Miss Piggy Lunchbox

If you know one thing about Stravinksy’s ballet The Rite Of Spring it’s probably that at its 1913 debut in Paris it set off riots. Here’s a dirty little secret, folks, people loved to fucking riot in Europe at concerts and ballets in the 19th century and the early part of the last century. It happened all the fucking time. If you pick any piece out of the canon that debuted after the French Revolution, there’s probably a 50/50 chance that there was a riot at its premiere. (Aside: I don’t know why I’m swearing.)

But for some reason this story about the riot at The Rite is retold far more than than all the other riots put together. I don’t really know why that is, but I’ll make up shit because I like doing that.

So, I think it’s because when it’s heard today, either for the first time or the hundredth, it still sounds obnoxiously foreign yet innately familiar all at the same time. The Rite is completely different than everything that came before it, and very different from everything you’ve ever heard, and yet everybody immediately gets it.

Its rhythms are all completely unexpected, with syncopated accents appearing in no discernible pattern, yet it cuts right to the rhythm of the human body, mind, and soul. You feel its accents inside you, echoing the strongest emotions of your life as well as the Big Bang. You can’t predict when the next downbeat is coming, yet you can’t help but move to it. It’s thrown off the formalisms of common time and the artificial civility of the ballet that accompanies that and replaced it with something sinister and pagan within all of us. Every instrument is playing in a different meter, simultaneously, conjuring up the most excited, confused moments when our brain is scattered, racing, and torn between competing sets of desires.

Alternately ominous and beautiful, crystal clear in its dominance of your ear canal and bewildering in its presentation of so…much…information, The Rite leaves you gasping for air. Your mind will race, confused, and yet excited at the same time. One moment you’ll hear madness in the composition, and then it will quickly resolve to genius, and just when you think you’ve heard everything, like it can’t get any better, it does. You can’t keep up with this piece as it whisks you along at its own exhilarating pace. A nearly steady build right to the end, this is what a primal, hedonistic, 30-minute orgasm, delivered as only a true dom can, sounds like.

The premiere of The Rite is still talked about because we can still hear its echoes when we listen to it today. It’s still discussed because at that moment music changed…Stravinsky opened the door to a whole world of music that was immediate, obvious, and exciting, but had been unknown to us before that time. In my opinion, it’s the first piece of rock and roll ever written, and owes as much to its current state as native African music and its mutation, the blues (to take absolutely nothing away from those contributions to modern Western music, of course). Not only was it a music-changing, an art-changing, piece, it is a life-changing piece. I don’t care how you feel about classical music in general, you must hear this piece, and Obama is going to require it to be taught in high schools because it is that fucking important.

This album, featuring Stravinsky himself conducting The Columbia Symphony Orchestra, begins with Petrushka, a “burlesque,” kind of a ballet suite like The Rite, as far as I can tell, and it’s awesome as well. It’s got a few more dead spots than The Rite, but it probably stands up there at about four lunchboxes just by itself.

It blurs the line between reality, fantasy, and dream in the tale of a sometimes animate marionette named Petrushka who is treated cruelly, and eventually murdered, by his creator/owner/pupettmaster. More traditionally dancey and less radical than The Rite, Petrushka still features motifs obscuring other motifs in a way that Wagner couldn’t even quite bring himself to pull off and also features a brilliant sonic impersonation of the hustle and bustle of the early 20th century crowds that would hear its 1911 premiere.

Going backwards chronologically from right now, Stravinsky is the first composer you get to where you think, “Yeah, that guy is clearly a giant, one of the greatest composers of all time and head and shoulders above his contemporaries.” He was, and still is somewhat, a modern celebrity, conducting these recordings in 1960 and passing away in 1971. It’s been 95 years since the premier of The Rite, and the world is still reeling, still feeling its aftershocks. Someday composers may be willing to wade into this world and write in this style. For now, though, Stravinsky’s greatness is still too intimidating for anybody else to truly attempt to further his work. That would be a shame if what the maestro had left us weren’t so brilliant on its own.

