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)

What a difference a year makes: this CD is a vast improvement over Mugison’s Ipecac debut.

Little Trip is a film score to a movie called Little Trip To Heaven, which I’m guessing is named after the Tom Waits song of the same name that is covered on this album. The cover features rusted out cars in front of broken down homes and barren trees against a cloudy, purple sky, and it basically sounds like the score to a film heavy on those elements.

It’s dark, melancholy, and brooding. It’s heavily instrumental, featuring sparse piano, saxes, Lovage-esque shimmering synthesized strings, and some steel guit, all moving with a slow, smoky groove As a film score, it doesn’t always make sense without the programmatic aspect of the visuals, like when it suddenly shifts from soft to loud for seemingly no reason. So it’s more of an interesting thing than a relaxing, enjoyable sort of thing, but I can dig that.

If I were to judge it on pure enjoyability, it’s a 3.5-lunchbox CD. That’s the criteria I use to decide what gets kept on my DMP. But if I’m to judge it on its merits as a film score and its function as art music, it’s definitely four lunchboxes.

Rating:

Mixers: “Go Blind,” “Watchdog”
Keepers: “Little Trip To Heaven,” “Mugicone,” “Piano For Tombstones,” “Mugicone Part 2,” “Sammi & Kjartan,” “Murr Murr v 2”
Filed Between: Mugison’s Mugimama! Is This Monkeymusic? and Murphy’s Law (Dedicated)

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)

From Ipecac’s Orthrelm bio:

Orthrelm’s first recordings avoided repetition of any kind, no choruses, no riff repeated. … With OV, Orthrelm embraces repetition…. sort of.

Sort of? I can’t think of a single better word to summarize this album than “repetition.” This is prog rock meets minimalism, where a short, rapid-fire guitar riff about one second long is repeated dozens upon dozens of times, achieving such a hypnotic effect that when the riff finally changes, which happens about once every 2.5 minutes early on in the single, 45-minute track on this CD and a few times per minute later in the track, it has a dramatic effect in stark contrast to the slight variation of the actual change.

Charles-Louis Hanon is the nemesis of every young piano student, as his technical exercises of repeated ascending and descending patterns are drilled into all of them. Just say the name Hanon around a pianist and you will almost certainly get a visible shiver, as memories of plagues of incessant aural and kinesthetic patterns instilled by exacting teachers are conjured up. This is like Hanon, minus the ascending and descending. It’s just repetition.

Of course, like minimalism, interesting perceptual effects are achieved with this level of rapid repetition, and the listener is left wondering if the phasing in the drums or the changes in accent in the guitar riff are really there or if their mind is just playing tricks on them. It’s very cool in an intellectual, artsy sort of way, but without the proper mood-setting chemicals, it’s not really an enjoyable casual listen.

You can listen to a sample of it on Ipecac’s site here. The intro is different from the rest of the track, and takes up about a third of the sample, so if you make it to the big change a third of the way through, you basically know what the remaining 44 minutes sound like.

Rating:

Mixers: none
Keepers: none
Filed Between: Orff (Carmina Burana, St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, cond. Leonard Slatkin) and Beth Orton (Trailer Park)

General Patton Vs. The X-ecutioners, a project between Mike Patton and The X-ecutioners, a group of three turntablists, is kind of a cross between the two Mike Patton releases on Ipecac that would follow it. As a predominantly hip-hip album, it serves as a bit of a forerunner to 2006’s Peeping Tom, though this isn’t nearly as accessible and the cohesion I raved about in that album’s review isn’t present here. Still, you can hear Patton experimenting with some of the things he would employ expertly the following year.

Unfortunately, early 2005 seemed to be a time when Patton had run out of ideas as well as the ability to concentrate for more than one minute, as this disc bears a lot in common with the Fantômas album that would be released six weeks later, Suspended Animation. Back then I wrote:

The fragments are too short and the intermittent samples are too long. Just when a groove starts to take hold, they cut it short in disorienting fashion. The album doesn’t flow and I don’t feel compelled to keep listening for what’s around the corner.

I could hardly describe this album better. It has its moments, great ones in fact, but those moments seem to be randomly scattered throughout bland, repetitive melodies, a constant shifting from one riff or noise to another, and the same vocal tricks by Patton that were brilliantly original from 1995 to 1999 but are just treading water now. “Chuck-a-loo, chuck-a-loo,” Patton percussively sings, and I drift back to the Clinton administration, when he was breaking new ground with how the voice was used as an instrument. Then, to really drive home that parts of this disc were just mailed in, we get the “This…is a journey…into sound” sample. I mean, really? Really? This sample was on just about every hip-hop album in the 90’s and you…I mean…what the…what on Earth made you think this was some effective way of demonstrating your sonic prowess in 2005? I don’t know, maybe if you were in a coma in the 90’s and wanted to hear Patton’s take on hip-hop, then maybe this would be a great listen.

