Pale Green Things

So I'm assuming you aren't a complete moron and have, therefore, picked up the Mountain Goats' latest effort. If, however, you suffer the unfortunate affliction of being a complete moron, it was released on 4AD last April and it's called The Sunset Tree. They've already recorded a new one to be released this fall, so if you haven't heard The Sunset Tree, you're way behind. I forgive you, though, because the band has released about 400 songs. At any rate, if it's a simple matter of not knowing where to begin, begin with The Sunset Tree. And I will now tell you why.

First of all, the album is a brilliant thematic rumination upon the power of music, and I know how terrible that sort of thing might sound. The Mountain Goats don't care, though. They have a mission. And that mission is to look honestly and thoughtfully at what might otherwise become a relationship painted with broad, assuming strokes. To be less vague, the album is about a young man's relationship with his abusive stepfather, and the role music plays in quelling—or, at least, constructively funneling—the depression and despair of the situation. This is no Golden Boy¹. This is no Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton²

The stepfather is portrayed at turns as a vicious monster (“I start wailing. The lion roars.”) and a misunderstood person with deep and troubling problems (“love, love is going to lead you by the hand into a white and soundless place”). We get a distinct sense of the pain our child-protagonist is going through when he explains how his stepfather “launches a glass across the room, straight at [my mother's] face, and I dash upstairs to take cover; lean in close to my little record player on the floor. So this is what the volume knob is for, I listen to dance music.”

And even this small fortress in which young John took cover is not safe from the terror: “You blaze down the hall and you scream. I'm in my room with the headphones on, deep in a dream chamber. And then I'm awake and I'm guarding my face, hoping you don't break my stereo, because it's the one thing that I couldn't live without and so I think about that and I sort of pass out.”

But when the dust finally settles, and John finally “wriggles up on dry land,” he looks back with a mixed sense of anger and finality. I get the feeling he wants to forgive or, at the very least, reconstruct his memories in a manner in which forgiveness is a plausible option. This intangible desire for his stepfather's posthumous redemption duels with his own desire to rid himself of the emotional tyranny within which he has shrouded his life, never more clearly than in the final song, Pale Green Things.

There are four pale green things in this song to take note of. First are blades of grass trying desperately to survive through the cracks of concrete. This subtly parallels John's own struggle to thrive under his stepfather's oppression. But also, and even more subtly, the desire for forgiveness to thrive under the emotional trauma that had been surmounting his whole life. Second, the wet leaves that his stepfather listlessly stared at during a particularly vivid memory. The wet leaves become synecdoche for the far off distance in which things might become okay again. The third pale green thing is the ruminations of “seaweed and Indiana sawgrass” John evokes upon hearing of his stepfather's death. This becomes the process of analyzing information; the “turning it over in my mind” necessary for sincere contemplation of some of the most emotionally fragile aspects of this young man's psyche.

The CD itself is the fourth pale green thing. It's completely green with a black border. Nothing more. Not even the name of the album. It is perhaps John's way of closing the process, finding finality in the place he has sought it his whole life: through music. His own music becomes, as those other striking metaphors, an avenue for solace and redemption, a place to express, however simply, his pale green things.

1An early Mountain Goats song extolling the virtues of kindness and charity on the grounds that “there are no Pan Asian supermarkets down in hell, so you can't buy Golden Boy Peanuts.”

2A somewhat more recent parable of high school would-be rockers whose dreams are crushed by adults who don't “get” the nuanced protocol of the death metal genre and, being adults, assume the worst.

Don't Turn Away

On the way home from our weekly Phoenix Improv Festival meeting, I told my fiancee to change CD's in the car stereo. She grabbed face to face's self titled major label debut¹. Before she even put the CD in, I did what I may perhaps arrogantly call a spot-on vocal impression of the opening bass line. “Wow,” she said when the real music came on and she realized what had just happened. “That's...sad.”

But the thing is, it isn't sad. I bought that CD on the day it came out—when I was in middle school—and I probably listened to it at least once a week until my junior year of high school. Was it a great album? I'm not sure that mattered. It was fast and loud and honest. And catchy. It straddled that prickly, fragmented fence between pop punk and hardcore. And now, I'm not entirely sure if I like them for nostalgia's sake or because they're good on their own merits, and I'm even less sure of what, if any, difference it makes.

face to face's Don't Turn Away was probably the first punk album I ever bought. I considered putting the word 'punk' in quotes in the preceding sentence, but you know what? That album is more punk than anything I have ever heard before or since. Now, I seriously considered deleting that entire last sentence because I am fully aware how utterly retarded it makes me sound. But I've never wanted to define punk in anything other than tenuous, subjective, and individual terms. I don't have faith in punk as a counter cultural force for changing the much-too-complex class relations of the world. To be sure, I feel that the 1-4-5 Empty Fifth Progression complete with with the Totally Killer Break-Down is insufficiently equipped to bring down thousands of years worth of ruling-class oppression. But damned if I'm not overcome with delight at the gumption, the suspension of common sense in favor of a beautiful and righteous idealism. And, unlike marijuana, face to face's Don't Turn Away was my gateway drug.

