33 rebellions per minute
"With a varmint as a garment gave a commentary bleak"
1992
Think Tree, LIKE THE IDEA
The first album I ever bought because the review said, approximately, "they have the talent to make a real
good record, if they'd just stop the stupid experiments and pick a strength or two to develop". My correct
assumption--- so far, it's been correct 5 times out of 5 uses of this strategy--- was that Think Tree had
already made a good record if the reviewer would just develop a concept of artistic ambition that didn't rule
out everything but the first 2 Ramones records. Or in this case, make that "the 3rd and 4th Ministry
records", because Think Tree are sort of industrial, if said industry is run by the deranged genius
researchers from an Inspector Gadget cartoon. The sounds are consistently innovative without ever falling
into the large ugly stylistic range Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) seizes for his own use; the darkest tracks,
"All We Like Sheep" and "the Living Room" and "Mammther" and "a Court Jester Named Sa-Sa" and
"Doh!", make a unique and coherent mini-canon. But other songs apply synthetic knob-twiddling to rap,
funk, country-rock, aggresive power-pop, vaguely-symphonic, and hilarious but flawlessly-executed
soul-man posturing. You got a problem with that? It's all done very well; you shouldn't.
Peter Moore's lyrics, though, truly shine, rhyming like Ogden Nash (the liner notes apologize for
"rhyming garment with varmint twice on the same record") or, more to the point, an overeducated Jesse
Jackson. Sometimes anthemic ("We're coming out of the doubting house and into the voting booth,
screaming 'Eye for eye! Tooth for tooth! Lie for lie! Truth for truth!'"), more often grim ("You were
promised a taste of honey and wine, all you got was a waste of money and time. They said 'Give 'em an
inch, they'll take an inch. Give 'em a nightmare and charge for the pinch'"), always danceable. And just
often enough, completely silly. Who else could keep up the following rhyme scheme for 14 more lines: "A
colossal ram's-head fossil that the moss'll put to sleep/ was embedded in the shredded wool of Ed, a
drunken sheep"? Though even that song finds room for "And as the princes holler winces to convince us of
our joys, they're pretending happy endings as they're sending off the boys". Political and cynical, if inimical
to melody; their synth-blurtings are diverting, so I'm sure it ain't a felony.
1997
Count Zero, AFFLUENZA
WE COME FROM THE PLANET ZARDOC WITH NEWS THAT WE UNDERSTAND SHOULD CONCERN YOU. COUNT ZERO WILL SOON BE PLAYING RELATIVELY PLEASING AND SONOROUS NOISES AT MEETING PLACE IN METROPOLITAN AREA. IT WILL OCCUR LATE IN THE EVENING ON A NIGHT THE NEXT DAY OF WHICH MOST PEOPLE ARE NOT REQUIRED TO ATTEND THEIR DAILY WORK PLACES. THIS IS NOT A PLOY TO GATHER ALL OF THE HIGH-QUALITY PREMIUM-OF-THE-SPECIES TYPES TOGETHER TO BETTER FACILITATE THE METABOLIC TRANSPORTATION OF THEIR MOLECULES ONTO OUR ALIEN SPACE VESSEL FOR STUDY. REPEAT.
THIS IS NO SUCH PLOY. THANK YOU.
SATURDAY FEB 20,
MIDDLE EAST UPSTAIRS,
$7 .. 18+
WE HAVE ICE CREAM ON OUR VESSEL.
THIS IS NOT A PLOY.
ANY COLOR YOU LIKE.
REPEAT. THIS IS NOT A PLOY.
THANK YOU.