Rating:

Mixers: The Rite, Part I: “Dance Of The Earth,” Part II: “Summoning Of The Ancients,” “Sacrificial Dance”
Non-keepers: Petrushka, Tableau I: “Russian Dance,” Tableau III: “Beginning,” Tableau IV: “Conclusion (Petrushka’s Death),” The Rite, Part I: “Adoration Of The Earth,” Part II: “Introduction,” “Mystical Circles Of The Young Girls”
Filed Between: Richard Strauss (Der Rosenkavalier perf. Te Kanawa, Rydl, Von Otter, Grundheber, Hendricks, orch. Staatsopernchor Dresden, cond. Haitink) and Sub Pop-200

You know what would be awesome? Less of this.

I was under the impression I liked Mocean (pronounced like “motion”) Worker based on his track on KMTT New Music Sampler 2005. Turns out he bores me to tears. This came out several years earlier and, whereas “Chick A Boom Boom” from that sampler was lighter and airier with more jazz and soul elements, this is darker, heavier, more synthethic, with more of a dance and techno feel. I’m assuming this difference, then, represents a career progression for him because man does this suck.

To be fair, this just wasn’t meant to be listened to except on ecstasy at a raging night club at 2:00 in the morning, and it is extremely rare that I experience even one of those things, much less all three at the same time, so Mocean Worker’s got his work cut out for him to win me over.

Still, dude. These songs don’t have to be six minutes long. You could really get everything out in about 90 seconds, which would make these ten tracks much more bearable since for the most part I find the first minute or so quite enjoyable. As it is, it’s just lay down some beats, quickly build up some layers, and put it on repeat while you go smoke a j. I mean, I know that’s the point with this techno dance stuff, but it doesn’t fly at MPL.

You know how boring this was? I had to turn on the NBA while I gave it its focused listen. It wasn’t boring enough, however, for me to actually watch the game. I just turned the damn thing on and then proceeded to ignore it. God the NBA sucks.

Anyway, I’m giving this an extra half-lunchbox because about half of the grooves are pretty cool, even if they go on way way way too long. There’s gotta be a way to do this in a way that’s interesting when sober, though. Vocals would be a start, like an Us3 or Soul Coughing thing, but then you don’t get played in clubs. So I guess it’s get played in clubs or get a good review on MPL. Seems like an easy choice to me.

Rating:

Mixers: none
Keepers: “Detonator,” “Times Of Danger”
Filed Between: Miscellaneous and Modest Mouse (The Moon & Antarctica)

Via Daily Kos comes this video that needs no context.

“Absolutely” is also the word McCain used to defend his robocall smears.

From Gregorian Chant all the way up through Mahler and Strauss at the very beginning of the 20th century, music had gradually added dissonance and stretching of harmony and melody in what amounts to a sort of evolution. As human ears became accustomed to certain tonal structures, composers were able to make things exciting by breaking a few of the old rules, ears adjusted, and so on. This isn’t earth-shattering and you can hear the same effect in comparing popular music of today to that of 50 years ago.

The point at which the wheels came off the gradual-and-natural-evolution train, however, was with Arnold Schoenberg, who examined this gradualness and decided that he might as well be a millennium ahead of his time and just throw off tonality altogether. Of course, it doesn’t really work like that…things happen gradually for a reason and you can’t, for the most part, jump all of the musical world forward several hundred years.

Curiously, though, Schoenberg was quite celebrated in his time. While his giant leap forward in harmony might have been a bit much, he enables the listener to come with him by emphasizing beautiful static sounds and graspable melodies throughout his 5 Pieces For Orchestra from 1909. When you listen to it now, in fact, you realize how much modern music owes to Schoenberg.

Without this piece, composed well before Schoenberg’s conception and articulation of “12-tone music,” film music wouldn’t sound the same, nor would the music of cartoons. Consider Bugs Bunny walking along while Elmer Fudd shoots at him, anvils fall from the sky, and animals run off cliffs only to be suspended in mid-air for several seconds. The music accompanying these scenes, with its quick and quickly-changing motifs is straight out of this work. He eventually leads you down into the same deep, dark hole that Berg does to open the disc, but he’s at least holding his hand as he gradually takes you further and further from the life you once knew and might never see again.