As it is, it’s merely a good listen, as some of the great moments bring it up just high enough to clear that bar. “Battle Hymn Of The Technics Republic” is a Star Wars laser gunfight on Planet Hip-Hop and manages to out-do all but the first two movies on its own. About midway through, “¡Kamikaze! 0500 Hrs. (‘Take A Piece Of Me’)” is probably the highlight of the album, with its hard-hitting beats and big, encompassing sound…if the whole album could have been that good…well, if wishes was fishes, I guess. Instead it just makes me that much more appreciative that Patton came out of his 2005 funk to make Peeping Tom, which I think I’m going to go listen to now.

Rating:

Mixers: “¡Vaqueros Y Indios! (Joint Special Operations Task Force),” “Battle Hymn Of The Technics Republic,” “¡Fire In The Hole! 0400 Hrs. (Joint Special Operations Task Force),” “¡Kamikaze! 0500 Hrs. (‘Take A Piece Of Me’)”
Non-keepers: “Improvised Explosive Device 0300 Hrs.,” “Precision Guided Needle-Dropping And Larynx Munitions (PGNDLM),” “Convulsive Antidote For Nerve Agent Autoinjector (CANAA),” “Surprise Swing Insurgency/Tabla And Tongue Twist Counterattack/(‘Dragon Seeks Path’),” “Eastside Multichannel Tactical Scratch Communications (EMTSC),” “Warcry/Infrared R’n’B Hallucination/Jungle Operations Exfiltration System,” “L.O.L.—¡Loser On Line! (Hate The Player, Hate The Game)”
Filed Between: Gene (“Sleep Well Tonight”) and Gershwin (Complete Piano Works (perf. Dag Achatz))

Vincent & Mr. Green is like a Nick Cave scene in a Wim Wenders movie. The music is overwhelming you and though you can’t quite discern a melody through the viscous bass, rhythm, and insanely-closely-mic’d vocals, you know that one’s there, but it’s an amorphous, mutating blob you can’t quite discern, coming into focus briefly, only to slip back into the ether. Somewhere somebody in a beret laughs and somebody else with a pencil-thin mustache pensively puffs away at a long cigarette. All is either black-and-white or monochromatic and draped in themes of death, betrayal, revenge, and disappointment, but also a zen-like acceptance. It’s disturbing, but compelling, and if you just surrender to it…just droop your eyelids and bob your head along, or at least nearly so, with the beat, you will reach a higher plane of consciousness and appreciate the sounds surrounding you.

And before you know it there’s a DJ right in front of you laying down beats that aren’t really slamming but seem like they are in comparison to where your now-surrendered head is at, and there she is, as clear as can be, Jade Vincent, the seductive, sultry, elusive chanteuse, you will be haphazardly pursuing for the next sixty minutes in this altered reality laid down by Mr. Green. And thank god, because he makes it all sound so good, so delicious, so palpable. You are now his movie, his creation. He controls all of your senses and finally you are able to surrender to everything, and just in time because Part I ends with Vincent telling of a phone call from Mom about Dad’s recent death, and you descend even further down the rabbit hole into the sonic mindfuck muck of Part II, never to be seen again, like the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey through the prism of a 1930’s French cabaret.

Rating:

Mixers: “Preface,” “Like You,” “Dance,” “Daddy,” “Dance (Part II)”
Non-keepers: “Burn,” “The Green Room,” “Will,” “Transylvania X,” “Once”
Filed Between: Verdi (Otello) and Voivod (War And Pain)

One my favorite musical experiences, and one I continually seek out, is where what originally sounds completely unmusical due to unconventional rhythms, melodies, or harmonies becomes, after several listens, musically beautiful. This phenomenon is why I listen to all of my albums so many times, no matter what my initial impressions are. It’s also why I’m hesitant to have a strong opinion (and I love having strong opinions) on anything I haven’t given a close listen. I experience it less and less as I age, which may be a consequence of me having heard so many unconventional forms of music, or there may be a maturational component that makes this experience more difficult to achieve. Circus Devils’ Sgt. Disco seems to suggest that the latter choice is an invalid hypothesis, though, as they provide 32 tracks over 65 minutes with varying, but generally high, levels of this phenomenon.