-- (a typical Peter Moore-written show anouncement)
The five years between Think Tree's LIKE THE IDEA and the first album by Peter Moore's next project Count Zero were surely not wasted-- Peter is a gifted Boston-area theatre actor, and holds down a mailroom job which he quite correctly likes, because it pays close to double the minimum wage, and doesn't sap creative power that he prefers to use on things far more interesting and useful than most paid brainwork allows. Still, from what I've read (an interview, a couple articles), Peter may also have been a bit glumly disappointed, reconsidering his mistakes, because apparently he and Caroline Records had actual hopes for LIKE THE IDEA's success. Which looked at one way seems bizarre to me: creepily inventive songs about watching war on television, about meat-eating, about the commercialization of sex, and about "Nat. Sec. Ston, what sake Peramith is/ Di-grace? Eschevaux some phlages. Spream/ trigger-livesman, Beridrome hershey in a/ porcelain fac-quest, Farce-in and fence-forth" are not exactly the formula by which the Cars and Blondie brought synth-pop to commercial prominence. But on the other hand, the record's early 1992 release came just a couple months after Nirvana and Pearl Jam broke; before that, the college-rock and "120 minutes" airwaves were leaving lots of room for electronic acts just as cold as Think Tree and a lot less capable, in a pinch, of writing a hook: Meat Beat Manifesto, Front 242, Nitzer Ebb, Manufacture. Think Tree were wonderful to me because of five essential strengths-- playfully theatrical vocals, good beats, great rhymes, incessantly warped sound programming, and political fervor-- and the first three of those showed great novelty-act possibility.
What if Caroline hadn't made the bizarre decision to release the uncomfortably stiff synth-country "Rattlesnake" as a single? What if they'd opted for the archly Brit-rapped "Monday A.M. First Thing", where Peter squeezed over a hundred words a minute in with no strain and room for some playful burbly keyboard breaks and what I can only describe as a honky-tonk guitar solo? Could legions of college kids have ended up trying to imitate his urgently muttered delivery of "His scrawl strained as if he wanted to write 'Danny can't come out to play today, Mrs. Torrance'", his arrogant "No, you fat old deaconess, besides, your reciting needs rehearsing", his panicky "Then she screamed 'I'm your boss's boss's boss's boss!'", his ricocheting "I'm sorry!"s at the song's end? Maybe, maybe, bringing the bizarre special pleasure of sneaking a verse-long critique of America's monocropping 3rd-world agriculture policy onto the pop charts.
Peter's conclusion, however, was that Think Tree was too confusingly style-jumping; that powerful albums like NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS are ones that pick a style and settle into it. So for his new band, Peter deliberately dropped the playfulness. He still _has_ it-- aside from the concert announcement I quote above, there's the one Peter sent just hours ago featuring some over-the-top versifying attributed to "John Donne Corleone, 1593-1953"-- but AFFLUENZA streamlines the strengths to rhymes, beats, cool sounds, and moral fervor. The musical result is a funky, industrial, coherent record that's roughly comparable to a hip-hop producer remixing a combined ten-song best-of mined from recent Stabbing Westward and Gary Numan albums. And while I'm frankly disappointed, there's still quite a lot to be said for that.
"Generation", the opening track, is as strong a song as he's written. Opening with a sizzling riff and Peter whistling into a microphone, it resolves into a forceful bass thump over which Peter sings, in a slightly gravelly strain that seems to be his default voice, a generational anthem in favor of skepticism, open debate, tolerance of difference, and resistance to materialism. Peter is too bright, alas, to _believe_ his generation is with him 100%, but it's is a useful statement of purpose. Its group-chanted "Phemps phemps phemps, bis-delis bon bemps" (French pronunciation; don't ask) sounds as intense as the militant bark of "Shoop-bop, shadda boop bop boop" that opens "Chaos", a staccato 15/8 dance track whose reflections on the decay of traditional mores seem thoughtfully hesitant in their endorsement of decay. "Motorcade", a three-part electro-funk waltz, is the first clear statement of the class warfare referred to in the album title, a war in which the suburban rich attacked the rest of us and don't seem likely to call a truce anytime soon. It would make a better anthem if, like "Generation", it avoided the obvious truths about the limits of democracy: it admits, "and if you only last one term/ I'm sure there's some other job to which you can squirm/ about a block down, we'll drive you there in your motorcade". Once you've admitted that bums thrown out will only hike their salaries and stay around to corrupt the bums thrown in, what's left to do?