Schoenberg’s students in what was dubbed the Second Viennese School (the first being loosely comprised of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven), Alban Berg and Anton Webern, on the other hand…well, they’re a little harder to get your head around. Berg’s contribution here, his 3 Pieces For Orchestra, originally composed in 1914 but revised in 1929 (which is the version on this disc), is particularly abstruse. It is grandly symphonic, a sonic maelstrom with no life presevers in the form of melodies or static beauty to guide you through. If you want to listen to this, it’s put your head down, lean into the wind, and push through. Its final part is militant both in its sometimes, but not for long, march feel and in the unpredictable explosions and cacophony, the sonic equivalent of what the middle of a World War I cannon bombardment must have felt like…and it was written around the time of Germany’s march through Europe in 1914. I like it more and more with each listen, as its ominous flower of darkness is slowly opening itself up to me, but it’s still tough.

If you know anything about Webern, it’s that he was a miniaturist, composing very short works, some only a few seconds long, that laid out his musical thought quickly with little to no development. As with Schoenberg’s 12-tone system, though, throw that notion away for this CD because Webern’s composition, 6 Pieces For Orchestra, was written before then, though all but one of the Pieces are still quite short, ranging from 0:55 to 2:33. They all stem from the death of his mother, and you can hear the seeds of his later work here as he wastes no time in explicating each emotion succinctly. There’s nothing traditionally beautiful here, but a wide range of sounds is produced, from a bubbling, percolating muck (II), to a gargantuan sounding funeral march whose climax is nearly deafening (IV), to chords upon chords layered in such a way that they simply refuse to resolve, bringing to mind a sumptuous but unsatisfying infinity. It is equal parts mystifying and palpably close to something familiar. Here, Webern lies nearly halfway between the now-everywhere sounds of Schoenberg and the total mindf**k of Berg.

One of the comparisons that leads off Alex Ross’ history of 20th Century classical music is that modern music is the analogue to modern film, dance, and visual art…not just in that it’s new, but in that the 20th century has seemingly produced art that has been so violently opposed to what came before it. I agree. This is absolutely the analogue to Kandinsky, Pollock, and David Lynch: there are parts that excite you, but it’s more about color, maybe a little about form, and less about some cohesive representativeness…and since music was always the least representative of all art forms (save possibly dance), the revolt against the structures that were there seem even more revolutionary.

One final note that I can’t fit in anywhere else. I love that James Levine conducted these pieces. Not because I think his interpreations are fine (I have no point of comparison) or that he’s one of my favorite conductors (I just don’t have enough data to really form an opinion on that), but just because I heard him speak when I lived in Boston (where he is now Music Director of the BSO), and found him to be intelligent, articulate, and quite likeable despite (or maybe because of) disagreeing with certain musical opinions of his. It was an intellectually challenging, enlightening, and mildly disturbing experience…much like this album.

Rating:

Mixers: ha, yeah right
Non-keepers: 3 Pieces For Orchestra III; 6 Pieces For Orchestra V, VI; 5 Pieces For Orchestra IV, V
Filed Between: Ben Folds Five (Whatever And Ever Amen) and The Best of Both Worlds – The Rykodisc and Hannibal World Music Sampler

I’ve never really been a Colin Powell fan, ever since I first heard of him as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff taking a stand against gays in the military, and his tragic performance in front of the UN with vials and satellite images that sold us into this war on false pretenses is what I think will seal his historical fate.

Still, I have to admit his evilness is several shades grayer than some of the other political figures we’ve been treated to in the last eight years or so.

Anyway, his endorsement of Obama obviously didn’t have anything to do with my vote, but I loved the part where he stands up for relgious freedom (i.e., not just Christians) and talks about an Islamic soldier in the U.S. army.  The part I think you should listen to is from 4:27 to 6:06.

This should be required viewing for all American civics classes.

I can’t think of a better CD to have popped into my CD player on my birthday a few days ago. I still have clear memories of sitting on the floor for something like my eighth birthday and unwrapping a new walkman and my first cassette, Springfield’s Working Class Dog, which I think had been recommended by the older neighbor kid, or maybe Mom knew I liked “Jessie’s Girl” from the radio or something. Regardless, over the next 26 years Rick Springfield has maintained his position at or near the top of my favorite musicians and this year’s Venus In Overdrive is probably his best album since the Holy Trinity of Rick (Working Class Dog, Success Hasn’t Spoiled Me Yet, and Living In Oz).

