I. It’s official: things have gotten out of control. The records that I bought on the trip out to San Francisco a month ago didn’t get heard in time, and then a few more got placed off to the side while I was preparing to go out on tour, and then the tour happened, and I tend to buy a whole hell of a lot of records on tour. I mean: I go completely nuts with the records on tour. I feel like I’ve seen people whose self-control is worse than mine in record stores while on tour, but I wonder whether the memory of such scenes isn’t a that-was-then this-is-now sort of proposition. I don’t think I entered a single store during tour this time out without buying three or four albums. I got me some Bruckner from the Celibidache edition, and I got me the new Johnny Cash. I scored a little Wire and I got my mitts on a copy of Enon’s Believo! I came home with so many records. There is no way I will ever get around to listening to them all. I mean, there isn’t, is there? My friend George brought me a box of CDs from Finland, mainly heavy metal & experimental noise stuff: there must be seventy-five CDs in that box at least. Short of taking a vacation from work to get some listening done, simple math seems to dictate the impossibility of making it through the mountain of recorded sound material clogging the traffic arteries in the living room. What to speak of the easy but elemental existential terror of deciding which record to listen to now, and of justifying one’s decision? There is nothing for it. It’s like finding oneself faced with an embarrassingly huge Halloween haul. You can’t think about where to start. You just dig in. So I opened up George’s box of Finnish CDs, once I’d given a quick once-across to Killed By Death Volume 9. I pulled out a record by Alamaailman Vasarat, one called Vasaraasia. I am pretty sure that its title means “Holla at me, all my circus dogs” in Finnish. I wasn’t sure what to expect; the cover art seemed evocative of something burning or glowing (it’s a street scene through a red filter), but the booklet showed pictures of guys with horns. And guys with horns is exactly what it is. Guys with horns and really terrific Brecht/Weill cabaret jazz chops. The album reminds me a little of an record I used to have (and probably still have, somewhere) by Elliott Sharp’s Carbon -- there’s that intense focus, kind of the opposite of West Coast Jazz: everybody in the band approaching the composition with the wild savage blaring intensity of a klezmer ensemble, this being by no means an accidental comparison, since the soprano sax that features prominently throughout Vasaraasia owes much of its tone & mood to the many thousands of mostly anonymous eastern European Jews who quietly revolutionized music from pre-renaissance days on down through the mid-twentieth century by adapting their old songs to the new means of transmission. While the production on the record attempts to encase everything in amber -- why are the engineers on jazz recordings these days so bent on separation? haven’t they heard the great Sinatra LPs where one strategically placed room mic caught the whole sound of the band better that a thousand in-bell contact mics ever could -- it fails to do so, because Alamaailman Vasarat have got their inner obscurity working. They don’t care what anybody thinks. That this characteristic is in fact as important as the punks always said it was has been recently impressed upon me anew by a band called Chaotic Discord, about whom more some day soon, one hopes most earnestly & hungrily. In the meantime there’s this random record of extremely formal, semi-retro but somewhat future-driven cabaret jazz on stilts, and I’m pretty sure none of you have ever heard of it, and I’m guessing that those of you who dug Gorguts’s Obscura will have some love for it. So here it is. It’s called Vasaraasia, which doubtless means “Under the Big Top, New Mushroom Clouds.” My love for it is as strong as the ocean and may prove to be as temporary as steam, given how slim this record’s chances are of not getting buried underneath its brothers and sisters over the course of the next few days and weeks. It’s good to be home & surrounded by music, anyhow. I will advise you of further developments within George’s Finnish box as they arise. |
II. And I do love me the guys with the horns. They remind me of the CD I saw in Ireland -- the jazz ensemble reading of Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder on the Winter & Winter label, which was just about the coolest thing I’ve ever heard. This one tune called “Hahumies” on the Alamaailman Vasarat record is going to save us all from the sordid consequences of our unrepentant sinning -- I feel certain of that much. But as I dug around through the unrealistically high number of sound recordings which I’d brought home from tour, my eye lit on one so obvious, so totally lacking in genuine obscurity and so devoid of novelty (ensconced, as it were, within a general ocean of novelty), that the sight of it gave me some comfort. And I began to get excited about the idea of playing it, and I grew more eager as Alamaailman Vasarat spun away in the CD player, rocking harder and harder, the album proceeding to its climax. The record in question, I should say, was Pavement’s Trigger Cut EP, and I was excited to play it because I’d never heard it before. Because I am ornery, I didn’t listen to Pavement at all when Slanted & Enchanted was punking out all the competition on year-end lists a decade or so ago. It’s a long and stupid story but the bottom line is that I just wanted to skip Pavement -- some cultural touchstones just seem a little too demanding on first blush to be fully approached, and my thinking was, why not just bypass the whole process? (See, I told you it was stupid). Naturally, it became impossible by ‘93-ish to avoid Pavement altogether, and so I wound up hearing “Cut Your Hair,” a completely brilliant single whose opponents are all either assholes or liars. But by the time I’d come around to the painfully, glaringly obvious conclusion that Steve Malkmus (whose name I desperately wanted, for entirely selfish reasons, to be the clip-cloppy “Malkamus” instead of the decidedly Yeatsian “Malkmus”) was in fact a genius, it was kind of too late to play catch-up. I bought the final Pavement album, which I kind of liked (its last song, “Carrot Rope,” rules no matter what anybody says, and “Spit on a Stranger” is a delicious broken icicle of a pop song detonating itself in front of a backlit window), and I picked up the first Malkmus solo record, which I hope everybody knows is utterly terrific. But I didn’t go listen to Slanted & Enchanted. I had meant to miss it and I had done so. Out on tour a week and a half ago, I ran across a copy of Trigger Cut, which I remember seeing in several living rooms back when Paula Abdul was still charting. Because my box of stuff-to-bring-home had already gotten out of hand, I had Trigger Cut mailed to my house, and it was here waiting for me when I finally got home for good yesterday night. And now I am listening to it. OK you guys I am serious. If there is ever a band this good and I start weaving some mildly interesting but ultimately brainless theory about how I don’t want to hear said band, you gotta beat me down with a flat sap. Trigger Cut is practically the Platonic form of a rock and roll 12” single, the very existence of which would have put the fear of God on dance music mavens if there’d been anybody anywhere with a gift for melody quite as easy as the one Malkmus possesses, or if there’d been any bands who played rock music with such clarity of focus. What is the M talking about? Something, surely; sexual politics, maybe, or the perils of exercising one’s creative talents in a market economy. That one can’t make heads or tails of his John Ashbery-damaged slant-rhyming ultimately makes no difference at all for that most annoying of hard-rock reasons: he means it. I’m not going anywhere with this; I don’t imagine that I have any particular insight into Pavement. I missed it. You-all were right and I was wrong. But I thought I’d take a moment to say that if you already knew how good Trigger Cut was but haven’t put it on in a while, it’s at least as good as you remember; and if for some reason you lamed it up like I did and skipped out on some of the best rock music since prime Rolling Stones, then for God’s sake quick fucking around and get with the program. Pavement was great. They’re gone now. Go get yourself schooled. |