He's not sure, and I'm not sure, so it's probably just as well he returns to broader commentary. "Gadfly"'s circling accumulation of highly processed cymbals, the slow breathing of dragons, choppy organ, distorted chorals, an iron that won't quite start, a high yearning New Wave synth hook, heavy bass bloops, and a repeating 6-note vocal hook sounds like the triumphant full comeback that Depeche Mode's ULTRA almost was, if only Martin Gore had remembered how to write melodies this compelling and overintellectual defiance this catchy. Will Ragano, another Think Tree vet whose "Break That Mirror" was a LIKE THE IDEA highlight, takes vocal and songwriting duties for the rocked-up "Dizzy" (with theremin) and the quietly seething "Your Town", and they fit perfectly: the former's account of getting beat up ("While a buzz grows louder back in my brain bomb/ tick tock tick, sick chuckle/ why not him? I'm dizzy") and the latter's indictment of media-enforced passivity ("In muted fun we stared at the sun/ looking for the newest one/ the more you learn the less you'll run") show a Moore aesthetic, and Ragano's stylish rhyme over three verses of "delirious" with "furious" with "curious" with "serious" with "voluminous" with "viciousness" would seem weird in any band but this.
The last two songs show Moore directly examining the album's own purpose. "Manpower", over brass, kickdrums, tympani, cymbals, and a churning deep vocal hook, attacks the continuation of sexism after three decades of prominent feminism and admits "the fact that I'm passive makes me all the more concerned". "Platforms", finally, on which Peter's drawling delivery in whcih the words seem to be sliding independently off his passive tongue, is another rap/funk waltz in which he balances his ideal hope and skepticism: "This song I wrote is a long ways away from here/ with it, though, I swear you could get your conscience clear/ you could make your sobs soak the heart of some financier/ who thinks that gold licks the tip of each well-aimed spear/ you could demand a recount of any crooked polls/ you could uplift you spirits like you're wearing platform souls/... / you keep walking while the healing thaws/ through fields that Cezanne draws/ you change your feet to tiger's paws/ ask which road is Shangri-La's/ take aleft through the Land of Oz/ pass the statue of Santa Claus/ then you know you're in the song I wrote".
That's just part of one verse out of three, but we get the essence: Peter Moore and Will Ragano and Jeff Biegert have music they want to create. It's a strikingly healthy philosophy, if nothing else. The careers of Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine and New Model Army, though both marked by steady improvement in music and thoughfulness, both bear the increasing weight of realizing that they were supposed to change the world, only it couldn't hear them over the Sprite commercials ("Image is Nothing. Thirst Is Everything!", as Hitler said the day he launched the second front). Count Zero's AFFLUENZA is simply inventive, danceable, catchy. Songs with words are better than songs without words. People who write words should write about what they care about. Maybe, with luck, the universe will listen and say "Oh, really? My apologies" and restructure to make the songwriter happy. Failing that, the listener might. Failing that, hey, here's some good songs.
2001
Count Zero, ROBOTS ANONYMOUS
I discovered at the beginning of the year – ROBOTS was released on January 2nd – that my feelings about AFFLUENZA were complex. On the one hand, I was afraid that Peter Moore would be happy with having established a consistent sound, and would release basically AFFLUENZA, Mark II. On the other hand, AFFLUENZA is an album I’d liked not only enough to review it favorably, but even to have once bought a full-price copy for a friend. When I heard of the new Count Zero release I headed immediately, with out-of-character excitement, to Newbury Comics to pick up a copy at once. “Hey! Wonderful! I bet maybe this won’t sound like the piece of crap I enjoyed from them last time!” is the closest I can come to summarizing what seem to have been my feelings, and darned if I can parse that. (Although the excellent job Peter Moore did as Pontius Pilate in the Boston Rock Opera’s production of Jesus Christ Superstar surely made me more eager, as did his hamminess in that show’s extended and ridiculous encore/bow-taking section.)
