SOUNDTRACK: PROTOMARTYR-Under Cover of Official Right (2014).
My favorite description of Protomartyr is that the three younger guys ran into their old high school math teacher at a bar and asked if he wanted to sing with their band. Protomartyr are a heavy band from Detroit (and none of the above is true about them, but check out the picture below for how true that seems).
The lyrics are dark, literary and sometime quite funny. The music is a sort of post punk. The drums are amazing with all manner of complex patterns. The guitar is angular and precise, eking out notes and then blasting away on gorgeous ringing chords. The bass plays patterns–not simple notes. His is a great counterpoint to the guitar. And then there’s the voice. Gruff, worldly, knowledgeable and occasionally angry. But mostly he sings in a kind of spoken word style, telling of his distrust with…well, whaddya got?
My CD did not come with a lyrics sheet (although I believe the LP does), so I don’t exactly know the words to these songs. I can certainly guess though.
The disc opens with a sinister chord that slowly rises, only to be replaced by a jangly open guitar chord and then a very lengthy riff. And then the deadpan vocals comes in. “Shade goes up shade goes down, one of my dead moves.” And that sets the tone (that song along with many other is a reference to a novel: in this case Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square). I love the way the second song “Ain’t So Simple” opens with an interesting drum rhythm and these great lyrics, “Hello there, you are all witnesses to a kind of confrontation between me and these three men.” The lyrics are basically an attack on the other guys in the band: “this thing that sits behind me: jumped up homunculus, and yet he sings so sweetly.” The guitar is quiet and complex with an interesting riff. Then the bridge bursts forth with all kinds of chaos and noise and a faster riff. The song ends somewhat positively, “guess I will keep him around, until the next song.” And it ends with the same drums that opened the song.
Most of the songs are just over 2 minutes. “Want Remover” is pummeling rock, heavy and distorted. “Trust Me Billy” reintroduces a spiralling riff but with a heavier drum. “Pagans” is only 1:11, with a very sparse sound. “What the Wall Said” slows things down (it clocks in at 3:11). It has a slow intro that is mostly bass. When the chiming guitars come in, the drums follow and the songs picks up speed. It has one of my favorite lyrics: “What will you miss? Alice in Chains played on repeat–not feeling great, you’re 20%.” Followed by morning ringing guitars.
“Tarpeian Rock” is set to a cool bass line. It’s basically a list of people who should be “thrown from the rock” “greedy bastards, emotional cripples, gluten fascists” etc. “Bad Advice” opens with a smacking drum sequence and ringing guitars. It’s angular and prickly until about half way through when it suddenly slows down with the simple “bad advice” chorus. “Son of Dis” is a blistering punk song. Barely over a minute, it is a relentless blast.
There’s something about the guitar sound on “Scum, Rise” that is so unguitar-like, I’m totally intrigued by it. And the repeated simple chorus of “scum…rise” is pretty hard not to sing/speak along to. “I Stare at Floors” is another fast rocker. “Come and See” has more great weird chords (with a vibrato put on them for extra weirdness.” It’s another fantastic song, with the chorus introducing a brand new drum sequence and a super catchy but dark chorus: “And I’ll try to live defeated, come and see the good in everything.” I can’t decide which section of the song I like better. Well, maybe it’s the repeated third part where the drums come bashing alive to really emphasize that section.
“Violent” is another slower song, with a lonesome riff and sparse drums. The vocals are so almost-flat that it makes the lyrics “if it’s violent…good” seem even more dark than they might otherwise. “I’ll Take That Applause” opens with a sample of someone singing something, maybe? Garbled, rather creepy sounding voices introduce a big ringing chord. The song introduces a piano buried under the chorus of “nothing ever after.” And then you press play again and listen to the whole thing again.
I simply can’t stop listening to this album.
[READ: September 15, 2014] Bough Down
Karen Green is a visual artist and poet. She was married to a man who hung himself, and this collection address that horrific incident almost exclusively.
Green’s poems aren’t structured like poems (meaning that they are blocks of text and have no concern for line breaks or rhyme scheme). Nevertheless the words she has used are quite powerful and evocative and do everything that good poetry should do.
Interspersed within the poems are small images. Most of the images are cut up pieces of text arranged but also obfuscated by what looks like a gauzy white paint (in the same way that the book has a gauzy white slip cover (nicely done)). I don’t know what the actual size of her prints is, but I wish they were bigger in the book. It’s really hard to see the details that are clearly there. And I know that hiding is part of the point, but if it were bigger it would certainly be easier to understand. I’m fascinated by her use of dollar bills as well as other tiny objects (fingerprints? stamps? boxes?).
Most of her poems are untitled; those which are titled have “jazz standards” as titles. Like “summertime and the living” or “let’s call the whole thing off.” This jibes nicely with one of the “characters” in the poems, a woman called “the jazz lady.” For indeed, although I’m reading this as a series of poem, there is so much continuity between poems, that it almost reads like a novel as well. If nothing else, there seems to be time passing between the poems. And while the story itself is unfinished, it does imply that things will be moving forward.
The pieces about the jazz lady are interspersed with the stories about “you.” The jazz lady “is in first or third person. She is keeping secrets and everyone who loves her is tired of them.” In “Black and blue and” it begins “No one knows how the jazz lady ended up in the hospital again.” I took the jazz lady to be Green, or perhaps just someone else Green knew. Continue Reading »
SOUNDTRACK: BIKINI KILL-Revolution Girl Style Now (1991).
Bikini Kill was one of the most memorable bands from the Riot Grrrl movement. And frankly, twenty years on, these song still sound incendiary–no one has picked up the torch that bands like this lit in the 90s.
