Silkworm
Lifestyle
»
Silkworm
Lifestyle
Touch And Go, 2000
RiYL: Pavement, Neil Young, Replacements |
Lifestyle is a five-star record, an accomplishment in rock songwriting and performance on par with Big Star's Radio City, the Replacements' Tim, or Pavement's Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. The album is so good, in fact, it has the effect of giving the fan rose-colored glasses; after the breakthrough of Lifestyle, the endless Firewater, doomy Developer, and lumpy Blueblood don't seem so bad after all.
What makes Lifestyle so good? It's one of Silkworm's quietest records, but that's hardly a new trend. Since founding guitarist Joel Phelps left the band after Libertine, the band has gradually drifted from its initial, Mission Of Burma-derived guitar smackdown sound. Across the underperforming Matador releases Firewater and Developer, guitarist Andy Cohen, bassist Tim Midgett, and drummer Michael Dahlquist began developing a sound more akin to Neil Young and Crazy Horse, with simple, hooky verses and choruses making room for Cohen's beautifully expressive solos.
Midgett and Cohen each write and sing their own songs, each in a particular style that's at once their own and wholly Silkworm. Cohen tends to write slower, sparser songs that spread out to allow his guitar room to speak while Midgett writes nervous rockers which never quite seem to settle on a structure. Over the long time they've been playing together (before Silkworm, Andy and Tim played in the non-legendary Montana band Ein Heit) they've developed very distinct personalities. Even if they didn't sound so different as singers, it'd be easy to distinguish their songs from each other.
Cohen's songs thrive on reference, geography, and intertextuality. "Contempt," which opens Lifestyle, is a typical Andy Cohen song, although sung in an uncharacteristic high tenor. "Contempt" retells the plot of Godard's film, complete with mentions of Fritz Lang and Homer's Odyssey, while evoking romantic images of Italy. It also calls back to an earlier Cohen composition - was the "Jean-Luc" he met in the subway in Firewater's "Slow Hands" Godard? (Or was it Jean-Luc Picard?)
To the point, "Contempt" opens Lifestyle in high style, with Brett Grossman's organ setting the mood. Although the languid tempo is unusual for the band, the way Midgett's bass more or less carries the song while Cohen's guitar extemporizes is textbook. Track two, "Slave Wages," despite the addition of more organ, is more traditional. Midgett draws much more from personal experience in his songwriting than his bandmate does, and his best songs have a nostalgic element that make them immediately relatable to the listener. "Wages" works in this vein, helped along by a wondrous Cohen riff that persistently continues for the duration of the song. Midgett flashes back to his time as a young man "living in a walk-in closet," pushing his voice up an octave in the chorus to express his memories of dissatisfaction.
The record continues more or less in the same fashion, with Andy and Tim exchanging knockouts. Midgett's "Dead Air" is a breathless romp with a spectacular Cohen guitar break. Cohen's "Roots" is an acoustic change-of-pace whose stripped-down arrangement highlights the surprising expressiveness of Andy's monotone voice. Heather Whinna, stepping in for the band's usual producer Steve Albini, does a laudable job keeping Midgett's bass, an integral part of the Silkworm sound, at the right level. Dahlquist's drumwork, as always, is fantastic. Just check out his stutter-step break under the hook in "Treat The New Guy Right," the unexpected dropped snare during the chorus of "Plain," or the relentless attack for the whole of "Around The Outline," which Dahlquist also sings, revealing that while they're all aces on their respective instruments, none of the guys in Silkworm is exactly going to be a finalist on "American Idol" any time soon.
Lifestyle climaxes with an absolutely flooring cover of the Faces' "Ooh La La," a song you may unfortunately associate with Rod Stewart's Unplugged. Or less unfortunately, Wes Anderson's "Rushmore." Well, no longer! This song belongs to Silkworm now. Over a soulful Midgett bassline that's probably his best work on the album, Cohen sings the classic "I wish that I knew what I know now" chorus like a man who probably heard the song as a young man, thought it was kind of tacky, and now realizes Wood and Lane knew of what they spoke. Silkworm's slow, electric arrangement stands quite apart from the original, and Cohen despite his limitations as a vocalist more than puts his stamp on it. Awesome.
The only possible shortcoming you could find with the album is its length; Lifestyle clocks in at under forty minutes. Also "Plain" and the first two songs on side two aren't quite as indelible as everything else. Following the needs of the songs, Cohen doesn't play any of his trademark long guitar solos here. It's hard to see how the band could have fit one in without damaging the album's crisp pace. Regardless, these are minor quibbles. You'd be very hard-pressed to find a better modern rock album than Silkworm's Lifestyle. I firmly believe it will take its place among the all-time classics one day; in my collection, it already has. This is one of those records you can listen to over and over and over again.
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.