33 rebellions per minute
"the clocks of the world are evil in their design"
2000
Admiral Twin, MOCK HEROIC
I always feel awkward reviewing albums that derive from power-pop or alternative-rock traditions too closely. A band like Admiral Twin makes its music from guitars and bass and drums and synthesizer, and I'll never get to decide that Song A's keyboards sound like a giant termite trying to use a xylophone to brush away inconvenient iron filings while it gnaws, or that Song B's drums sound like the Tin Man falling down eleven flights of wooden stairs, because they really, really don't. Admiral Twin _are_ fond of synthesizer decorations that sound like conversations in sonar, which is cool. But mostly Admiral Twin sound like a combination of a whole lot of other good bands, many of whom you know songs by, and I fight the feeling, as I sift through mental memory, that I'm overlooking the obvious band-to-band imitations time and again.
Does the choppy, descending five-chord riff on "Better Than Nothing At All" remind me more of the Gin Blossoms or of "Pretty In Pink"? Will anyone benefit if I compare it to the rockers on Adam Schmitt's WORLD SO BRIGHT, which failed to define the ideal of Americanized power-pop for the world as it has done for my brain? Do the gang-harmonies on the chorus bear close comparison to Sloan's recent albums? Those resemblances, though important, are likely not where the magic is, any more than the loveliness of "No. 1 Fan" can be fairly communicated by pointing out how they've taken rotating-Leslie-speaker vocal effects and cushioned psychedelia from Beatles, a soulful melodic gooeyness from Leo Sayer or Lenny Kravitz, and echoed-thud drum machine from a hundred conceptions of modernity. "Veteran's Day" is vaguely Goo Goo Dolls-ish: it does the somberness thing with hollow-bodied acoustic guitar and some woodwind and a singer catching his breath while still holding the last syllable, then the scratchy bass kicks in like a post-Rage Against The Machine "Ziggy Stardust", then the chorus is expansive and full-spectrum. "When I Hit The Brakes" is more daring, true: compressed, staccato, and metallic, like a cross between Love Spit Love's TRYSOME EATONE and Something Happens' aptly named BEDLAM A-GO-GO. And the casual jangle and harmonizings of "Half A World Away" conceal the ambitious twisting melody the Mommyheads never appreciated
Air Supply quite enough to write. But "Another Day" uses two of the most hackneyed chord progressions in "alternative" rock, and I've let that song into my mind every bit as contentedly.
MOCK HEROIC makes me happy, which is nice, sure. But in writing about Admiral Twin, I'm implicitly arguing that they're _good_. Good in the musical equivalent of Stephen King's dictum that "It is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and... equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one [but] it is possible... to make a good writer out of a merely competent one". I buy a large number of CD's by bands that are doing perfectly credible music in the same veins as Admiral Twin, and some of those bands excite me, but a lot more, in their very pleasant and agreeable and boppy way, kinda bore me. And unless my reactions are completely random, which I'm sure they aren't, there are virtues to MOCK HEROIC that I'd love to see other bands study. So let me try to figure out what.
Start by noticing the individual moments I've come to love, the ones that make me gasp and resume attention if, for some reason of personal overwhelm, I'd faded out. On "Aeroplane", say, the groove bops along like the jangly "No Myth"-era Michael Penn, with the drums strongly emphasizing the backbeat instead of the front beat; but then the singer draws out his syllables for the prechorus, pledges "I'll treat you like an" and pauses, as the drums charge in, five fast snare whomps that didn't appear on the posted schedule, and it's on that momentum he finishes the sentence as the chorus's true start. "Eustace and Isadore" leads with dry, monotone, minor-key guitar picks so many Cars songs, and the slow volume buildup practically serves as its own purpose, music so completely tipping the mood that _something_ is about to happen that it hardly matters what (in this case, piano like Tori Amos trying to embellish Nine Inch Nails' "Something I Can Never Have", and some synth chuffings like a styrofoam insect scratching itself with its legs in a stuffy room (aha!)). One chorus of singing like the angelic Thom Yorke justifies the next song's backing vocal part muttered into a cheap megaphone. The warmth of "...Fan" is emphasized, not diluted, when the instruments drop out for two measures except the drum machine. "Better..." links its swaggering rock verse and feyer, Kinksian chorus through _two_ segues, peaking for me when the singer adopts a taunting, syncopated cadence to lift the melody up the scale along steep paths officially closed to climbers. "Veterans..."'s woodwinds keep entering 2/3 of the way into a line, drawing attention to their loveliness. "Another Day" brings in the weary Frank Black vocals two beats before it's joined, by an even wearier acoustic guitar like Violent Femmes trying to impress Portishead. The familiarity of the minor chords somehow justifies the crashing intrusion of the chorus's even more familiar major chords, which in turn serve as a polite style marker from which the vocals launch in unexpected directions.