The intangible that I'm getting at—that I'm trying and failing to elucidate—is that sometimes music needs to be assessed by subjective means. Sometimes albums are great because they find you at a particularly vulnerable or unique time in your life. And it's important to realize that it doesn't make them any less great. I'm sick of hearing people say, “Well that album isn't very good but I listened to it all the time in high school because I was young and stupid and now that album makes me happy to listen to because I think of those great times and get nostalgic but I promise it has absolutely nothing to do with the merits of the music.” Run on sentence aside, the sentiment itself is all too often either bogus or self-loathing. Sure, sometimes we listened to stupid stuff and we are ashamed because of how bad it was in retrospect. But more often we come to the realization that the music isn't “cool” and, therefore, turn our back on it.

Don't Turn Away is fast and loud. Their follow-up EP, called Over It, is similarly fast and loud. When I listen to these albums, I feel like I can take over whatever minute portion of the world that's worth taking over. I usually jam them in my car when I'm alone. I sing along loudly and bob my head up and down like a muppet with a Parkinson's ridden puppeteer. And sometimes when I pull up to a stoplight and catch the eye of the driver next to me, I feel a little ashamed. Then I feel ashamed for feeling ashamed because, really, I should just not give a fuck about this random stranger's disapproving—or, perhaps more accurately, bewildered—glare. But, like the knowledge that face to face aren't very “cool,” (after all, they released their third full-length through A&M) and certainly do not pass the standardized punk-rock litmus test that makes me feel like I shouldn't be listening to this music in the first place, I realize that this is just another institutionalized way to control my actions. And that's not very punk rock, is it?

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1I'm not being rude or careless by not capitalizing their name. They are the bell hooks of 90's punk rock. They prefer humility to convention, and on this point I'm rather ambivalent. As sincere as their intentions, it comes across as a somewhat calculated attempt at humility, which can be seen as more contrived than humble.

22 Jacks

Given that, on first listen, they sound like something a suburban housewife listens to while running on a treadmill, the 22 Jacks are a surprisingly great band. It’s too bad for them, financially at least, that housewives have never heard of them. Moreover, it’s too bad that really no one—aside from the few hardcore Wax fans who decided to check out the singer’s other band, or aging punkers who still follow the careers of the Adolescents and Agent Orange members—has even heard of them.

I saw the 22 Jacks live about six years ago when they opened for mxpx. I’ll say that again. They opened for MXPX. If my point that they are underrated is not fully illustrated by the preceding, doing a quick Amazon search reveals that you can purchase all three of their albums used for 25 cents, and a penny for each of the two I’m going to talk about.

A band who opens for mxpx, whose discography is worth less than a stamp, is either the most pathetically underrated band in the universe or is, well, terrible. But the 22 Jacks are not terrible. They are, as I’ve mentioned, surprisingly great.

They have two albums—actually three, but I don’t particularly give a shit about Overserved, which features 10 songs, 3 of which are live tracks, 3 are covers, and 2 were on their first album. I could speculate all day without approaching anything resembling a reason to release that album. They have two albums of note.

The first, called Uncle Bob, is a light and dancy romp about the singer’s dead uncle, Bob. It’s the second best album ever made about a dead uncle. The first is Sport Murphy’s Uncle, about the growing animosity of his family after his uncle died in the World Trade Center attacks. Sport’s effort is a brutal, tragic, and honest work about the psychology of exploiting the dead. Uncle Bob, on the other hand, is neither brutal nor tragic. It is, however, honest. And honesty is my only real requirement from music. It’s a requirement sadly ignored by too many musicians and too many fans. The 22 Jacks pull it off because they understand that ‘honest’ doesn’t mean ‘serious.’ They understand that honest music can still be fun.

The role of uncle is always an interesting one, and Uncle Bob was clearly the fun uncle. The one who showed up during the best of times, partied, spoiled the kids, and went home. The one who probably didn’t have any kids of his own, being much too irresponsible for that sort of commitment. He lived the fantasy of fatherhood, then retreated to the safety and comfort of a bachelor’s life.

