… in which I try to get over my hang-ups and open up my brain a bit while listening to Class Clown Spots a UFO by Guided By Voices
Beethoven’s name comes up in conversation and immediately you hear the characteristic pounds that open his 5th Symphony.
The Beach Boys, after 50 years of waxing fiberglass, are still wishing “They” could all be “California Girls…” Will Beck still be seen as a “Loser” at age 50? And, no wonder you don’t like the new Shins album, Jeff, it’s because it doesn’t sound like their first one.
Picture it: What if the super-scientists of the brave new world of the 20th ½ century harness necromantic-powers through lightning and reanimation potions and bone-re-fibrations and mind-stimulations to thus resurrect Beethoven and the old deaf dog decides, after a quick shower, that he wants to put out a new record?
Doesn’t matter how he makes it, how it sounds, what styles he embraces (would he reinvent DubStep? How he’d marvel over subwoofers and sequenced drum macines…) What matters is how you’re going to hear it – and you’re going to hear it through nostalgic ears, ears that remember well the dynamism of those old tunes, that 5th Symphony.
Funny how it is, a band, an artist, a filmmaker, a movie star, when they attain elevated reverence, be it widespread across the mainstream or clutched tight by the cult-esque hands of the shrewd but supportive underground, when they become stars, become unforgettable, they can then suffer becoming un-evolvable in some eyes… Condescending, in a way, don’t you think? Only just a few steps removed from your mother always seeing you “as my little boy…”
Gold Stars for the Robot Boys who Motored Away down Alien Lanes and got off on the Exit Flagger seeking new lives with Valuable Hunting Knives… Their old indelible “hits” echoing forever forward as the years scroll by but our regard for them stays preoccupied, frozen in amber, back there in 1995, or somewhere around the strange azure-tinged daydream memories of “Lo-Fi” “indie” heydays spent kicking around one used Records shop after another and drinking too much Budweiser as the floodlight blazes and fizzles-out from the top corner of the garage door and all goes quiet in those idealized nights of fading crickets and exhaust-stunk suburban streets through humid summers…
Your band has been the soundtrack for so many lives – and the playbacks are just as comforting as my uncle watching Casablanca on Turner Classics’ for the 193rd time.
Too many traps can snare you when you’re signature becomes ostensibly traceable by a population of dreamy and deluded listeners; you’ll get one reviewer who wants to kill your legend and proselytize lovers into haters with screeds of sneers; you’ll get another reviewer with somewhat good, if kool-aid-intoxicated, intentions, who just want to love you because they loved your past works so much so you get the smear of rosier lenses. Then, you might also get someone like me who’s just over-thinking the whole god-damned thing and feeling torn. But then, thankfully, out there, you’ll find someone who can approach it all with sober ears and an uninfluenced heart, not a cold bastard out just walking through another routine check-off of an album review, but someone who’s going to keenly comb over all the bumps and curves of the sonic sculpture.
Hopefully I’ll be a balance of the last two…
Guided By Voices shuffle down the aisles of the MusicWorld’s blogosphere with a kingly cape pinched by festooned cool clerks preserving their legend as lo-fi indie-rock sages, swinging scepters of shambolic, Rustbelt-wrung-Brit-pop. Their high regard is due in no small part to their epic (sometimes death-defying) live shows (spanning 2-3 hours with as many songs toppling forth as emptied beer cans) and to the four (if not five) iconic albums they released through the bulk of the 90’s.
Strange, the power of a song or a few songs, (or 33 songs, in GBV’s case), suddenly those songs are like Rhett carrying Scarlet up the ornate staircase, the shadowy figure tearing open the shower curtain with a knife in its hands, Superman darting in and out of a fucking phone booth, it burns its memory onto our ears.
Is it, then, at least partly the fault of the listener, (maybe some gut-response from The Listener -as some bipedal species feeling its way through the caves of recorded sound-), that when last year’s big reunion of GBV culminated with the “much-anticipated” release of their (first-in-however-many-years’ album) Let’s Go Eat The Factory fell upon ears that found it unsatisfying… “missing something…”
Or, at least, maybe just not enough muscle in the swing of its bat, not a tight enough grip when roping through grimier atmospheric murk or tearing liltingly through breezier/tinnier psyche-pop dustings. But too many moments of Factory felt like the creaky stretch before a proper work-out; the in-take of air, the nervy tinges through your leg muscles before a long run; an overdue clearing of the throat, some inevitable phlegm clearing.