Perhaps my favorite moments occur on lead track "the Unlucky Ones", even not counting the relief when seven seconds of Starbucks world-music percussion are joined by earnest Western voice + acoustic guitar like Rush's recent efforts at balladry. The verse and chorus words are glib-enough assemblies of bad-luck superstitions ("We step on every crack we can find/ thirteen a day if we get half a chance"), and the chorus is glorious, an anthem owing equal debts of learning to Rush, Radiohead, and Roxette. But even better is the linking pre-chorus, hammered whole notes letting the vocal melody open up while revealing the song's unexpected heart: "I know, I know, you're dying to break free". And even better, perhaps, are the two spins out of the chorus, as Brad Becker on keyboards and Mark Carr on "noises" wring new sounds out of their gadgets and into our universe _while_ still harnessing every last drop of chorus magic.
Write it out all listy like that, and it's clear: what I think Admiral Twin are Good at is transitions, connections. The heritage of mainstream American rock radio is, in absolute rather than relative terms, awfully darn diverse, and there are thousands of bands that will take from one part of the heritage in one song and a different part in their next. Or, perhaps, dispose of the parts of tradition they feel awkward with: for every Behind The Music story of how Def Leppard or Marcy Playground almost threw away "Pour Some Sugar On Me" or "Sex and Candy" because "that's not what we sound like", there are surely ten other stories of the bands that went ahead and discarded. You hear their albums, you hear them performing the truths they're comfortable with, and often they'll exemplify their tradition with skill; and a small percentage will hit the sweet spot of your tastes and become precious to you. Some lucky people can work the same job for 30 years with the same loving spouse sharing the same fulfilling chores and hobbies, too, but the 25 million American women who read an average of a dozen romance novels per month are reading zero books about those marriages, and a dozen about bored (housewives/ jiltees/ patients) being swept away into irresponsible new fortune. Those novels don't spawn sequels looking in four years later to make sure all has remained exactly the same.
I've learned far more about economics from psychologists and ecologists entering the field than I ever did from economics books by economists; but I also learned more about psychology from renegade economists than from Freud or Skinner. The world is not always kind to connectivity, of course. Economists make more money learning the advanced calculus needed to quantify the field's principles than they ever will by learning to write obnoxious term papers using clinical research to challenge the validity of those principles. The world's rules require me, if I follow on my plans to teach history and social studies, to get there by taking classes in how to teach history and social studies, lecture after 2-hour lecture on how outdated the lecture model is. It doesn't care if _I_ think my best ideas about history teaching come from several un-textbooky teaching memoirs, computer games, a paleontologist, an architect, a couple of technology analysts with distinctly crank-like theoretical persistence, at least one National Organization of Women board member, at least one banished ex-N.O.W. board member who resents her, two sabermetricians (searchers for objective knowledge about baseball), a few home-schooled friends, Dave Barry, and a television presenter named James Burke whose field of study is absolutely everything in the universe.
I am, in fact, living this year in one place in one post-ACORN job as my way to affording the official blindered course of study. I love the place and I like the job, but I _still_ dislike the assumption that it prepares me for teaching better than vanishing to Vancouver for a few months and founding a keyboard/flute/drums pop trio with friends would. Which, I ask you, would teach me more about how to win over an audience of two dozen skeptics: customer service, or lead singing? Not the straight-line one to earn the state residency to pay the tuition to hear the lectures to pass the exams.
One of the most important men in history was a statistic-obsessed dweeb who amused himself by measuring the carbon content of the Pacific air; another was some guy named Firestone who wore dripping rubber costumes and bankrupted family and friends in a silly and smelly quest to turn rubber into something useful and solid. But neither would have mattered without someone else looking on and saying "Hey, this ain't my field, but it just might connect to something I was trying".
Admiral Twin aim, yes, a little lower. Connecting the power-pop of the Raspberries to the guitar atmospherics of early U2, or the country-rock leanings of Tom Petty to the ambitious sugariness of Sloan, that's unlikely to remodel cities or save forests. But when those connections are daring enough, yet filled in with carefully lit arguments, they will make the listener (or some listeners, or me at least) perk up, lean in intrigued, and smile. If you're going to play pop music, you should want to learn the tricks that make people lean in intrigued and smile. And if people never did that, remodeling cities for them would be pointless.
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