The album seeks not so much to chronicle the life of Uncle Bob as it does to become him. Capture his strange and eclectic spirit. Musically embody the persona, the image that Uncle Bob created for himself. Then, lightly sprinkle moments of clarity across his deliberately superficial appearance. The album is deep. Much too deep to open for mxpx.

Musically, the album sounds like if you took the politics out of early Elvis Costello. The songs are infectious in a way that other songs branded “infectious” could only hope to be; infectious in the sense that you have to listen to the album again and again as a pre-emptive strike against the inevitable fact that they will become stuck in your head. The jangling guitar solo on Newspaper and Cigarettes alone is worth about sixty times the price of the album—which, if you’ll remember, is exactly one cent plus shipping and handling. The drummer, Sandy Hanson, is the type of knows-his-place drummer that your crappy high school garage band wished it had, but had to make do with Ol’ Rush McFillsalot instead. He knows when to rock and, more importantly, when not to.

The album cover is green, which wouldn’t bare mentioning if not for the fact that the songs sound, well, green. Not in the sense of being amateurish or earthy or environmentally conscious, I mean they just sound the way I imagine the color green to sound if it were music instead of a color. They sound green the way Johnny Cash’s songs sound black.

Then they go and put out Going North. It resides in the somewhat more familiar territory of failed relationships. The album’s theme seems to be about going on tour as a means of escaping the pain of breaking up. Yeah, I know. Not exactly uncharted waters, but the Jacks pull it off. Each song is able to stand on its own as a Buddy Holly-esque 3 minute pop song about breaking up being, you know, hard to do. But this album has a flow. If Uncle Bob surrounds you with a personality, Going North picks you up at a local gas station, shows you the entire country, then strands you at a rest stop nine hundred miles away.

It starts with the type of pop-punk song that would make Screeching Weasel jealous. It ends with a song that is as soft and cool as anything I’ve ever heard. It’s the type of song that makes you want to put on a leather jacket and sunglasses and just cruise around the city in a convertible. Which is what I’m going to do right now, in lieu of writing some profound conclusion to this.

The Most Refined of the Death Metal Genre

Now the thing about death metal that you have to deal with if you want to hear some of the most amazing and haunting musical compositions of the modern era is the completely godawful vocals, which most people refer to pejoritvely as "cookie monster." It's basically as low of a scream as possible, rendering what might otherwise be universally loved musical arrangements all but moot. Not to mention, the vast stretches of our population want as little as possible do to with any genre of music that uses the word "death" as an effective descriptor. To be honest, most people don't make it far enough to even get to the vocals, stopped somewhere along the way if not by the cover art (the amount of mutilated flesh depicted is usually in direct proportion to how fast and loud the band is) or the band's name (either verbal representations of the cover art or, presumably, the same translated into a Scandinavian language) then certainly by the final roadblock, the names of the songs or albums.

Germany's Necrophagist is, in some ways unfortunately, no different. Their song titles roam from pretty direct thematic indicators (ignominous and pale) to even more direct thematic indicators (stabwound).

The cardinal lyrical difference between the various genres of metal appears to be from what angle the lyricist decides to view death and destruction. Whereas metalcore may look at destruction anagogically through the view of an unjust society, and black metal personifies death and destruction by allegorically representing Satan, darklords, stone gates and oceans of fire, death metal takes the micro approach. It looks at death as an inevitable biological process through which our most intimate and ultimately realized fears manifest themselves. Necrophagist's first album was titled "Onset of Putrefaction," which is a death-metally sounding phrase describing the moment when decomposition of once-living flesh begins to emit odorous compounds. So that's what they're getting at. If it wasn't clear enough from the album title, the first track is called "foul body autopsy." Death metal is not a genre known for its subtlety.

I wish I could relay exactly what the music is doing without using Nintendo analogies, but I cannot. The guitar riffs sound like those power-up machines that restore your life meter in, you know, every fucking nintendo game.

Okay, now vibrate your tongue against the roof of your mouth. Now do that in 15/16 time.That approaches what the drums sound like.

Singer/songwriter/guitarist Muhammed Suicmez, who also played every instrument on the aforementioned Onset of Putrefaction, has found a full band for their latest release, Epitaph. But the playing sounds suspiciously like their first album. I have a feeling this Muhammed dude is the type of control freak who wouldn't let his band members record in the studio, but judging by the stuff he composes and plays, he has every right to be.

