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listen with a crooked ear: a Shilmafone mix for brave young cyborgsNov 11 '04 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line I know you think Nine Inch Nails are too cuddly, but really, there's no need to despair.
Since my substitute teaching has become a full-time job again (with some real teaching as a fill-in algebra teacher til Christmas), my wife Cindy is less busy at work for the moment than I am. As she called, full of time and between projects, I suggested “You could do review of Mike Schiller’s mix for me” – but as long-delayed as my writeup has been, she didn’t think Mike would like her helping. “No problem, just say something favorable”, I replied, and she paused to think: “This mix didn’t make my ears bleed?”, she suggested. So that wouldn’t work; one sentence in, her review would reveal that I’d never actually played the mix for her. Shilmafone and I had traded difficult music before (see my review of Crushed by the Presence), but I guess we’d both been holding back, at least a tiny bit; this time around, our mixes would have scarred _any_ sane person. Luckily, he enjoyed my second weird mix as much as my first, and I have enjoyed his. If I pummeled Mike with weird instrumentation, odd time signatures, and complicated song structures, his favorite method was just as effective: send teams of robots in to crush all listener resistance. I should note that, as before, I intend 3, 4, and 5 (on a 5-point scale) to be positive ratings, and 1 and 2 to be negative ratings. The absence of low ratings in this review does not in any way change this system. 1. C-Tec, “Random” Industrial music is not a playground for "random", but I could believe, if asked, that C-Tec’s skittering beats were constructed with at least some help from die rolls: to decide to the microsecond exactly when the highest-pitched beats – the ones like the Tin Woodsman hyperventilating as he rapidly clicks his tongue against his teeth – would fall. I could accept, too, that the bass player jabbed out his ominous power-chords from three rooms away, to keep him from being biased about when his riffs should start. The singer, growling through a ventilator shaft, does keep a firm rhythm, and honestly the song’s overall feel is well within the genre. But it’s queasy and unsettling, and oddly cheerful about it, so what’s wrong with that? 4/5 2. Chemlab, “Suicide Jag” This song is more human, but also more disciplined. The bass guitar shoots off shrapnel on cue, the drummer is jittery but exact, and the singer monotones “You fuuck me and I hate you; you hate me and I fuuck you” through a bullhorn like a pained sergeant drilling his troops in self-mutilation. But there’s a cute little synth melody behind the sung chorus, and a hair-dryer gamely trying to hum along; so maybe, just maybe, everyone involved thinks this is a pop song. 3/5 3. Nas, “New York State of Mind” No relation to the Billy Joel song, but we do hear a single splash of piano repeated just before the start of each 4-beat measure, while the real rhythm is driven by syncopated kick/snare and a simple, muddy synthesizer hook. If, like my occasional white students, you hate rap music’s grind-everything-into-your-head repetitiveness, you’ll hate this song, and that’s fine. But there’s something oddly appealing to me in the beat, and its minimalism puts the focus on Nas’s urgently spoken words, a thoughtful riff on the dangers and temptations of growing up in the ghetto. Or maybe it’s just that “I never sleep, cuz sleep is the cousin of death” wins over the same part of my brain that remembers the movie Real Genius only for how lucky the hyperkinetic nerd-girl was to be awake eight extra hours of every day. Either way, I’m impressed. 5/5 4. Front Line Assembly, “Plasticity” Elegantly composed for a 7-minute running length, this is the first song here whose synthesizers sound “futuristic”: fast-paced driving music for the sleek vacation-getaway spacecraft of the cosmic motorways. As the vocal stylings remind us, road rage won’t suddenly disappear at 1,000 miles per second; and as booming lyrics like “the laws of nature, the laws of man/ this volatile paradise will never stand” warn us, talk radio callers will always be whiny-asss. 4/5 5. Pigface, “Nutopia” Very possibly the best song I have _ever_ first heard via mix cd, and the latest entry in my twenty-or-so favorite songs ever, “Nutopia” serves as a perfect illustration of the difference between poetry and lyrics, lyrics and vocal performance, vocal performance and recorded song. Read as social commentary, guest Meg Lee Chin has given us, at best, a few catchy lines (“Seven-Eleven nightmares at 3 a.m.”) and Alan Ginsburg homages (“I saw the best minds of my generation caught up in the virtual reality of living/ memorizing PIN numbers and secret codes, swaying robotically to nonexistent rhythms/ flashing memberships to clubs so exclusive nobody belongs”). As heard lyrics, though, the tiredness of her take on “my generation/ my generation” loses importance; catchy statements of the familiar gain more weight, because they _are_ catchy and familiar. And with Meg herself singing … man. Her speaking voice is as sardonic and versatile, taunting here and infinitely wise there, as her words aren’t. Banks of processors, turned on and off in a dozen combinations, make her teacher or distressed damsel or amplified Wonderful Wizard. Lines like “I think we might need to lay low for awhile”, meaningless on paper, are sung as impossibly beautiful counterpoints; a chant of “snivelling, throbbing, moaning, groaning” is elevated to the epitaph-in-advance of 30,000,000 people who, if they'd only listen, would be shocked into doing some living before their deaths. And Pigface, the band, manages soft/loud/soft transitions as flawlessly as anyone has, switching what could be a maniacal clatter from off to on, from sharpened to dampened, from nudging to dictatorial, with a precision that can only be sane, dangerous art. Mesmerizing. 