It’s like when you listen to a certain sample of speech enough times, it begins to sound familiar and enjoyable in the way tonal music does. You perceive the changes in pitch as a melody, the quality of voice as the harmony, and the diction as rhythm. This is why poetry read aloud is a completely different (and superior, I believe) art form from poetry read silently. It’s why those tracks by The Doors where Jim Morrison reads his poetry over weird sounds eventually sound like music. Sgt. Disco is all about this. It takes several listens for it to sink in, but I wouldn’t describe it as challenging. Circus Devils has found a way to make their music so speech-like that it feels like an innate acquisition to comprehend this disc.

This isn’t a spoken-word disc, however. Though I can’t go back in time to remember exactly which parts were less musical to me several listens ago than they are now, this is something you will unquestionably immediately recognize as music. Roger Waters has explored similar territory to those songs here that are nearly tuneless vocal melodies supported by sparse instrumentation, like “Nicky Highpockets” and “Pattern Girl.” “Love Hate Relationship With The Human Race,” which must be the band’s ode to me, features a clichéd cock rock riff with all sorts of swagger. “New Boy,” with its toy instrument timbres recalls Debussy’s work, particularly Children’s Corner. And after over an hour of bizarre, surrealist lyrical imagery of plastic surgery and alien life forms, the band sums things up with the brilliant protypical rock opera closer “Summer Is Set,” recalling Rush’s work of 30 years ago.

Most CDs that reach five-lunchbox candidacy appeal to my heart and loins. They get me excitable and animate me, causing me to jump around and scream. Sgt. Disco is just as good as any of those CDs, but it appeals to my intellect, hitting my cerebral neurons just right, causing me to stroke my beard and smoke a pipe.

Rating:

Mixers: “In Madonna’s Gazebo,” “Pattern Girl,” “Outlasting Girafalo,” “The Assassins’ Ballroom (Get Your Ass In),” “The Constable’s Headscape,” “New Boy,” “Swing Shift,” “Do This,” “French Horn Litigation,” “Summer Is Set”
Non-keepers: “Puke It Up,” “Happy Zones,” Hot Lettuce,” “Safer Than Hooking,” “Caravan,” “Lance The Boiling Son”
Filed Between: Chopin (19 Waltzes perf. Cyprien Katsaris on Teldec) and Eric Clapton (Timepieces – The Best Of Eric Clapton)

I was never a fan of The Jesus Lizard, so it’s not that surprising that I’m lukewarm on the new band David Yow is fronting, Qui, even though they are on Ipecac. I am, however, a fan of Tomahawk, featuring The Jesus Lizard’s guitarist Duane Denison. Seems that maybe Denison had the chops and Yow was the psycho putting the fear into the crowd. I don’t know nearly enough about The Jesus Lizard to make that claim, but it’s fun to speculate recklessly.

I think Qui does what they do well, it’s just not my cup of tea. It’s probably not yours, either. I dig the abrasive atonal riffs, and the jarring, dissonant layering they do with them, but they spend too much time in the upper registers, which makes their aggressiveness that much more unbearable.

On top of it all, you have Yow’s screaming vocals and violent imagery that, while it plays well with the music, is just a bit too disturbing. “Today, Gestation” is about a flasher and serial killer who “cut ‘em in pieces and set ‘em in rows.” I’ve never seen liner notes that listed lyrics as “???? ???? ????,” but that’s definitely what Yow is singing for the first three lines of “Gash.” Unfortunately he becomes understandable and proceeds to make my skin crawl as he sings, yells, and howls “Smack her” for the majority of the song. Likewise, he yowls out “I’m going to belt you” for a good chunk of “Belt.”

So, yeah, if these guys wrote catchy tunes there would probably be a parental uproar. Don’t get me wrong…I think that would be just as misguided as parental uproar over Mötley Crüe or Marilyn Manson, I’m just saying that since these guys are old (Yow is 47), nobody cares.

Oh, and they also cover Frank Zappa’s “Willie The Pimp” and, surprisingly, do quite a faithful version of Pink Floyd’s “Echoes.” At 6:37, it’s about 17 minutes shorter than Floyd’s version, so faithful is a relative term, but still, faithful enough to be notable.

Rating:

Mixers: “Apartment”
Keepers: “Gash,” “New Orleans,” “Echoes”
Filed Between: Queensrÿche (Operation: mindcrime II) and R.E.M. (Automatic For The People)