You roll your eyes and humor me, but Springfield’s songwriting brilliance is one of the best kept secrets in rock. You dismiss him as a pretty boy, one-hit wonder with “Jessie’s Girl” plus some time on General Hospital, but he had two more top 20 hits from Working Class Girl alone, one of which I heard blaring two weeks ago at a UW 5k I ran. He also had three top 40 hits from each of his next two albums (see the Holy Trinity of Rick), including the number two “Don’t Talk To Strangers.” He’d continue charting in the top 25 into the late 80’s on his next three albums, including scoring a number five with “Love Somebody” from the Hard To Hold soundtrack. His critical acclaim never quite matched his popularity, but appearing on the cover of Tiger Beat, or whatever, tends to have that effect. But, yeah, Springfield’s a total stud and it’s no accident he’s still putting out great music.

And I’ll be one of the first to say that one of his first albums after his near-decade hiatus, 1999’s Karma, was acceptable but pretty weak. I didn’t even get his next two albums, but given how incredible Venus In Overdrive is, I’m going to have to go back and check them out.

The album begins with an intentional nod to “Jessie’s Girl,” then spends the next 40 minutes forging another brilliant chapter in this 59-year-old’s(!) history. These are all brand new songs, some of them mixed by Matt Wallace who produced two of the greatest albums in rock’s history, Faith No More’s The Real Thing and Angel Dust, that stand equally with the greats in Springfield’s canon. Unlike too many aging musicians, Springfield stays with what he does so well. These are all new, fresh songs, but God, nobody else is so masterful with some power chords, a catchy melody, and a veneer of keys over a driving, clean guitar sound. For a few days I was eleven years old again, playing air guitar in front of 15,000 screaming fans just behind the mirror.

(Election obsession side note: Also making me feel young again was this adorable birthday card from my 80-something Republican aunt from Iowa whose message inside was brimming with comforting confidence that Obama was going to fix everything soon. Hold me while I suck my thumb and fall asleep.)

It’s not all 1982 all over again, and 2008 Springfield isn’t some caricature of what he once was. His life stage is apparent in his lyrical content and in the liner notes, which feature page after page of pictures of him with his fans. Most of his fans don’t look like me…check it out. He gets political, anxious to throw out the whole system, on “Mr. PC,” and no fewer than four of these songs are about death, in particular that of Sahara Aldridge, a 13-year-old fan who succumbed to a battle with brain cancer last November.

Of course, it’s never been all about unrequited love. Springfield’s been dealing with death, particularly that of his father’s in 1981, in his lyrics prominently ever since Success Hasn’t Spoiled Me Yet. As a survivor of depression and a 30-year veteran of a career in rock-and-roll, though, his explorations of the issue have a more peaceful, faithful, upward-looking feel then they did before.

So yeah, I have a very strong identification with Rick Springfield, and there’s a part of me that feels like I am him in a way. It’s always been a rewarding relationship, and I can’t even tell you how excited I am for his recent success in delivering one of the best albums of the year.

Update: “Time Stand Still” is the best song ever.

Rating:

Mixers: “What’s Victoria’s Secret?,” “I’ll Miss That Someday,” “Venus In Overdrive,” “One Passenger,” “Time Stand Still,” “Mr. PC”
Keepers: everything else
Filed Between: Springfield’s Backtracks and Bruce Springsteen (Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.)

On their 1994 release Fairytales Of Slavery, Miranda Sex Garden has done a great job of defining a cohesive artistic vision and then articulating it. Through unconventional instrumentation (there’s a glockenspiel, some strings, and a potpourri of rustling and banging), atonal experimentation both in the instruments and with the band’s pair of female vocalists, and dramatic (albeit super-cheesy) soft-to-loud beginnings to nearly every track here, they have created a strong sense of darkness and discomfort. It’s pretty bad, though, reeking of mid-90’s deeper-than-the-ocean-blue navel-gazing deeposity. They’ve set their mood, they just forgot to create compelling, memorable music to go along with it.

While their off-key instrumental excursions, notably the sax in “Transit,” are clearly intentional, the vocalists’ off-road trips seem to be more accidental, with long tonal melodies capped by a long, held, out-of-key note. According to Wikipedia, these former madrigal singers used to be an a capella group, so I’m left wondering how that could be given the fingernails-on-chalkboard vocals.

The band seems to be fairly well apprised of avant-garde music, employing non-traditional instrumentation and some hints of minimalism. “Havana Lied,” with music by Kurt Weill, sounds like a German oom-pah band, and “Intermission” is reminiscent of a calliope. The bangs and crashes in “Transit” bring to mind some of Varèse’s noise works. “The Wooden Boat” reaches out to minimalist Steve Reich with its rapid-paced theme that slowly and nearly imperceptibly evolves over long stretches of time.

