Obviously, a band called “Head of Femur”, which titles its debut album Ringodom or Proctor, is going to be fun. At least if the song titles measure up. “Curve That Byrd”, “Yeoman or Tinker”, “Acme: the Summit of a Mountain”, those should be fun songs.
Or, I know, they could be pretentious and solemn. “Ringodom or Proctor” could be a real psychological choice, the condition of being Ringo Starr (an amiable rhythm-keeping doofus) versus the condition of being a frowning man at a desk whose job is to silence all rhythms. But it takes a lot of people to make and release an album. No way could Head of Femur have gotten that far, especially somewhere as down-home as Nebraska, without people daring to point out that “Head of Femur” is a really silly band name and Ringodom or Proctor an even sillier title. They kept both. So obviously, a band called “Head of Femur” is going to be fun.
Which they are. I was sure of that by 30 seconds into my first listen. I’m normally a much harder sell, but then, I don’t always hear pop songs as elemental as “January on Strike”. A kettle drum is hit hard and fast, 52 times in 11 seconds (which is 285 beats-per-minute, techno fans), before being paired with a fast monotone on bass guitar. A piano enters, playing five notes one at a time: a simple hook, descending an octave. An urgent, yelping male voice starts singing at _double_ the rate of that kettle drum. He’s only singing one note himself, true, but then he slows down (slightly) and ends his sentence on a new note. The whole song reacts: the drum and bass stop, and the guitarist plays a pensive lick on what I would’ve sworn was a ukelele until I checked the credits. Then, at 30 seconds, the drum and bass and piano race back in. This, my friends, is the sound of enthusiasm.
By the minute mark, the guitar’s return is pretty enough for a Southern-rock power ballad; soon after, the piano is playing enough notes to sound grand and classical; and by 1:36 into the album, a horn section is celebratory enough for the finale of an MGM musical. An off-key blat by the trombone halts everything so that the bass and kettle-drum can barrel into the breach one more time; the singer again sings his note, and then his other note. A guitar that now sounds more like a mandolin plays a strong riff with Middle Eastern chordings in 10/4 time, and I glance at the CD player and realize that, in mid-riff, Head of Femur has switched to song #2.
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I don’t know whether a great full-length pop album could be made at 285 beats per minute. “January on Strike” may be evidence that it couldn’t: hear how all the real melodies have to waft in more slowly. But the album’s constant isn’t the rush of beats; it’s the rush of ideas. Less than 20 seconds into “Curve That Byrd”, the lead guitar is playing a pattern that’s relaxing and fluid even as it’s full of jumpy notes, and the singers are doing Beach Boys harmonies. The violin soon reminds me of “Shiny Happy People”, which I firmly believe is one of R.E.M.’s best songs even though Michael Stipe is known to hate its shiny happiness. The fanfare has a tinge of melancholy, with the trumpets and trombone undercut by sadder euphonium, flugelhorn, and French horn. Marimba and timpani introduce the more dramatic side of R.E.M.’s Out of Time, and then that Middle Eastern riff returns to lead the song’s four minutes of swirling melodies to a finish.
Listening to Ringodom or Proctor piece by piece, it would be easy to mistake it for a mild downer. “Yeoman or Tinker” starts with sad Rhodes keyboard, and a guitar trying to imitate the calls of a wounded glass bird; its vocal melodies that circle each other are minor as often as major, and the piccolo solo is rousing but, again, minor-key. “Eighty Steps to Jonah” has fast rumbling xylophone and cymbals and synth, but the verse vocals are whiny, not far from tears, while the strings and French horn suggest “Penny Lane” taken off Zoloft.
“Me, My Dad, My Cousin, and Ronnie” is a waltz driven by accordian and triangle and violins, and it has its share of sad cello. Perhaps that outweighs the ridiculous deep singing on the chorus (like the Big Bopper singing a lullaby inside a giant tuba), and the faint ribbit-ing loop of a man saying “Ronnie”. “Acme: the Summit of a Mountain” is an obvious single, with fierce cascading drums and punk violin and skittering tuned percussion, but it fades to lost UFO bleeps and the percussion section of a weary marching-band at the end of a 31-0 defeat.