The only flaw on the entire album is the vocals. Now I understand that if you do anything but the gnarliest of growls, death metal enthusiasts will turn their back on you faster than Sammy the Bull Gravano. But for a band as innovative as Necrophagist--a band whose own website (the Official Necrophagist Dungeon, mind you) boasts their single-handed resuscitation of the genre--the monotone growl just distracts. It's like if in the middle of Cirque du Soleil, a guy came out on stage and busted out a decent anyone's-uncle-can-do-it three ball juggle. It might impress a few kids, but they're better than that.

That's not to say that you shouldn't do whatever it takes to hear this album. Just listen to it. Listen to it and think about your own imminent death. Think about the rotting that your flesh will experience, and compare that to the milder, gentler rotting your flesh is already starting to experience. Then, when you've sufficiently mulled it over, let one of the killer guitar riffs refill your life meter.

Abbey Normal

Every now and again when you've driven up to Provo, Utah to meet your fiance's father for the first time—and after the three of you have had a blast snowboarding for the better part of the night—you'll find yourself traveling up to Salt Lake City to catch a rock show. You're into music; your fiance is into music; your fiance's father is into music. Why not, right?

Well on that day, you will undoubtedly enter a smoky bar and find three kids playing something resembling ska-punk. Not ska-punk in the Operation Ivy vein, mind you, but the type of ska-punk that would be full-fledged third wave ska if they could only find a horn section. But, of course, the thing is, they can't. And they never will. So they've resigned themselves to sounding like Saves the Day with upstrokes.

And if you were to place bets on he future of this band, the smart money's on continuing to play these types of bars, maybe some high school functions, vehemently urging their friends to come see them, and then eventually dissolving. Not breaking up, mind you. Eventually they will all just stop showing up to practice. No one will bother to call, they'll all simply move on. It would be a shame if not for the fact that the band isn't very good. Sure, they know how to play their instruments. They even have some catchy songs. I'm sure a close circle of 20-30 peers and admirers will wonder whatever happened to that band. “Good times,” they'll say. But notice they never quite say, “Good band.”

Well here's a coincidence to end all coincidences: I saw this very band! They're from Provo, they were playing at a bar in Salt Lake City, and their name is Abby Normal.

If you're over the age of twenty, you'll probably recognize the Young Frankenstein reference. These kids were in all likeliness under the age of twenty, so this reference probably seems a great deal more obscure to their age cohort than it would to ours. So, obscure but comedic cultural reference for a band name...check!

The singer wasn't very good at singing. He could stay on key when he sang loudly. Unfortunately, he lacked the confidence to sing loudly during the softer parts of the songs. But if you know anything about my musical tastes, you'll understand the kind of leeway I give to singers. You'll also recognize my favor for the emotional content that underlies the musical content. It's more abstract, more difficult to summarize, but ultimately much more rewarding.

And this band, Abbey Normal, in spite of their shortcomings, had that completely intangible and subjective emotional content. Peeking out from behind their lack of confidence was the very reason for this lack: they really wanted people to like them. They took themselves seriously in a way too few bands do these days. I don't mean to say that too few bands take themselves seriously—that is anything but the case—they just take themselves the wrong kind of seriously. They either want to put out an album or they want scene cred or they want to be famous. They want to feel important. Like rockstars.

Abbey Normal, on the other hand, simply wanted people to enjoy their music. They wanted to get on stage and play music that was fun to listen to. And, in spite of their seeming newness to the stage, that feeling came through. It's the type of feeling that even the most seasoned vets can't pull off. It screams of a time when intentions were simpler, before the information age had polluted the vast horizon of possibility, back when a song was sung because someone wanted it sung and, goddammit, that was what they were going to do. I'm not entirely sure that time ever existed, save for in the minds of those who would will it so. Nostalgia is all too often a revision of history, a retroactive ennoblement of the profane.

But the purpose of music is to give texture to these revisions, these fantasies. It provides a platform for the eradication of our fears and, in its place, the installation of hope. And damned if that wasn't exactly what Abbey Normal was doing that winter night in a small bar in Salt Lake City. In a strange and strangely profound way, they instilled my bitter and jaded mind with a jigsawed sliver of hope. Now, when the music industry crumbles in the most vivid versions of my fantasies, it'll be bands like Abbey Normal that look around, shrug, and play a few upstrokes.

Music Only from now on.

So I'll be updating the blog weekly--on Sundays--with some sort of music related article. Most likely talking about pop-punk from the mid nineties. But probably other stuff too.