In the end, though, it feels like experimentation for experimentation’s sake. There’s nothing wrong with that, per se, but I just don’t think this mish-mash of 20th century styles does anything new, nor does it present any real reason to spend any more time with it. There are exceptions, like “Transit” and “Cut,” which rock a little harder than the rest of what’s on here. Another exception is “The Monk Song,” which features a capella vocal lines contrapuntally singing vowels and, despite its initial unpleasantness, rewards the patient listener with layers of interesting interplay.

A little darker and a significant amount more experimental, Miranda Sex Garden reminds me a lot of Rasputina, another female-led band in my collection I’m pretty sour on. I didn’t need one of those CDs, and I certainly don’t need two. Still, I have to give the band credit for creating what is, despite a mid-90’s glut of this kind of deep-for-deep’s-sake records, a fairly unique rock statement and for holding it together for over 50 minutes. It’s still a stinker, though.

Rating:

Mixers: none
Keepers: “Cut,” “Transit,” “The Monk Song”
Filed Between: The Minnesota Opera 2000-2001 Season Preview and Miscellaneous

“Fuck this and fuck that/
Fuck it all and fuck the fucking brat”
- “Bodies” by The Sex Pistols

Boy did I need this. Hope, universal health care, and appealing to our greater selves has worked for me for the past 20 odd months, but with less than two weeks to go until the election, it turns out I need youthful anti-authoritarian screeds that condemn everything done by older generations and those in power. Who ever thought anarchy could be so appealing or apathy so empowering?

After a long string of silly experimentation and navel-gazing technical proficiency, it’s about time I got something so exposed and in your face that there’s hardly anything to analyze. This is just pure disaffected youth in a crumbling economy railing against everything they see. “No future!” Johnny Rotten, whose annoying British drawl becomes enjoyable when backed by a brutal guitar assult, screams in “God Save The Queen,” the best song ever, condemning not only those who caused the problems but also those who are trying to fix them. Nobody escapes his bleak schaudenfreude: “No future for you/No future for me.”

This primal, visceral sound puts a sneer on your face, a snarl in your speech, and turns everybody into somebody just asking to get their ass kicked. I think I may just keep this on repeat for the next two weeks.

Rating:

Mixers: “Problems,” “God Save The Queen,” “Seventeen,” “Anarchy In The U.K.,” “EMI”
Non-keeper: “New York”
Filed Between: Sepultura (Roots) and Ravi Shankar (Raga Charukauns)

I experience a phenomenon with certain comedy television shows, Monty Python, Dave Chappelle, and South Park among them, where, when somebody describes a sketch, routine, or segment of the show to me, I find it side-splittingly hilarious. When I watch the show, though, iincluding the described parts, I sit straight-faced wondering when the boredom will cease. (Note: Does not apply to South Park’s early work, which I found pee-my-pants funny.)

The musical analogue of this phenomenon has to be Secret Chiefs 3 who, as mentioned in a post a year-and-a-half ago, have been recommended to me by more friends who like the same obscure music I do than any other band. And it figures they should be: they are led by Mr. Bungle’s guitarist Trey Spruance and joined frequently by Mr. Bungle members and contributors Bar McKinnon, Trevor Dunn (also in Fantômas and has contributed to Melvins), Danny Heifetz (if I haven’t told you my story about meeting him, remind me to tell you), and William Winant. Upon discovering our Mr. Bungle connection, these conversations with friends always go the same way:

Friend: Do you like Secret Chiefs 3?

Me: Probably. I only have First Grand Constitution And Bylaws and…meh….

Friend: Yeah, that one’s not so special. You gotta get Second Grand Constitution And Bylaws. Book M also rocks.

So here I am with the band’s second album, originally released in 1998 and remastered in this format with a bonus track added in 2000. And…meh…. Spruance, Winant, and Heifetz all deliver technically brilliant and compelling performances, and Spruance’s compositions are, of course, off-beat, creative, and intriguing mash-ups of techno, surf, spy music, disco, funk, and Middle Eastern rhythms and tonalities. It’s like if “Desert Search For Techno Allah” from Mr. Bungle’s 1995 album Disco Volante (probs my fave album of all-time) were stretched out for a whole album. Then, in “Jãbarsã,” I swear he actually samples audio clipping and uses that sample as the basis for an instrument for a complete mind- and ear-f**k. Still, I find myself kind of bored through big chunks of this.