Brian Eno’s “the True Wheel” is covered with intense, trippy rock energy, and the falsetto harmonies set off a hiccupy lead vocal that reminds me of early Roxy Music; but then “Money is the Root”, on faded electric piano, sounds defeated. “Science Needed a Medical Man” races along on handclaps and toy percussion and a chunky guitar hook, but the vocal harmonies are Flaming Lips impressions, and like a Flaming Lips song, it turns out to be about loss and death.
The shifting time signatures of “Finally I’ve Made it Nowhere” bury nods to everything from the power-pop of Fountains of Wayne to the sea-shanty “Sloop John B”, to the rock drama of the Who’s Tommy, to the pep of a carnival cruise-line band that didn’t suck. Indecisive. But the guitar on “the Car Wore a Halo Hat” sounds as hollow-bodied as it can, there’s weepy pedal-steel and shimmering synthesizer, the timpani clatters, and the last lyric on the album is “Give me a second to say goodbye”. Many of the album’s previous lyrics have been about sexual jealousy, money-based jealousy, role confusion, alcohol, and rejecting ambition.
So why, then, does Ringodom or Proctor make me so happy?
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For one thing, the outsider whining of the lyrics is only obvious when I read them. “You’ve had victory again, like chariots on the beach spearing the enemy down” is a glorious chorus spanning almost two full octaves, and by itself it could be praise. “Eighty steps to Jonah, that’s what the children say” could be a nursery rhyme. “Make another make another make another make another vodka tonic, cuz I really love them!” just sounds like enthusiasm. “I don’t wanna go to tech school!” is a rallying cry many of us can get behind. It’s easy to read “He gets psyched for birthday pitfall kitchen” as word salad. It’s so easy that they must want us to; perhaps they write in bad moods, for the power of venting, and then they go smudge the meanings in good moods. A fine system.
More to the point, they can’t be as outsider as all that. Sure, there might really be a Ronnie, who “must be an assshole” because he “eats a lot of snail and gets a lot of tail from the girls in Riverside”. Nonetheless, the men in Head of Femur got a Tiffany to play violin and sing, an Annie to play flute, a Gretta to play cello, and a Margaret to play bassoon. Let’s get real: getting a girl in bed might not be the easiest task, but it’s one I’ve achieved here and there, while I’ve never had a girl play bassoon on one of my songs, as I bet Ronnie hasn’t either. There’s also ten male-named guests, plus an A.J. Mogis, the producer, who plays “handclaps, Rhodes, and cat”.
And the communal music made on Ringodom is just so full of life. Fine, it flutters between major and minor key, and it switches tempoes and time signatures on a dime: the result is the freedom to write huge swooping tunes, and make them sparkle as much as they wish.
Flaming Lips want to be geniuses of melody, and their last couple albums have piled on such lush sonic details that I’m happy to pretend they fool me; but if “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots” was sung as radio pop-punk by Blink-182, it’d be one of their less tuneful, less catchy pieces. Polyphonic Spree got some MTV2 play for “Light of Day”, a catchy song with its cascading brass and strings and harmonies, but with eighteen singers they didn’t think to find one who could actually _sing_, while Head of Femur’s Ben and Mike and Matt can hit dozens of notes every time out. A Blink-182 cover of “Acme” would be the most spectacular thing that band ever did, and I like Blink-182.
In other words, Ringodom or Proctor is as over-the-top as its name, and for me, that’s what sells it. Even the slow bits are always in motion. Even the most strained vocals are picking out ambitious tunes, and then going back and improving them. Even the simplest see-sawing bass line is lending tension to a full cascade of sound.
And everything I hear here is catchy. Catchy, co-operative, and fun.
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