurky free-jazz trumpet, a string quartet interspersed with militant marching, organ, bizarre percussion sounds, a synthesized tuba, and at least three tracks that feature a woman having an erotic experience.

Despite all that variety, there are still sections of the album where it bogs down into a swamp of indistinguishability. Compiler Alan Bishop seems to have an affinity for tracks that feature high, held, screechy violins, as that sound constitutes the majority of the tracks that have little to nothing to say here. And do we really need three different female orgasm tracks? I mean, I love the sound of a woman getting off, but it’s not something I want to listen to when I’m on the bus or doing homework, two of my main music-listening activities.

The liner notes deserve special mention, as they are glorious. Glossy, colorful, and capturing scenes from the films whose scores are featured here, they paint a picture of Italian film that lies beyond intriguing. Whether it’s a topless woman kissing two men in front of a backdrop of war planes (Forza G), a nude woman on all fours painted in yellow and black spots from head-to-toe (Veruschka (Poesia Di Una Donna)), or a caged woman in a circle of robed priests (L’Antricristo), it all adds up to me needing to see more Italian film.

In fact, this is a borderline three-lunchbox CD, but the fabulous liner notes and the Best Song Ever, “Un Uomo Da Rispettare (Titoli),” strongly assert that this collection has safely earned its extra half-lunchbox.

Rating:

Best Song Ever: “Un Uomo Da Rispettare (Titoli)”
Mixers: “Rapimento In Campo Aperto,” “Ninna Nanna Per Adulteri,” “Trafelato,” “Sequenza 10”
Keepers: “Giorno Di Notte,” “Ricreazione Divertita,” “Seguita,” “Postludio Alla Terza Moglie,” “Il Buio,” “Le Fotografie”
Filed Between: Morphine (Like Swimming) and Van Morrison (Astral Weeks)

This is the next installment of Ipecac’s 2005 releases, and it slots in as easily their best release of the year. It’s a refreshing listen by virtue of more than just its high quality: this is the kind of album that we in the review business like to classify as a “fun-loving romp.” Consisting of an amalgamation of Russian and Eastern-bloc performers, Messer Chups lays out 45 minutes of their take on Western culture through the eyes of Cold War-era filters and instruments. Imagine the comical exuberance of White Zombie translated to spy music played on Soviet-era synthesizers and theremins, and you’ve got Crazy Price. Clips from American horror and science fiction b-movies dance alongside innovative sound-effect timbres turned into instruments that groove unexpectedly well.

What Messer Chups brings to the table in innovative use of sound and kicking grooves they lack in compositional talent. About half of these 16 tracks work themselves into structures that maintain your interest for three minutes, but when they miss it’s because they stay in the same monochromatic vibe for that amount of time.

The band is at their best when they stretch themselves (which is a better proposition than being better when they don’t), as they do on “A Plateful Brain,” which features a modern jazz piano riff of cluster chords, and “Gangster They Called Horizon-man,” which begins with harp. More of these tracks are shareable than the singleton mixer indicates, but the halting use of sampled movie dialogue (they clearly have a love for the rhythms of English) prevents most of them from flowing with anything.

Messer Chups isn’t just about sound, as they demonstrate with their use of other media. They include five videos on this CD which are perfect visual analogies of their songs, featuring patched-together and psychedelically-altered visuals from b-movies, along with what seem to be some creations of their own. Four of the five videos are of songs not on this album, which is nice because they’re not just throwaways. I really wish they’d included some audio-only versions of them, in particular “Super Megera.” Check it out for yourself:

They’ve also mastered text. Their Wikipedia page is rich, and well worth a read. I’m not sure there’s a single band whose Wikipedia page gives a sense of a band’s sound better than that of Messer Chups. Here are some verbatim clips:

Since 2005 Messer Chups is duo of Gitarkin and ZombieGirl on bass and in 2007 they became trio with drummer Denis “Kashey” Kuptzov from famous Leningrad band. In 2008 they changed drummer to Alexander belkov and became vocalist Alexander Skvortzov.

Messer Chups’ music often features a fundament of surf drums on which they build collages of samples from odd sources, like circus music, jazz, east European animation soundtracks, and American B-pictures. On top of that they lay solos from guitar and theremin. The overall effect is one of loving parody and good fun.

Good fun, indeed.

Rating:

Mixer: “Sex Euro And Evils Pop”
Non-keepers: “Chasing For Young Blood,” “In 3 Minutes Till Massacre, “”Ghost Rides To West,” “Make Music, But Not Trash,” “Monkey Safari,” “Not Made In Japan,” “Good Night”
Filed Between: Mercy Me (…And The Devil Makes Three) and Metal Church (The Human Factor)

What a horrible year 2005 was for Ipecac. It began with the requisite Dälek release, Absence, which was basically the same silly two-lunchbox thing Dälek always puts out. From there it went through a set of mediocre three-lunchbox releases by General Patton vs. The X-ecutioners, Guapo, The Locust, and the Patton-led Fantômas. Then came what may have been the year’s highlight, the requisite Melvins release, which was Mangled Demos From 1983, and also received three lunchboxes. I want to highlight that, as of May, the best Ipecac album for 2005 was a re-release of hastily recorded tracks by noise-mongering teenagers in 1983. From there things got really bad, as they released the 1.5-lunchbox OV by Orthrelm and followed that up with this disc, another 1.5-lunchbox effort, this time by Icelander Mugison.

Somehow this release won Best Album at the Icelandic Music Awards, with “Murr Murr” taking home Best Song. I know there are only like 300,000 people in Iceland, but this was released in that country in 2004, which means it beat out Björk’s Medúlla. I don’t know that album, but I find it hard to believe Björk made something worse than this.

This album has its moments, like the lo-fi acoustic guitar funk (it seems to be mandatory to compare this song to “Loser” and Mugison himself to Beck) of “Murr Murr,” the driving synthesizers of “Sad As A Truck,” and the plaintive sweetness of “I Want You” and “2 Birds.” Even some of the more challenging tracks like “The Chicken Song” and “What I Would Say In Your Funeral” grow on you to the point of listenability after a while.

It’s never enjoyable for more than a few minutes at a time, though, and spends an awful lot of time being down right annoying. “Swing Ding” is just 24 seconds of somebody burping “rock and roll” and “Afi Minn (My Grandpa)” features several minutes of muffled noises that sound like somebody scuffling through a morning kitchen routine. That was groundbreaking in the 40’s and, with advances in fidelity, managed to continue to be interesting in small doses into the 60’s (see Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother), but in 2005, what is your artistic statement here? What value are you adding to the world? How do you justify using storage space for this? What are you trying to say, beyond the fact that you’re weird and different and oh my god there is no yawn big enough to serve as a response to that level of pretentiousness.

I still have a couple of 2005 releases from Ipecac to get through, but if I had been listening to these discs as they came out, I just may have given up on them before they picked things back up in 2006 with East West Blast Test, Ghostigital, and Peeping Tom. I think Ipecac’s 2005 can probably be summed up as a WTF wasted year.

Rating:

Mixers: “I Want You,” “Sad As A Truck”
Keepers: “2 Birds,” “Murr Murr”
Filed Between: Mudhoney (The Lucky Ones) and Murphy’s Law (Dedicated)