Who knows? Maybe I’m just too obsessed with the election to enjoy anything (I’m barely even looking forward to my birthday, because there will still be 12 days to go). In the end, I’m just befuddled by the whole thing. Not only with the music being less-than-gripping, but with the liner notes, too. There’s this whole Sufi mysticism thing going on that is completely opaque. The liner notes nearly start with this passage.

Once you are familiar with Book T (having remained unmoved by the spectre of Death) you may pass through the “Source of Life” at the psycho-cosmic center (Qaf). Here you will gain access to the Huraqalyan World, or “Eighth Climate.”

And I am just not getting on that train. At least not without Sufi Mysticism For Dummies or something.

Still, though, even that sounds awesome when it’s explained to me by somebody else. Along with the quotes I pulled from Seattle’s alternative weekly The Stranger 19 months ago, consider what’s written by Jonathan Zwickel, also of The Stranger and one of the people who, whenever I read them, make me never want to write about music again because I could never be that good, on the band’s page on Spruance’s label’s web site:

Legend has it that 11th Century Persian sheikh Hassan-i-Sabbah inspired fanatic, even suicidal, devotion from his legions. His method of initiation was to kidnap and drug his foes’ fiercest soldiers, then bring them to his fully functioning Garden of Earthly Delights, which was complete with exotic delicacies, fountains of wine, and good-to-go virgins. When his captives came to, dazed and suggestible in their psychedelic stupors, they were told they had died and entered heaven. Sabbah had only to promise that each of his subjects would return to Paradise if fortunate enough to martyr himself in his service. For a century, Sabbah’s Hashishim — “Hash Eaters,” from which we derive the word assassin — were the most feared killers in the known world.

It seems that Sabbah and Trey Spruance have something in common. Spruance, Secret Chiefs 3’s chief composer and a former guitarist for Mr. Bungle, is a visionary madman capable of instilling both fear and respect in his listeners.

…

Over three years in the making, Book of Horizons is Secret Chiefs’ most expansive and coherent statement, an alchemical fusion of Morricone-esque cinematic grandeur, midnight surf guitar, traditional Middle Eastern rhythms and time signatures, demonic death metal, and electronic deviance that yields a work of undeniable force.

Holy crap, that sounds incredible. I have to go get Book Of Horizons right f’ing now…I’m sure to love it.

Who knows? Maybe this album just needs more demonic death metal, which I was expectingor maybe it just helps to be really stoned. I guess I should have listened to this when all my friends were telling me to. Oh, and as I’ve been writing this I’ve promoted “Zulikfar II” from non-keeper to mixer and “Book T: Broken Glass Hearse” to keeper and added a half-lunchbox to the rating. So maybe it just needs more time, but my editor’s breathing down my back.

Rating:

Mixers: “Zulikfar II,” “Jãbarsã”
Non-keepers: “Renunciation,” “Jãbalqã,” “Book T: Orbital Ballroom In The Hall Of Resurrection,” “Beyond The Mountain Qaf,” “Hurqalya”
Filed Between: First Grand Constitution And Bylaws and Sensational (Get On My Page)

I had a conversation with a friend recently in which he declared, “I get the idea that sound quality means a lot to you.  See, it doesn’t mean anything to me, I just like good songs.” Unsurprisingly, I get a lot of this: people telling me they don’t care about sound quality in music. Frankly, I find this claim untenable on two levels.

First, to claim that somebody could listen to something through a tin can or on top-line equipment and feel the same about it is a pretty thin branch to find yourself out on. The thought that you could listen to a song that was recorded in mono with a microphone down the hall from the room where it was being performed and then relayed via cell phone to your ear and somehow attain some assessment of the true, underlying, song-ness of what you’re hearing is preposterous.

