settling into the right amount of whelm
Written: Aug 23 '03 (Updated Aug 29 '03)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Enthusiasm. Daring. Great, versatile singing. Long compositions that flow and dance (or stomp).
Cons: Could be seen as too forward and abrasive, or too unpredictable.
The Bottom Line: The most exciting, fun, kinetic, bizarre, and unique album I’ve heard the year 2003 produce. Music professors, apparently, can be darned interesting people.
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| voxpoptart's Full Review: What is it Like to be a Bat? - Kitty Brazelton Mov... |
Were I a rock critic, it would be my job to understand the album I’m writing about. But failing that, I’ll consider my critic job done when this sentence ends: I am pointing you to What is it Like to be a Bat?’s well-thought-out website, which makes for pretty decent reading (although the much-too-brief MP3 samples, from an album consisting of two 26-minute compositions, are best avoided). I’d sort of hoped that
http://www.kitbraz.com/bndl/bat/
would give me some insight for this piece, but screw it: as a rock critic, I’m in over my head.
Luckily, I’m much better at being a fan, and as a fan I can tell you that What is it Like to be a Bat?, by Kitty Brazelton and Dafna Napthali, is the most exciting, fun, kinetic, bizarre, and unique album I’ve heard the year 2003 produce. Now I just have to figure out why you might care.
For one thing, it might help if you’re into heavy metal. Or musical comedies. Or Ministry. Or light opera. Or documentaries. Or circuses. Or progressive rock. Or Diamanda Galas. Or the Eurodisco soundtrack to Midnight Express. You needn’t love all of these, by any means – that would exclude me – but liking one or two would be good.
Extra credit geekitude: it might help lots and lots if you’re a fan of avant-jazz legend John Zorn, whose Tzadik label released this album, or of Faith No More’s equally innovative Mike Patton, who has turned himself into a John Zorn for the girls-with-posters-of-cute-rock-stars set. In the novel off-chance that you love Amy X Neuberg & Men’s music like I do, you’ll probably sense a kindred spirit in Brazelton and Naphtali. If you agree with me that Carla Bley’s 1972 magnum opus Escalator Over the Hill is the greatest thing ever to pass itself off as jazz – and the Rolling Stone Guide gave it five stars, so somebody must – then Bat? should be raucous, liberating ear candy. And of course if you’ve been a fan for years of Brazelton’s 90’s rock group Dadadah, her name alone should sell you, just as it sold me.
But not only is there no good reason why you should know what I’m talking about, the fact is that even _I_ know nothing about most of the names on these folks’ resumes. Kitty and Dafna are both music teachers for a living. The New York City improvisational underground is where they lurk, although their percussionist Danny Tunick has played for three alternative rock groups I’ve (barely) heard of, and for the Brian Eno-covering classical ensemble Bang on a Can.
The second of Bat?’s two pieces was funded by the New York State Council of the Arts. That shouldn’t bug you: Laurie Anderson’s great “O Superman”, a major British hit, was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, and all of XTC’s early rehearsals happened while Andy and Colin were on welfare… but I know how it sounds. If I give any more damn credentials, you’ll never believe how fun this disc is to listen to. Even me describing the music may overwhelm you a bit, at first: it should, to represent the experience. The album does settle back into the ideal level of whelm, but only after it dazes you a little.
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Piece one, “Can You Sing ‘Sermonette’ with Me?”, starts off with:
-- six decoy seconds of quiet, atonal cocktail-lounge noodling, followed by Kitty and Dafna’s happily echoing war whoops.
-- As they fade, the music bashes its way in, steady pounding drums guiding a huge subway train aboveground and triumphantly into low orbit. Whenever the train starts to lose steam, the drummer clicks his sticks together firmly twice, and the pounding starts back up. That’s the first minute.
-- Then comes the complex two-voice, four-part vocal harmonies, which sound more like prayer than “I’m sucking myself”, “I’m spaghetti”, or “I go out, I come in again” really should. It takes about 84 seconds for medieval, baroque, and musical-comedy modes of harmony to appear, interact, and be
-- replaced by a low humming squiggle.
-- The hum is promptly joined by a much more chaotic squall: a caffeine-overdose drum solo by a drummer who likes to let each of his five dozen drums take turns, overlaid on a rattly soundtrack like a video game designed to be played on air-conditioners, along with more soprano whoops.