Listening to the first two tracks on Class Clown, I was worried some of the kinks still hadn’t been worked out. The band’s already known for quirky-quip song-titles sounding clipped from an introvert’s cafeteria-culled fairy tales, so the murmur and munch of “Blue Babbleships Bay” risks coming off as self-parody and the hazy, blue-collar sophistophrat, fist-raising anthem of “He Rises! Our Union Bellboy” still chimes of glassy-eyed old guard indie-rockers polishing past trophies.
A minute into the aptly titled “Forever Until It Breaks” I was this close to skipping to the next track, but then something in me let it play.
I hung up my hang-ups, truthfully, and I let the songs strum over me anew. “Hang Up And Try Again” –also aptly title, spurs on with its buzzsaw guitars churning gracefully and gristly, “Forever” lulls with its wheezy acoustics into some wistful campfire-sing-along, those sawing strings breathe meditatively.
Again, perhaps self-referential, but catching in its mellow-ish mantra, “Keep It In Motion,” ambles along spiritedly, those violins return for this sweet, minimalist jaunt, a simple hum over sparsely punched percussion. Here, it feels like boys finally found their post-Millennial / (hell, post-2010) studio-groove.
I say studio-groove because they’d already fallen back into their stage-groove from the live sets that started up more than two years ago, but now there’s a chime of confidence, or maybe just comfort, to the songs. Whether dusky acoustic trips, weird psychedelic-pop splatters, or muscly, frayed-edged metal rockers (“Tyson’s High School!”); it’s smorgasbord, yes, but not uneasy, not like it’s searching for something to be, or reaching for something too high. (More on “reaching,” later).
And still very much not the typical 5th Symphony the old fan-base unreasonably hopes for…Still weird, a bit mangy or even flighty at points, but it still holds you. I couldn’t stop staring into that campfire as Tobin Sprout sang on, melodious, but fogged by the delicate clamor of those guitars and strings “Forever…”
And why should I have to do this every time Bob Pollard puts something new out? (Material-output-wise he’s three-times as consistent as any Woody Allen, be it solo or be it under GBV, he just keeps going).
But, why would listeners bear-trap the ankles of their beloved artists with the silver spikes of their past piques. Harrison Ford’s no longer Han Solo and Wes Anderson isn’t going to make another Rushmore and… Bob Pollard never stops writing…
I sat down with Keith Thompson (of Electric Six / Johnny Headband) recently, and we talked at length on this subject, as it’s coming up on the 10th anniversary of the Electric Six’ album Fire, which featured their break-out single, “Danger! High Voltage.”
“If you’re a musician, you wanna write something new under the name that you’ve been writing under,” Thompson said. “Are you gonna keep referencing what you’ve been doing? Or are you gonna do something new?”
The Fire LP was also home to instant-anthems like “Gay Bar” and “Dance Commander,” songs that helped them establish their foothold in U.S. ears, but tracks they’ve since grown far away from; if they’ve returned to similar aesthetics its always with evolved ears and keener approaches. This band, E6, just like Pollard, never stops writing…(Seven albums in the last seven years alone).
When you don’t stop, when there is no block, then there’s no risk of looking back, staying back, or recapturing what’s been before. Why would you want to, if you’ve got this new thing here…
“If you’re writing where-you’re-at,” Thompson said, “you’re not gonna reference a bunch of bullshit that isn’t relevant. It’s only relevant if you’re caught in the past.”
Let Beethoven die.
And “everybody hold your heads up high,” Pollard sings on “Keep It In Motion”
“Everybody could be touching the sky / So you slow down and up, up we go / Up, Up we go now…”
As he’d sung 15 years prior: “As we go up / we go down.” Indelible lyrics and melodies, yes. But there’s new songs to get stuck in your head. Open up your brain, Jeff.
If I couldn’t get into any sanctified indie/mega-star’s newer stuff, it’s because sometimes I’listening for something else. Caught in the past, in the midst of future tracks.
“Keep It In Motion…”
~
FYI: The Electric Six are performing live, in Michigan, very soon – first, a few hours West of the Washtenaw-area in Grand Rapids and then just about one hour East towards Detroit:
- Sat 7/14 – Grand Rapids, MI – Pyramid Scheme
- Sun 7/15 – Fenrdale, MI – Woodward Avenue Brewers for the Pig & Whiskey Festival.
- http://www.electricsix.com/
They’re currently finishing up production on a Live Compilation – due out in October, this year.