Consider the times you’ve heard early rock-and-roll, or big band jazz recorded in the 20’s, or classical music recorded in the 40’s. I think that, in general, if you examine your feelings about music recorded 60-plus years ago, you’ll find that you form a lot of your “do I want to pick this up again” opinion on the fact that it sounds thin and tinny compared to music recorded today.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that just because something sounds like crap you won’t listen to it. But I’m saying it’s a factor. Because people still listen to Maria Callas even though virtually everything recorded of her sounds awful. That doesn’t mean the sound quality has no bearing on their enjoyment of her recordings; it means that Maria Callas’ interpretations were so unique and fabulous that they’re willing to listen to her despite the shortcomings in fidelity.

The second way in which I find the notion that sound quality doesn’t matter untenable, and this point really makes the first one moot anyway, is that there’s really no way to separate a song from its sound…the two are inextricably linked. You don’t have a song without its sound, unless you’re talking about the abstract concept of its composition, but you’re not telling me you’re getting any kind of pleasure on just reflecting on a composition without listening to some performance of it, unless you’re a really heady music major, in which case we’re having a completely different conversation anway.

You see, when you listen to some crackly FDR speech and compare it to some pristine-sounding NPR recording like This American Life, I’ll believe you that sound quality doesn’t matter so much beyond comprehensibility, because the meaning of a spoken word recording is in the words, not in the quality of the sound. However, the meaning of music is in both what’s being performed along with how it’s presented. While the meaning of FDR’s speech can be written down and digested through the eyes, music can only be sensed as the expansion and compression of air waves as interpreted by the ears, and sound quality is just as much a part of that as, say, an A power chord played over a rock drum beat.

If folks didn’t care about sound quality, really didn’t care, bands wouldn’t spend tens of thousands of dollars on equipment, producers, engineers, and techniques to get the punch in their recording just right. If the sound didn’t matter, peeps wouldn’t turn up heir favorite songs because it would just be the same song they were already listening to, only louder.

So if you choose to listen to lo-fi music or to music on lo-fi equipment, that’s fine, but I contend that it’s done after an intuitive and immediate but thorough evaluation of how a given song sounds on that particular recording on that particular piece of equipment. And maybe you decide, possibly subconsciously, that even though the sound quality isn’t pristine, it’s still something you enjoy listening to. I can’t argue with that…but I do argue that sound quality was inherently a factor in that decision, and I further argue that I could take that same music production environment and degrade the sound quality to a point that you would decide differently. Finally, I see no difference in the final product between me altering the sound quality in such a way and bands doing the same thing on their recordings.

All of which is a lead-in to the fact that The Minders take fun, catchy songs, and obscure them behind horrible production techniques. It’s not like they just can’t get the sound right; I have no doubt that this album sounds exactly like they wanted it to. However, in what I think is evidence that supports my “if you like music, sound quality matters” argument above, they went out of their way to exploit and over-emphasize the mid-high frequencies (where the human voice resides) that we hear better than other frequencies in order to make these songs sound noisy, abrasive, and low-fidelity. In fact, nobody would deny that raw, powerful bands, usually in the punk vein (see Jon Spencer Blues Explosion) do exactly the same thing (and, again, wouldn’t do that if sound quality didn’t matter to every listener of music). Why you would do it over Beatles-esque melodies for an entire album completely eludes me, though.

“Paper Plane,” has some decent parts but features a hummy, nasal bass that obfuscates everything else in the song, including a lead guitar solo that is Modest Mouse-esque in its inability or refusal to hit notes clearly so that they fall flat as if played by a beginning guitar student. “Big Machine” is a complete and total cymbal-fest, giving even The Melvins a run for their money in that department, but without any meaty guitars to support them. “Hand Me Downs” is basically a Weezer song except that it, of course, sounds like complete ass. Plus not all of the songs are catchy ditties…some are boring, annoying, or both.

Besides the fact that most of the underlying songs are infectious pop bouncers, and that the keepers and mixer below are all recommended without hesitation, the best thing I can say about this album is that it goes through its 17 tracks in under 36 minutes, so they didn’t waste any time getting their shallow-business-made-deep-through-crappy-sound out. I appreciate that.

I guess they were trying to experiment, and failing, much like fellow Elephant 6 collective-artists Apples In Stereo who so disappointed me nearly a year ago. “Elelphant 6 collective” must be short-hand for “poppy songs that sound like suck.”

Rating:

Mixer: “Better Things”
Keepers: “Almost Arms,” “Sally,” “Rocket 58”
Filed Between: Mind Bomb (Mind Bomb) and Mindfunk (Mind Funk)