The happy news: ROBOTS ANONYMOUS doesn’t sound like the piece of crap I enjoyed from them last time. Peter Moore, Will Ragano, and the rest of their band have returned to mad-genius mode. Where LIKE THE IDEA was too erratic for its own commercial good, and AFFLUENZA was an overreacting retreat into (admittedly excellent versions of) a then-popular industrial-dance sound, ROBOTS manages to get weird in an album that flows like a long composition. It is, in fact, maybe the first album I’ve loved since Marillion’s MISPLACED CHILDHOOD (in 1985!) where not only is there no space between songs, but the locations of the track index between each song could be sensibly argued -- indeed, I’d have put the border between “Roach Motel” and “Bachelor #3” a full minute before they do, and have quibbled by a few seconds on several others. The one review I’ve seen of this album, in Pitchfork, fulfilled Think Tree’s old habit of being criticized for having too many ideas, but the parts Pitchfork’s writer seemed to want to excise are by and large the parts that strike me as the mortar or glue that hold the album together.
Since “…Motel” starts the album with the restrained tension and trebly synthesizers of Midnight Oil’s “Outside World”, while “Bachelor #3” stomps, why not link them with some subdued but tense, dissonant strings pushed by Midnight Oil-like snare-drum reports, which become rhythmic drumrolls, introducing the new rhythm? “Moon ‘69” fades to its beat in simple 4/4 cymbals, which slide into the limber syncopation they’ll need for “Starry Skies”. The firm trombone cadence ending “Sham Maker” is fed back to us in periodic echoes like a distant elephant, until a march tempo worthy of Laibach gives them new context. “Out There” fades into disco for bumblebees, joined by the synth envelope of a steel drum, which goes from formlessness to the cadence of a migraine commercial as “Good News” begins to develop over it. And so on; the unified structure is also helped by the fact that every song has its chorus performed only twice (which doesn’t stop “Bachelor…” and “Moon…” from being instantly catchy). Count Zero have mastered the arts of context and album flow, moreso to my ears than even Modest Mouse.
The happy result is that they have now made the kind of unified album Moore was aiming for, without cramping a soundscaping ambition
that reminds me, this time, as generously of Super Furry Animals and of mid-80’s Midnight Oil as of industrial music. “Bachelor…” is a deranged rock opera, Moore trading his roughened drawl (a drawl of insouciance, not a Dixie drawl) for several voices from the promised Robots Anonymous meeting. “Moon…” travels, mostly by sensible baby steps, from waterfalling electric piano; to a refrain equally qualified for Soul Train or a Cocoa Puffs ad; to a distorted rap by Will Ragano; to a haunting bridge kin to both Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” and NIN’s “Closer”; it also finds time for an imitation piccolo solo. “Starry…”, a restrained and pretty anthem, sounds like Rush, in the Ayn Rand-rejecting maturity that began around “Distant Early Warning”, trying very hard to be influenced by the small-combo jazz balladry of Ella FitzGerald. The kick/snare and heavy echo of “Sham…” put a modern synth-rock twist on a tradition of simplicity that extends back through AC/DC and Kiss to Elvis Presley circa “Hound Dog”.
“Out There” is the album’s closest approach to Gravity Kills or Stabbing Westward, but the melody is jauntier, the high noises are weirder and wilder, and it has the boom of Queen’s “We Will Rock You”. “Good…” builds, layer by layer, into the huge mystical drone we can expect from Trent Reznor when he comes back from India in the same bliss George Harrison spiked “Within You Without You” with. “Indulgences” is another buildup, from a gnattish Morse Code rhythm into a cathedral of organ, swirling violins, wah-wah guitar, and the wind through a smashed stained-glass window. But “Finnegan”’s Rhodes keyboards are spare and insinuating, with a skewed jazz-funk riffing and vocal rhythm that together would fit snugly onto the last couple of Ani DiFranco albums. “Go Go Go”, neatly though it segues from and into other drum lines, is extraordinarily intense: thick fractured percussion and megaphone vocals. And “Cure of a Kiss” goes from a slide-guitar/ drum-machine groove, to a filtered all-percussion sound envelope, to one of the prettiest winding chorus melodies I expect to hear all year.