5/5 6. Pig, “Volcano” Pig’s vocalist, on the other hand, is happily ridiculous in his monster-growls, so over-the-top in their menace that they almost come down the other side being menacing again. I miss the horn section they used to cover “Head Like a Hole” (except on the bridge, where it joins some (synthetic?) strings like a college marching band playing the half-time show of World War III). But the huge-buzzing-insect guitar, the mechanical rumble of eighth-notes, and the whomping minor-key bass chords make a pretty solid juggernaut of the whole thing. 4/5 7. Ministry, “Broken” The first ten seconds or so are nothing but bass guitar, a massive sheet of tuned sound that could have carried the whole song fearsomely. I wish they’d dared to never bring the drums in at all, but the drums do echo like rifle shots, which I admit is kinda cool. The verse vocals are snotty; the chorus vocals are sung so that even the people at the _back_ of the Nuremberg Rallies need earplugs. And unlike my mental image of Minstry, there’s a bridge and solos and stuff, rather than the same riff over and over. 3/5 8. Secret Chiefs Three, “Assassin’s Blade” Castanets? Muted drum-rolls? Jazzy piano? Yes, Mike has plenty of ideas about how music can be weird, and these guys are a quaint bunch enraptured by spy movies, tangos, and chase scenes set in palaces with bordellos every five rooms. Catchy, decadent, and fun enough that I don’t mind it being all-instrumental. 4/5 9. Tea Party, “Silence” Abrasive and fast-moving, rushing through snake-charmer melodies so fast that the snakes all run and hide. Actually, the parts with the flute are folky and gentle enough to suggest a Jethro Tull in love with delay pedals, and somehow both styles work together. 3/5 10. Non-Prophets, “Disasters” A band led by Sage Francis, whose Personal Journals is definitely among the better rap cd’s I’ve heard. “Disasters” is set to a soft, shuffling beat, with someone playing his Gameboy and tending a crying baby in the far background. Francis tries to rap seriously about families but gets caught up mocking other rappers (“I diggity-done this, I diggity-done that, I kickity-kept this style in my arsenal in case it came back”), which is much stupider, but also kinda fun. 4/5 11. Aphex Twin, “To Cure a Weakling Child” The strangest track here, and the most winsome. The vocals waft in syllable by isolated syllable, like a toy teaching a toddler to speak. Which makes perfect sense as tops spin, dice roll, mice race (claws extended) across metal surfaces, breakbeats whiz by with puppy-dog enthusiasm, and Casios sing each other lullabies. 5/5 12. Tomahawk, “Captain Midnight” Fronted by Faith No More’s Mike Patton, Tomahawk follow his usual fondness for quiet, ominous verses balanced against huge, aggressive choruses. In this case the verses are built from shimmering guitar, simmering electronic beats, and the cawing of undead crows. The “chorus” defies its role by only arriving once, a frantic tower of sound determined to make us as afraid as the singer seems – then content, once it’s bluffed us with its seeming power, to hide until we go away. 3/5 13. Skinny Puppy, “Testure” I trust Shilmafone, so he didn’t need to prove to me that Skinny Puppy – the house band of goth kids in clubs too dark to reveal that someone somewhere might be smiling – often hid real tunes behind their harsh beats. But he wanted to prove it, and “Testure” does the trick, in a warm New Order glow. 4/5 14. Front 242, “Headhunter v.3.0” This sound is all about latticeworks of percussion, including the monotone verse vocals. But it sets off the broad-strokes chorus melody with a power it wouldn’t earn on its own; and one thing you gotta like about robots is that their drum-fills are, in all their wide variety, almost inhuman in their speed and power. 4/5 15. cEVIN Key with Edward Ka-Spel, “ 13th Shade” Some neat guitar pitch-bends that remind me of the Doors’ “the End”, and a vocal delivery like ransom notes being read to me by an invisible guy six inches from my ear. Plus some cool sound-envelopes on the artificial percussion, and keyboards whirring in soft but threatening tones. Good theatre. 3/5 16. My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, “Sexy Sucker” Normally, I’d say that theatre is the entire point of the Thrill Kill Kult. In concert, I thought they were terrific – boneshakingly loud and danceable, sleazily good-looking (and proud of it), happy to use cool rock cliches like fog machines, and blessed by fans with a few hundred of the most creative haircuts I’ve ever seen. Their songs, on the other hand, have tended to strike me as thuddingly dull, a single weak idea done over and over for five minutes. The exceptions have been songs with “Sex” in the title. Luckily, they seem to have plenty of those. “Sexy Sucker” is cocky, kinetic, mindless ... and also structured, melodic, loaded with nifty guitar solos, and kinda great. 5/5 17. Machines of Loving Grace, “Cheap” The one song on the mix I thought of giving a low rating to, as the verses just remind me how heavily Pretty Hate Machine relied on Trent Reznor’s charisma and singing ability, not present here. But the chorus has, instead, the snotty pseudo-menacing charm of Blue Oyster Cult, their poet-of-the-cycle-gang routine fed through a MIDI and those cybernetically-controlled future highways where drivers stare down playing Nintendo, while their bikes speed along at 120 m.p.h. in perfect safety … until a couple of wires cross, and everyone piles together in a 45-vehicle crashup. And our Loving Gracemen, despite their name, will be standing on the median strip, grinning down at us. 3/5 Mike finishes with a 42-second snippet by Coil. It's pleasant enough, but at least on the album he'd talked me into buying, Coil are masters of edgy 10-minute dreamscapes. They seem lost by the idea of brevity. But brevity confuses me too, and when a disc is 76 minutes long like this, I guess that’s fine.  |
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