Westy Gets Mail #3
Jello Biafra, The American Plague, Luther Russell, Variant Cause, Floater
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In the Grip of Official Treason
The Sex Pistols are the British punk band with by far the largest gap between their reputation and the actual quality of their recorded output. The United States has too many people and too many bands to make a definitive statement, but my vote goes for the Dead Kennedys as the Pistols' domestic equivalent. They had a couple good singles, just like Malcolm McLaren's boys, but for the most part their career consisted of lawsuits and media meltdowns far more than decent records. If anything, they thrived on the controversy; putting penis art on their album sleeves moved way more units than their music, which by and large was lousy.
After the Sex Pistols broke up, Johnny Rotten/John Lydon went on to found Public Image Limited, a musically and artistically superior group to the Pistols who never sold a fraction of their figures but are the great unmentioned influence on a wide swathe of underground rock running from Stereolab to Atari Teenage Riot. Since the Dead Kennedys broke up, their singer, Jello Biafra, has built a career as a public speaker around attempting to provoke further lawsuits and media meltdowns. While he does try to sing every once in a great while, his "musical activity" is mostly limited to suing his former bandmates every couple of years. He's marginalized himself to the point where Congress isn't actively trying to deport him any more, but as his eighth collection of spoken word recordings reveals, he's become little more than a clownish talking head who in his lack of hard facts and petulant name-calling comes across as little more than the exact opposite reflection of the very politicians and corporations who get him so angry.
At times on In the Grip of Official Treason, like the compelling "Die for Oil, Sucker," Biafra's strident delivery and weird rhythms do qualify as poetry, although his vitriol is so constant and explicit that for those who do not share the man's fascistically rigid liberal ideals it's going to be awfully bumpy going. Ultimately, that's why the record fails as a piece of art. For all of his righteous rhetoric (and he's quite talented at turning U.S. military-industrial complex newspeak around to his own purposes), Biafra simply doesn't have enough in the way of a coherent argument to make this recording any more than a frenzy-builder for the already-converted. He may have more of a justification for his worldview, but in effect, Jello's rantings aren't at all distinguishable from those of Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh.
http://www.alternativetentacles.com
The American Plague
God Bless the American Plague
The no-frills packaging and a brace of sloganeering song titles has the listener bracing for good old-fashioned angry U.S. gutter rock, but unfortunately this misguided record is produced and sequenced as to rob the possibly potent American Plague of whatever danger they might once have had. You want them to sound like Hüsker Dü; but they sound more like Urge Overkill, except without the irony or the tunes. Much meddling with the rhythm section sound causes nearly every track to stumble into a too-familiar groove, and the bad-reception effect applied to all of frontman Jaw's vocals really sucks. A deeply proficient lead guitarist can't make up for the fact that most of the songs use the same sort of Link Wray chord patterns that were textbook when the Rolling Stones started stealing them. "Burn It Down" at least has a bit in the way of dynamics, but most of what you're getting here is the sound of a deeply confused band. The time signature changes, departures from standard meter, and the occasional aggressive fuzz bass lines say they want to be a greasier version of Girls Against Boys, but the constrained arrangements and flat production implies that they're reaching for the brass ring as the new, I dunno, Papa Roach or something. I think they'd be better off allowing themselves to get weirder, since the lack of memorable lyrics and Jaw's limitations as both a songwriter and a personality do not distinguish God Bless the American Plague as a future chart-topper.
http://americanplague.com
Luther Russell
Repair
60's pocket symphony pop is so much in fashion these days that I am actually starting to resent Brian Wilson. Was Pet Sounds worth Sufjan Stevens and Bright Eyes? Tough call. Anyway, Luther Russell is to be very much commended for making Repair in a clear but not ornate style. Just a few keyboard and percussion touches are all that's needed to flesh out the workmanlike guitar-bass-drums-vocal shape of these tunes. Russell's got the gift; he can reliably turn trusted old chords into arresting new songs. He's got style too, with a likably lived-in voice and a signature giddy slide guitar scrape. The deceptively titled "My Own Blood" is a tightly-structured little march that mixes Tin Pan Alley discipline with a super-tasteful lead guitar lick. Russell could stand to write a few more songs where his vocal charisma increases to the level demonstrated on "Black Leather Coat," but Repair still comes highly recommended to fans of Wilco's Being There or well-crafted yet unfussy pop/rock in general.
http://www.myspace.com/lutherrussell
Variant Cause
Excavating Variant Cause: 1980s Pacific Northwest Volume 1
While the CD sleeve is quick to remind you that these forgotten oddballs once stalked the same stages as Green River, Soundgarden, and The Melvins, Variant Cause are way more interesting than just another second-rate grunge band. In fact, if anything, the songs collected here suggest that there was a lot more to the Seattle scene in the early 90's than we ever suspected. There are some loud guitars on Excavating, but there are also funk basslines, metronomic Devo beats, Oingo Boingo keyboards, and a constant stream of nice hooks from lead singer Jan Gregor. This is amazingly cheerful music coming from a region where it rains pretty much all the time. In fact, between all the irreverent genre-hopping and Gregor's playfully nonsensical lyrics, you could almost dub them Seattle's answer to They Might Be Giants. The reverb-heavy "Last Chance for Losers" is an effective anthem that compares favorably to the popular radio rock of the era while "Bad Blood Between Us" nicely channels the Replacements. Not a single song on the compilation sounds like it's repeating another, with touches like harmonica solos and terrifically elastic, original bass playing complementing the band's plus songwriting. I very much hope that there will be a Volume 2.
http://www.variantcause.com
Floater
Stone by Stone
Oh, wow, this is dire. Utterly uninteresting bar rock from one of those bands that obviously thinks they are fantastic and has never paused even a moment to reconsider this basic assumption. The drummer distractingly keeps trying to prove his chops instead of following the songs, there's pointless guitar-pedal intros to every damn song, and Robert Wynia's lyrics sound like random redigested scraps of songs Roger Waters rejected as being too pretentious. "Breakdown," which rhymes "tally 'em" with "Valium," is so flagrantly U2-derivative it's kind of cute. "Proviso" unforgiveably thieves from Nick Cave on its way down to horrid, sub-Stone Temple Pilots butt-rock negligibility. I don't understand the rationale behind an indie rock band using their limited available resources to so accurately recreate overripe corporate rock. It takes hundreds of thousands of people singing along to redeem lyrics this unoriginal and ham-handed. I don't foresee that happening for Floater.
http://www.floatermusic.com
MARK T.R. DONOHUE | Mark T.R. Donohue is a prolific freelance writer whose areas of expertise include Rockies baseball, video games, genre television, English soccer, and pub rock. He lives in Colorado, where he cultivates the largest and creepiest private collection of Alyson Hannigan memorabilia in the Mountain West.