The musical reach, so carefully earned, suits the words. The fictional game-show transcript and the rant about Neil Armstrong’s moon landing are given playful music with choruses that leap out like jacks in boxes. “Starry Skies” borrows Rush’s earnest urgency to deliver exactly the sort of encouragement Neal Peart himself has long been square enough to write: “You fear your friends/ you’re near the end/ nothing to trust/ but girl, you must./ Stop sinking, take a breath! Stop thinking ‘this is death!’/ Clear the mascara that embarrassingly dries on your sorry eyes”. “Roach Motel” sets words of sarcastic apology, from poor man to landlord, for being unsuccessful and thus creating blight; the atmospheric music backs off from feints at power as the narrator backs off from actual defiance. “Sham Maker” and “Go Go Go” are fierce lyrically and musically, but where “Sham…”, an us-against-them class rebellion song, plays a unifying, traditional juvenile-delinquent rock’n’roll, “Go…”’s moral outrage shows only an enemy, and its music obliterates mere warmth in favor of vaporization.
(A quirkier matching of music to word: Moore seems embarrassed by his compulsive wordplay, and volume drop-outs or obscuring vocal patches often protect verses like “Paradise, not parasites/ Holidays, not squalid days/ No proselytizing Pharisee/ will dowse your works in kerosene/ to sterilize your heresy”, or “He’s got turds for the wicked and words for the weak/ he says ‘the meek shall inherit some bald sick prize’/ but the clock pickpockets the cause from his eyes”.)
Second-most interesting to me, of the word/music matches, is “Good News”, where the sonic merging of Nine Inch Nails and George Harrison is straight to the point. Trent Reznor’s accusatory mode is a bit of fine-tuning away from moralistic indignation, a quick spin of ideology away from clumsy lines like Moore’s “Amplify trivial events/ just to win the pity game/ Shape frustrating incidents/ just so there’s someone to blame”. He and Moore may be the same inborn personality type: the doomsayers, the haranguers, the seekers of things to be shocked and appalled by. The difference – the one that makes it easier to root for Moore in full attack mode – is that where Nine Inch Nails’ paranoia is about “you hurt _me_”, Count Zero’s is about “you caused harm” or, worse yet, “you caused harm and didn’t even make yourself happier for it”. “Good News” is sputtering and industrial because its message is “you suck”, sure – but it’s celebratory in the end because the complaint is “Broadcasting ‘Killers Roam the Steets’/ helps you fear your fellow man/ That way you will never dare/ harvesting a common ground/ joining forces with his flock/ building louder powers with Love’s sound”. The massed “Love’s sound” chanting at the end is a rebuke to the song’s target, not a loving invitation; ironic. But some people will never love their fellow men, and I for one hate people like that.
“Cure of a Kiss”, the finale, impresses me even more, though. On AFFLUENZA’s “Platforms”, Moore dared to examine why be bothered turning anger into obscure songs; here he dares to examine the anger itself. “I walk into this party/ half out of steam, half in a dream./ ‘Have fun’, she’d said,/ ‘You might as well be dead for all I know’./ No one was gonna see/ the hole from the Heaven that she’s stole out of me”, it starts. The music decays as he recounts his efforts to turn his bummer universal (“I take some cues from the news and I spit out a spin”), despair drawing an audience… “Meanwhile, Beauty’s gone to bathe in the pond/ she’s wading shoulder-deep in the mist/ flirting with a frog in the frond/ he’s waited his whole life for this/ waited for the wave of a wand/ waited for the cure of a kiss”. That chorus, to a tune worthy of Stevie Wonder’s peaks of inspiration, is happy, and it’s right. I feel as strongly as Moore that women’s attraction to competitive, aggressive, “achieving” men makes the world a worse place – but I only wrote songs about it when I looked like I’d be single forever, and Moore’s “Bachelor #3” was probably written when single and dumped. I’ve felt for many years that involuntary unemployment should be made impossible, but I’ve argued the politics of it mainly when unemployed.
This doesn’t mean doomsayers and rebels are wrong. It doesn’t mean that their warnings aren’t important. It shouldn’t even dilute the moral force a Moore (or a Ralph Nader or a William Greider), who see defeats other than their own. It just means that they (we?) are, more often than not, some form of sore losers. It takes guts for a Peter Moore to notice that.
It does, of course, mean that the best way to shut dissidents up would be, not to arrest them, but to make sure they’re busy and happy. A pleasant task can sedate. A kiss can cure. Of course, if that was really how whiners were dealt with, there wouldn’t be so much to complain about.
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