-- Then the drums settle down into a nice jazzy pace while Kitty sings a catchy melody to the lyrics “Ba, badada, bum bum” a few times, but that doesn’t even last a minute before
-- the soft drone of a snoring insect pushes it aside. Only then do we return to battle-cries and trains and drumsticks again, and start to wonder if “Sermonette” has, perhaps, some structure to it.
It does. This particular chaos (track 6 on the Walkman dial) is allowed to evolve for almost four minutes: reusing prior motifs, inventing new sounds with every knob twist, slipping into little tunes. This is already the part I think should be exciting to fans of metal and industrial: that so much noise and speed, creative sonic aggression and instrumental acrobatics, should be possible with no regard to genre. But track 7, by itself the majority of “Sermonette”, has learned more than a little from Black Sabbath, or maybe the Doors’ apocalyptic “the End”. The minor-key bass guitar drones massively (or sometimes intimately) in the background; the girls howl (with perfect pitch) as well as sing. If the most important lyrics are sung with quiet intensity, more Billie Holliday than Ozzy Osbourne, well: you aren’t really going to pretend Ozzy’s mid-castration screeching is what made heavy metal popular, are you?
Perhaps you don’t think Metallica songs need worried female voices filtering in like hallucinations or miswired intercom messages. But who knew they needed bedtime prayers, until “Enter Sandman” proved it? Perhaps you never pictured the Doors doing Jewish folk-dance, but it ain’t cuz they weren’t drunk enough, so we have to assume it was a tragic lack of ability, here rectified. Perhaps you thought the Banshees only needed one Siouxsie at a time, and so did I; but hearing several would-be Siouxsies circling each other’s overdubs makes it all clear now. Perhaps you thought jazz cymbalists shouldn’t be accepting dares to try and hit their drum kit hard enough to destroy it, but Tunick’s kit makes it through to the next piece, so I guess you were just being a worrywart.
And perhaps you were assuming that Brazelton, Naphtali, and Tunick had the combined attention span of a gnat that’s been throwing away its Ritalin pills, but listen to them carry all of these diverse ideas through “Sermonette”’s coherent, sustained 16-minute final movement. Hey, I was having doubts too – even if those first ten minutes _were_ as joyful as watching the Simpsons while bouncing off of padded walls.
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For all that, it’s the second and more orderly of the 26-minute compositions, “Five Dreams: Marriage”, that truly blows me away. There is a tale in the lyrics, which are layered oddly. We have both a series of marital arguments and resolutions, sung directly and mostly from the woman’s perspective; and some background-filtered spoken vocals in which the woman seems to be answering unheard interview questions about both the arguments and the decision to record a piece about arguments. The effect on the musical structure is interesting.
The arguments, for one thing, are catchy. Like, with proper editing software, I could carve a couple of singles out of “Five Dreams: Marriage”. There’s interwoven Broadway-ish duets over fiercely propulsive New Wave synth-dance, Brazelton’s swooping four-octave range countered by Tunick’s geeky and innocuous tenor. There’s elements of strutting jazz-pop. There’s lite Middle Eastern leanings, like a copy of “Walk Like an Egyptian” that wasn’t damaged all _that_ badly in the garbage disposal.
Track 17 could be edited into forceful half-chanted “verses” (over tribal drum clatter and C3PO warming up his speech synthesizer post-power-outage), and anthemic sung choruses that wind towards mental breakdown. I think most fans of Hole’s Live Through This would embrace it pretty quickly, while Led Zep fans would groove to the physics-defying, too-fast-to-be-this-heavy drum solo at the end.
And on “Marriage”, the quieter parts are fully integrated into the composition. The trumpet calls, the chorale, the instrumental grooves that overshadow the interview segments: they are woven into the textures, not dumped onto the hard drive with a loud clatter. Of course, put that way, we probably needed “Can You Sing ‘Sermonette’ with Me?” to appreciate the absence of squalor properly. The squalor was, and is, fantastic. “Five Dreams: Marriage”, though, is Art. Being fantastic art, then, is a bonus.
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(Thanks, once more, to the noble efforts of lambchops for adding this to the database. Also, note the album's Amazon availability, despite the usual "found at zero stores" silliness.)
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
voxpoptart
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Member: Brian Block
Location: Greensboro, NC
Reviews written: 200
Trusted by: 280 members
About Me:
Let's give a big Earth welcome to Everett Block, born 10-26-08. Daddy shall return shortly.
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